Teacher hopes to inspire love of learning

Following the path of the teachers that inspired her, Parkview Elementary School fourth-grade teacher Valarie Nippert works to inspire a love of learning in her student in ways that will keep them engaged.

“I like the challenge of finding new and inventive ways to get information to the students, and ways to have them interact with the learning that’s not just sitting and reading a textbook,” she said. “I try to plan a lot of hands-on activities, things where they can get up and move and take things apart and ask really difficult questions, and have them come up with their own questions.”

This hands-on approach allows Nippert to engage with the students and help them on their individual paths.

“I love getting to interact with kids of all different ages, and then getting to just be a part of their lives and help them learn something new,” she said.

A graduate of Portales High School, Nippert has worked at Parkview for four years.

To what do you credit your love of teaching?

I would say it would be the awesome teachers that I had. I loved my fourth and fifth grade teachers. I particularly remember them. Pretty much every teacher throughout K-12 I loved. Lots of my English classes in high school, they are really the ones that made me be like, “Oh, I wanna be like this when I have a career some day.”

What do your students teach you?

My students teach me that there's not only one way to look at things. They come in with a different world view. They come in with different ideas and experiences and backgrounds. Just because I look at it one way — whatever we happen to be learning that day — doesn't mean that that's the only way to see it, so they teach me that there's several different facets to everything we learn, not just one way.

Describe your teaching style. What makes it distinctly your style?

I kind of feel, because I'm in my fourth year teaching, that I haven't found a style that I stick to from year to year. I kind of like to try new things, and maybe that's my style. I try new things and decide, “did that work, or was that a complete flop? Should I try something different?” And then, I bring in something new. Sometimes I realize only parts of it need to be changed, or everything worked fabulously and I'm going to recreate that next time.

It always changes, because you have a different set of kids every year. That's the other perk to this job, is everything is brand new every time we come back in August.

As far as my teaching style, though, I would say that I like to incorporate a lot of movement, a lot of exploration. I like them to discover things. I'm working toward getting better at doing a student-run classroom, where the kids do a lot of their own questioning and feedback, and questioning one another.

Describe a moment that reaffirmed your love for teaching.

A moment that would reaffirm my love of teaching would be when I have a student that struggles really hard to understand a concept. We figure out a way to work together to figure it out. That might be that I work with them one on one, that might be that they have another peer in the classroom that they can work with that can explain it better than maybe I can, and then, that feeling of when they finally get whatever it is that they've been working toward. Whenever they achieve that goal feels just as great for me as it does for them, and I would think that that would be the best moment in this career.

— Compiled by Staff Writer Eamon Scarbrough