"We have to make it personal and learn who our students are, what makes them tick," she told an audience of 100-plus, including aspiring teachers.
A kindergarten teacher at the highly diverse Broad Acres Elementary School in suburban Washington, D.C., Ms. Oliver said her professional experience confirms what exhaustive research and parental intuition have long shown, that the quality of the teacher is the single most influential factor in a child's academic record.
She characterized excellent teachers as those who possess one outstanding attribute: they give their hearts to their students, everyday and every year.
Ms. Oliver broke heart into an acronym: "H" is high expectations for every child; "E" refers to expertise, to faculty who are experts on children, content, and motivation; "A" is for ardor, a passion and feel for what teachers do ("Children know the days we don't love it so much"); "R" stands for relationships, taking the time to know students and their parents, and to make them partners; "T" is for "thinking outside the box," original thinking. Educators must be willing to change, adapt and work aggressively as advocates for children, she said.
Underpinning her shorthand philosophy of heart, the 2006 National Teacher of the Year delivers a catechism with four tenets: equity, high expectations, effort, and relationship building.
Equity, she said, requires bridging the massive achievement gap that plagues United States school rooms more than 50 years after they were desegregated.
High expectations start from the predicate that all students can learn and achieve at high levels if they get the requisite time and resources.
Ms. Oliver's precept is that only high expectations can surmount the equity gap. That means "believing in children even if they don't believe in themselves--and even if their parents do not believe in them."
Administrators and teachers at Broad Acres decided to meet the equity gap by expecting the best from elementary pupils whose test scores had plummeted to such disastrous levels in 2000 that the state of Maryland threatened to restructure the Silver Spring school.
Three, four, and five years later, all test scores met or exceeded the requirements mandated by the Bush Administrations signature No Child Left Behind Act, thanks to the leadership of Oliver and her colleagues.
On April 26, 2006, Ms. Oliver found herself at the White House being feted by the President and First Lady as 2006 National Teacher of the Year. Since June, she has crisscrossed the nation as a full-time educational spokesperson.
In her remarks at Humboldt State, she warned that parents and teachers must be careful about the messages they send to children about education and intelligence. If, for example, they praise a little girl as so smart, she inherited all the brains in the family, you know she takes after her mother, what happens to her brother, who took after the father and didn't get all the brains in the family? Does the brother give up in second grade?
"Realize that this is not the message that we want to send to students," she asserted. "Intelligence is not a fixed or innate entity. Being smart is about working hard."
Hence Ms. Olivers classroom emphasis on her third tenet, effort. Her message to her kindergartners is "working hard makes you smart." At first, they look at her "with that blank stare," but repetition helps and the memory of it often emerges in higher grades. They will hear the word "effort" again some day and have a flash; "Oh, that was what Ms. Oliver was talking about!" Positive student attitudes toward effort can be transformative, she argues, and bridge the achievement gap.
In closing remarks, the nation's most highly recognized elementary education teacher returned to her self-made acronym: "We have to have heart and give that heart to our students each and every day."
Education is a community effort, she concluded, and "it really does take a village."
Her own work reflects that conviction. Heather Boynton, the Ferndale Elementary School teacher who is Humboldt County's 2006 Teacher of the Year, noted in introducing Ms. Oliver that she promotes literacy in suburban Maryland by sponsoring Books & Supper Night four times a year, when families check out books from the school library and enjoy dinner together.
Ms. Oliver sees the classroom as a second home, Ms. Boynton said.