Her Story
Rebecca Palacios taught for 34 years in the Corpus Christi Independent School District, 24 of them at Zavala Elementary, the same school she attended as a child and one that is about 99 percent Hispanic. She taught kindergarten and then prekindergarten there and was one of the first teachers to teach dual language at the pre-K level, with each class spending half a day in Spanish and half in English. She says she kept “files of what worked” from her own childhood and “vowed to myself that I would work to make children love learning and want to come to school.”
Her room had small, intimate learning centers made from things she had collected over the years, among them a water table, a block center with cars, pulleys and ramps, a music center, a writing center and two aquariums, because “everything could be a learning experience.” Her thematic curriculum was written around the umbrella theme of “Family,” and she assessed three- and four-year-olds with rubrics, individual dictation and drawings in bound journals that showed families what their children knew.
With a colleague she wrote a $2,000 grant for a lending library of books and cassettes, and she held fun book sessions where parents learned to sit children on their laps, act out stories and sing them. In ten years the library lost only about three books. She was featured in a PBS special, Toddling Toward Reading, in a segment called “Reading Maestros.”
Beyond the Classroom
Palacios was her district’s first Teacher of the Year and served six years on the Texas Commission on Standards for the Teaching Profession. She was a founding director of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the first director to become National Board Certified, and the first Hispanic teacher in Texas to do so. She was the board’s vice chair from 2003 and has earned a Ph.D. in early childhood education at the University of Texas at Austin.
She has given more than 250 local, state and national presentations and six international ones, and she has worked with teachers in Russia, China, Egypt and South Africa. The Texas American Federation of Teachers gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award in Professional Development in 2013. She retired from the classroom in 2010 but is a senior curriculum advisor for ABCmouse.com, which she says is “providing it free to all public school teachers,” and she leads a committee planning universal preschool in her community.
Philosophy Into Practice
Palacios believes the first encounter matters most: “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression,” so she wants every 3- or 4-year-old to feel “that school is the place to BE.” She says she taught and treated children “as I would want my own children to be taught and treated.”
She names school funding and access to college for poor children as the two biggest issues, and she has testified before Texas legislative education committees four times in support of National Board Certification and universal preschool. She quotes Dr. Hector P. Garcia: “Education is our freedom and freedom should be everybody’s business.”
“Everything could be a learning experience.”— Dr. Rebecca A. Palacios
In Her Own Words
“I am still working with teachers and daily impacting thousands of young learners.”— Dr. Rebecca A. Palacios
“The children must feel that school is the place to BE.”— Dr. Rebecca A. Palacios
“Quality learning cannot occur without quality teaching.”— Dr. Rebecca A. Palacios
What Others Said
“Her life-long dedication as a teacher to young students and their family is also distinguished by her work at the local, state, national and international levels.”— Adria P. Vasquez, nominator
“She is recognized as a leader in the nation for her expertise in early childhood and bilingual education.”— D. Scott Elliff, Ed.D., former Superintendent, Corpus Christi ISD
“I was the first to hire Rebecca Palacios as a brand new teacher.”— Eduardo Torres, retired principal
“She taught all of us to give our best for our students, to wear a smile, and to love and believe in what we do.”— Brenda Chirinos-Vazquez, former student teacher
“She is definitely a Teacher with passion and love for children and her work.”— Luz L. Rodriguez, parent of former students