As the final round of group voting begins, TCU doctoral student Naomi Gutierrez is in contention to win the title of America’s Favorite Teacher. A 17-year veteran teacher at Rosemont Middle School in Fort Worth, Gutierrez attributes her success to a single piece of advice from one of her professors: “The kids don’t care what you know if they know you don’t care.” This has driven her passion not only for the subject she teaches, but for the care she puts into the students themselves and making sure their learning experience is fun.
“I've been doing this 17 years, and you don't get to 17 years not enjoying what you do. Honestly, teaching was all I've ever wanted to do.”
Gutierrez, now a doctoral student in the College of Education’s Science Education program, graduated in 2024 with her Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in science education. However, while she knew she wanted to teach since third grade, she didn’t start out teaching science. Her bachelor’s in elementary education from New Mexico State University was focused on math and language arts. But three years after she started teaching math at Rosemont, she transitioned to science to help meet the district's needs.
“That’s how I met Molly [Weinburgh],” Gutierrez explains. She attended professional development workshops led by Weinburgh, professor, chair and director of Andrews Institute for Research in Mathematics & Science Education. Eventually, the opportunity to pursue a master’s degree presented itself, with funding from the Andrews Institute.
“And then, I just realized how much I enjoyed going to school,” Gutierrez said. “So, I was like: ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll do a Ph.D., too! Why not?’”
Pursuing a Ph.D. also gave Gutierrez the chance to research something very familiar
to her — something that inspired her desire to be a teacher.
“I came into school speaking both Spanish and English,” she said. “But I had a bit of an issue making the connection between the English and Spanish. In third grade, I was really struggling, but my teacher was just so amazing and got me caught up so that when I moved up to fourth grade, I was on par with my peers. I still talk to her now! When I go home, we’ll meet for lunch.”
Having experienced the difficulty of transitioning from bilingual to monolingual education, Gutierrez wants to use her dissertation to examine the hardships of that transition and, hopefully, identify new strategies to ease it. Part of that, she says, is changing the way we think about bilingual education.
“That mentality of ‘our kids do know two languages, but yet, since it’s not the language that we educate in, then it’s a deficit’ instead of looking at how positive it is that they know two languages.”
Voting for America’s Favorite Teacher Top 5 ends at 7 pm CDT on Thursday, April 16. To learn more about or vote for Naomi Gutierrez, visit the America’s Teacher website.
The America’s Favorite Teacher contest, run by Colossal in partnership with DTCare, The Planetary Society, NSTA, and Lerner, comes with a grand prize of $25,000, a trip to Hawaii, a feature in Reader’s Digest and (the prize Gutierrez is most excited for) an assembly at her school featuring celebrity scientist Bill Nye. As an added bonus, all proceeds from the contest are donated to the Planetary Society.