The assembly had all the trappings of your average pep rally. The cheer squad warmed up the middle school crowd, and an African drum group made up of fifth-graders performed. But the television cameras and the arrival of the mayor were big hints that this wasn’t simply a celebration of rising test scores, as the Capital City Public Charter School community had been told.
When Mayor Muriel Bowser announced seventh-grade life science teacher Justin Lopez-Cardoze as DC’s 2020 Teacher of the Year on Oct. 2, the place exploded with cheers and shrieks of excitement.
A native of Durham, North Carolina, Lopez-Cardoze has been teaching for eight years, the past four at Capital City’s middle school. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University. In addition to his teaching duties, he chairs the science department and represents the middle school on Capital City’s Equity Core Committee.
Lopez-Cardoze stood out among the hundreds of DC public school and public charter school teachers considered for the award, according to State Superintendent of Education Hanseul Kang, because of his effectiveness as a teacher, his level of engagement within his school community and his commitment to equity in education.
The two other finalists for the award were Beth Barkley, an English teacher at the Cardozo Education Campus International Academy, and Daniel Spruill, a music educator at Center City Public Charter Schools-Brightwood Campus.
Lopez-Cardoze “is an incredible science teacher,” Kang said. “He inspires a love of science in his students, and he’s helping them be scientists right now as they are in seventh grade as well as think about what it could mean for the future. … His passion is just evident, and we love how much he is committed to learning and growing and continuing to improve his own practices in education.”
“It feels wonderful. It feels surreal,” Lopez-Cardoze said after the announcement. “I’m still growing, I’m still learning, so to have such an honor is wonderful. But I still don’t feel like I’m where I truly want to be as a teacher yet.”
Chief among his professional goals is increasing his proficiency in culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), a teaching method that emphasizes educators’ cultural competence in teaching a diverse student body and relating coursework to students’ cultural experience.
Capital City Public Charter School, located at 100 Peabody St. NW in Ward 4, serves close to 1,000 students from across the District in grades PK3 through 12. The diversity of its student body informs the school’s emphasis on equity in education and Lopez-Cardoze’s mission to empower his students to make a difference in their communities and society.
“When we’re looking at students across multiple races, when we’re looking at … African American students … Latinx students, students who are LGBTQIA+, any student who exists in a building needs to feel the right that they are receiving an equitable education that is going to push them forward into achieving bright futures,” Lopez-Cardoze said.
Part of his role in that endeavor involves sitting on the school’s Equity Core Committee, which acts as a resource for teachers and administrators. Over the summer, members meet to plan continuing training for the faculty on topics such as fostering cultural competence and culturally relevant classrooms.
His goal as a teacher is to create educational tasks for his students “that are really activating their originality of thinking, their personal ideas and their personal voices into our classroom,” he said. That individual goal reflects what he sees as a national need for educators to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to instruction and an exclusive focus on academic achievement.
The challenges he sees as an educator are effectively differentiating instruction to meet individual students’ needs, understanding how teachers’ and students’ identities inform their experiences, and “tapping into the critical consciousness of our students to make what they are learning meaningful for them to be agents of change in our society, the agents of change that we need.”
The DC Teacher of the Year award, which comes with a $7,500 check, also makes Lopez-Cardoze eligible for National Teacher of the Year, a professional award bestowed by the Council of Chief State School Officers. Last year’s DC Teacher of the Year — Kelly Harper, a third-grade teacher at Amidon-Bowen Elementary School in Ward 6 — was named one of four finalists for the national award.
At last week’s event, Lopez-Cardoze acknowledged important professional and personal influences in his life — including his mother and husband, both of whom were in attendance — and told the assembled middle schoolers that the majority of his cash prize would go to fund “a dream of mine that I’ve wanted to accomplish ever since I started teaching”: a scholarship to benefit a Capital City student who has demonstrated excellence in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “To me, that’s where the money needs to go: to students.”
Though still in an early planning stage, the merit-based LoCa STEM Scholarship is envisioned as an award of $5,000 or more to “a Capital City PCS senior attending a college or university in Fall 2020 who has demonstrated exemplary academics” in STEM, as well as “modeled our Three Dimensions of Student Achievement: Mastery of Knowledge and Skills, High Quality Work, and Character throughout their High School Career,” Lopez-Cardoze wrote in an email to The DC Line.
Lopez-Cardoze may have been caught off guard at last week’s pep rally, but his students were not at all surprised that his excellence as a teacher was recognized. His seventh-graders say he’s the kind of supportive teacher they can talk to “about anything” — and that the lessons he leads, occasionally laced with humor, provide hands-on engagement with science.
Like his students, Lopez-Cardoze isn’t finished learning and progressing. “My next steps are to continue growing with my students,” he said. “I grow with them.”
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