Top Teachers

While our top teachers come from different schools — public and private — different areas of town — urban districts and rural areas — and different backgrounds and experiences, they all share an immense passion for what they do. 

At some point, during each interview, every teacher said they couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Though some previously worked in industries that would lead to more financial security, none had positions as personally rewarding as being an educator. 

As the magazine has done in years past, we’re honoring five private and five public school teachers. We begin this process by asking our readers to submit votes through our website, fwtx.com, where students, parents, fellow teachers, and staff members can explain why their nominee is deserving and dote on their favorite teacher. After collecting the nominations, we vet the final list through the teachers’ headmasters and principals.

Mary Mosley

Kindergarten, Sunrise-McMillan Elementary School

It’s difficult for Mary Mosley to talk about her students — she always refers to them as her babies — without tearing up. Mosley teaches at Sunrise-McMillan, a school whose zoning falls in a lower-income area. Families can’t afford school supplies or, sometimes, even shoes for their children.

“We had a little baby who would show up to school in whatever shoes she could find,” Mosley says. “Sometimes it'd be her big brother's shoes. It got to the point where she had huge blisters on the bottom of her feet. And so, we, of course, we went and we bought her shoes. Made sure that she was okay.”

Mosley, like many teachers at Sunrise and beyond, takes on a financial responsibility for her students, often buying them school supplies, food, and clothing to ensure they’re prepared and fed during their hours in school.

“I have a stack of clothes,” Mosley says. “I have a stack of backpacks. I keep food in my pantry. I keep toiletries. I keep all of that. I've taken clothes home and washed them and brought them back. Whatever I can do to make those babies be successful, that's what I'm going to do.”

Despite the burden, Mosley can’t imagine going anywhere else.

“I can't imagine [another teacher] coming in, and it's just like, ‘Oh, she left too,’” Mosley says. “They have so many people in and out, and the teachers: they either stay or they don't.” 

Gregory Gross

Spanish, Godley High School

As Gregory Gross puts it, most people teach as they were taught. We read, learn vocabulary words, listen to lectures, and take a test; there’s a reason we remember so little from our foreign language classes. But, Profesor Gross, as his students call him, is flipping such stale methods on their head.

“There’re words that for whatever reason, always stand out in people's brains,” Gross says. “So, you remember broccoli or chair or bicycle, but you don't really focus on the actual use of the language. So, I go in there day one, and we find something that's interesting. I personalize it to my kids. And so, it's what they're interested in, is what we learn. I throw in the verbs, they supply the vocabulary, and we go from there.”

This concept is called comprehensible input, which is based around the concept that one must understand what they hear in order for one to process it. And Gross, who’s been teaching Spanish at Godley High School for 12 years, first applied this technique only a few years ago.

“I've been a teacher for 16 years, and I'll say that I've been a good one for four — when I implemented this technique.”

So, if students are steering the conversation, what do they enjoy talking about most? “Themselves,” Gross says. 

Brenda Snedden

First Grade, Southwest Christian

Brenda Snedden can’t remember ever not wanting to be a teacher. Since the moment she could say the word “vocation,” being an educator was what she wanted to do. 

“I used to teach neighborhood kids and force them to do school,” Snedden says. “And I'd make my little sister memorize books, thinking I was teaching her. I've always wanted to be a teacher.”

Now, after 33 years being a teacher, 19 of which have been at Southwest Christian, Snedden calls herself a mixture of the old school with new school.

“'Cause a lot of the old-school things were good,” she says. “I like neat handwriting. There's a lot of connections with writing and how your brain forms. That physical act of writing. A lot of schools have gone away with that, but now they’re veering back.”

When asked about the challenges of teaching first-grade students, Snedden points to an iPhone and says, “Too much of that.”

“Teachers have really noticed a change in the children,” Snedden says. “So probably keeping them engaged and focused is the biggest challenge right now. I think everything is wonderful. Everything can be wonderful if using it the right way.” 

Lisa May

First Grade, Starpoint School

Lisa May teaches first grade at Starpoint School, a lab school at TCU that provides education to children with learning differences. As May puts it, the students she teaches weren’t successful at another school. 

At the first-grade level, May loves getting “to show [the students] how beautiful they are and point out all their strengths. And then we take those things, and we help them overcome their weaknesses. 

“Not only to know how to survive in school, but how to thrive, and how to take on challenges.”

Starpoint is for children ages 6 through 11, and once they leave their program, the hope is they are ready for their next education environment, whatever it may be. 

According to a parent who filled out our online poll, “These students leave their [previous] schools believing they are dumb, unworthy, and that they are failures, all because they learn differently. Mrs. May erases all of that. She very quickly proves to them that they are worthy, they are very intelligent, that they can be successful at anything they put their mind to.  

“She doesn’t just teach; she saves.” 

Kim Quarles

English and History, Trinity Christian Academy

Kim Quarles can’t quite put a label on her teaching style. Socratic? Inclusive? Discussion lecturer?

“I'd never put a name on it,” Quarles says. “But I'm telling my students what they need to know, but we're doing it in a discussion format so that they can share their thoughts with me.”

For Quarles, having the thought isn’t enough; it’s communication and being able to express these thoughts that builds confidence in a student. 

Quarles has been teaching for 16 years; she spent her first five years at Crowley before taking 10 years off after having two children. 

After initially going to school for business marketing, Quarles felt a calling to teach after a street football game with kids during a mission trip in New York. When she returned to school, she switched her major.

“I love it,” Quarles says about teaching. “It's different every day. That's the fun part about teaching. Kids come in, and they're different every day, different moods. You have to be flexible enough to be like, ‘Oh wow, they really can't focus on this today. We need to deal with life today because maybe something's going on or something.’ I love that part of teaching, just being able to kind of go with the flow, but still teach them.” 

Barton Scott

Robotics and Engineering, Young Men’s Leadership Academy

Once an employee of Tandy Corporation (remember those old word processors?), where he sold CRM, ERP, and workflow applications, Barton Scott’s successful sales pitches included magic tricks — he’s a clown and magician on the side. Barton found the transition to teaching smooth, thanks to his subject matter — engineering — being so hands-on.

“When I saw the engineering opportunity, I was like, ‘Oh wow, okay,’” Scott says. “So, I can have them build robots, build a plane, build a building, and it became more project based because there wasn't a standardized test attached to it. It gave me a lot more freedom to do things that are more suited to me and my creativity.”

Since Scott’s arrival at YMLA, students have gone from working on lawn mowers to creating things such as animatronic puppets and, what Scott’s most proud of, creating a microbusiness, where students learn to laser-engrave and personalize products and sell them. The profits help sustain the program. 

“Only thing I would give myself credit is really for is implementing change,” Scott says. “I came into a school where the kids were working on lawn mowers, and three years later, we're doing things that no other school in the nation is doing.” 

Alexandra Checka

English and Coding, Applied Learning Academy

Get on the topic of education, and Alexandra Checka can wax poetic for hours.

A Harvard graduate, who speaks multiple languages, who traveled the globe, and who worked at the Harvard Art Museum for a spell, Checka was inspired to become a teacher after returning home to Arlington. There, during her first day of substitute teaching, she was horrified to find out that students in an eighth-grade home economics class couldn’t read. Even more shocking, when she sounded the alarm, her cries fell on deaf ears.

“I had so many questions that day,” Checka says. “Which I then spent the subsequent rest of my career trying to answer and trying to solve.”

All of Checka’s experiences, education, and worldly knowledge have led to an ability, and a choice, to do just about anything. But she’s not planning on leaving middle school education any time soon.

“It turns out that, like, weirdly I have been training my entire life to take teenagers that hate everything and make things interesting for them,” Checka says. “Every single like, job, experience, traveling, all of it, equals up to like, ‘I know that you hate reading, and I know that you hate history, and everything is terrible, but let's do this thing.’” 

Robin Preston

Science, Trinity Valley School

Robin Preston is about to enter her fifth decade, 40 years, being a teacher at Trinity Valley School.

“I really thought by now I would be, I don't know, a princess on a hill somewhere,” Preston says. “Never in a million years could you have told me that I was still going to be there 39 years later.”

Trinity Valley has grown a lot in those 39 years. As Preston recalls, she used to teach history, math, and science before the school expanded. And her classroom had a single microscope, where students would have to lineup to view single-celled organisms. 

Despite changes to Trinity Valley and the introduction of the computer into the classroom, according to a parent who filled out our online poll, “[Preston’s] enthusiasm for teaching has not waned in the 35-plus years she has been at Trinity Valley. The excitement for science she brings to fifth-graders is unparalleled.”

Preston, a breast cancer survivor, exemplified her passion for teaching during her battle; she continued to teach during her treatments. 

Janet Trammell

AP Physics, All Saints’ Episcopal School

Janet Trammell is a high school physics teacher who never actually took physics in high school. But she more than earned her stripes in the field doing research for nearly a year before deciding life in an 8-by-8 cell doing someone else’s work wasn’t her passion. After doing lab demonstrations for area schools, she found the idea of teaching far-more rewarding. 

“I took an education course and said, ‘Yeah, I kind of like this,’ and so I went back and got certified to teach,” Trammell says. “It wasn't really that direct route sometimes a lot of elementary school teachers take. In high school, a lot of teachers think, ‘Yeah, this isn’t exactly what I thought I was going to do.’” 

Fourteen years in — she’s spent the last four years at All Saints’ Episcopal — and Trammell hasn’t an inkling of regret. “I love it,” she says. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

In addition to her duties teaching all of Newton’s laws to advanced placement students, Trammell is also the sponsor of the solar car team, which builds a full-size, road-worthy solar car and races against other schools.

“Last year was a road race to Palmdale, California,” Trammell says. “We drove our solar car from Fort Worth to Palmdale and, in our division, we took first place. First time we've ever done that.” 

Dev’n Goodman

English and Leadership Skills, Dunbar High School

Dev’n Goodman’s been teaching for seven years, but this short time and her progressive sense doesn’t mean she ignores the old-school approach of lecturing.

“I do lecture at least twice a week, and that means, for the majority of the class, students are listening and taking notes,” Goodman says. The other days are interactive discussion-based learning. Goodman follows the Montessori approach, where the students lead their learning. Outside of a few topics, Goodman allows the discussion to take shape in any form, and the back-and-forth ideas allow students to better develop their own opinions. 

Goodman is also invested in helping build student leadership outside of the classroom. She’s partnered with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which now has student ambassadors from Dunbar High School, who perform hours and hours of volunteer work at the museum, greeting patrons and giving tours.

“They do about 45 to 50 hours of volunteer work on their own time,” Goodman says. “Missing school, becoming docents for that night.”