For National Teacher of the Year Sydney Chaffee, teaching is a political act. She has been traveling the country urging all teachers to make social justice a central part of their mission. Talking to students about justice can't be a niche for certain kinds of teachers or certain schools. When students understand inequity and have the tools to work towards a more just world, they see why their education truly matters.

As Teacher of the Year, Sydney Chaffee is committed to taking risks for her students and, as National Teacher of the Year, will encourage all educators to take risks – on their students, on each other and on themselves.

As a humanities teacher at Codman Academy Charter Public School in Boston, Sydney takes risks every day to improve learning for all of her students. In the classroom, she strives to create lessons that demonstrate how education can be a transformative tool for social justice, and she encourages her students to see themselves as having the power to make change in the world based on lessons from the past.

“Education must be authentic. There is no use in studying history if we believe it to be static and irrelevant to the future,” she says. “Authentic learning enables students to see and create connections in the world around them.”

She tries to infuse the hard work of learning with joy, not only in her classroom but throughout the school. For example, she is the coordinator of a schoolwide Community Circle every Thursday where all students in the school come together to celebrate successes, share good news and dig into serious conversations together.

As the 2017 National Teacher of the Year, Sydney is looking forward to advocating for all teachers to take risks on behalf of their students and giving a voice to the issues that affect her students.

“When smart, driven teachers are given time and space to collaborate, we can help all of our students in all of our schools succeed. We have a lot of work to do, but we can achieve so much for kids when we commit-together-to being simultaneously optimistic and daring,” she says.

Sydney has taught for the past 10 years, 9 of which have been in her current role. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and a Masters of Education from Lesley University. Sydney is a National Board Certified Teacher. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx