Early Childhood Education teacher Kimberly Wilson was named Career and Technical Education (CTE) Virginia Teacher of the Year for 2018.
Wilson attended Virginia State University (VSU) where she earned her Bachelor’s of Science in Family and Consumer Sciences with a minor in Business. She later received her Masters of Science in Family and Consumer Sciences from Virginia Tech while teaching at Francis C. Hammond Middle School.
After graduating from VSU, Wilson worked as a retail manager and a buyer for a family owned business. “[I was] looking for a more fulfilling journey in life, [when] I was offered the opportunity of a lifetime to become a member of the ACPS family,” Wilson said.
Wilson began her time as a teacher at Hammond where she taught Family and Consumer Sciences to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students. In 2010, Wilson transferred to T.C. where she teaches Introduction to Early Childhood Education, Dual Enrollment (DE) Advanced Early Childhood Education II, and Virginia Teachers for Tomorrow.
One of her classes, Introduction to Early Childhood Education, is the beginning of a sequence of classes involving teaching. Each class focuses on a specific age of children, and they consist of “lab experience, weekly lectures, and peer observations.” By taking part in these activities, students are able to “gain practical knowledge and experience,” and they often have the ability to establish partnerships with people within the Alexandria community.
By taking these classes, students are able to take part in an internship in the Tiny Titans Child Development Center at the King Street campus. “This center services the citizens of the Alexandria Community and not the students of T.C. Williams High School,which has been a long misinterpreted assumption,” Wilson said.
Wilson tries to ensure that her “classroom environment is relaxed, inviting and very busy,” she said. “We are up moving, conversing, problem-solving and sometimes dancing.”
Junior Caroline Schie, who takes DE Early Childhood Education II, said, “She is not one of those teachers that sits down and gives us work and makes us do it by ourselves. She is interactive and always pushing us to understand the concepts that we are learning.”
