Her Story
Martha McLeod teaches fifth-grade science at Fulton 4-5 Learning Center in Rockport, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. Her lab is an “indoor zoo”: fifteen aquariums of mice, snakes, lizards, turtles, frogs, hermit crabs and a foot-and-a-half-long shrimp, along with tarantulas, hedgehogs and tadpoles. Students look after the animals on weekends and holidays. Her goal is “to create a daily sense of wonder in my students and to avoid boredom and redundancy at all cost.”
Outdoors, she transformed the school grounds into a wildlife habitat that the National Wildlife Federation has certified and that is an official Texas Wildscape. Students plant vegetable gardens, gather eggs from the campus chickens and sell chicks, eggs and homemade bread at the local Farmer’s Market, learning “supply and demand and retail marketing.” At lab tables, students rotate weekly jobs named for the food chain: producer, predator, herbivore and scavenger or decomposer.
About two-thirds of her students come from low-income families, and some have never left their small town. To show them “infinite possibilities,” she paired them with graduate student mentors from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi to test whether water discharged from the city’s treatment plant was suitable for marine life, collecting samples and testing oxygen, chlorine and salinity themselves.
Beyond the Classroom
McLeod created the Fulton birding team, which practices weekly before school and goes on monthly field trips with local experts. Students have helped the Texas Ornithological Society raise pledges for bird habitat and contributed counts to the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. She also started a junior docent program in which her students greet visitors at the Rockport Harbor Aquarium and explain local marine life.
She has been campus science coordinator for about eight years, leading weekly teacher training and curriculum writing. The campus ranks in the top 8 percent of Texas for science, her recycling program made the school the state’s top recycling campus, and she has brought in more than $25,000 in grants. Honors include a Texas Environmental Excellence Award (2012), a state finalist in the H-E-B Excellence in Teaching awards (2010), and Aransas County and regional elementary teacher of the year (2007).
Philosophy Into Practice
McLeod sees teaching as an art: “broad, carefully designed brush strokes that deliver the content required, mixed with exciting, meaningful, thought-provoking activities.” She says she was drawn to teaching as a young mother who saw a toddler as “virtually a scientist at work,” and every day she teaches “as if my own child is in the classroom because every child deserves my best.”
She names teacher stress, low pay and lost respect as the great threat to education, and she answers it at her campus with a shared tutoring program in which teachers team-teach students who need extra help. For students in poverty, she believes schools must supply the background experiences, such as habitats, specimens and field trips, that more affluent children already have.
“Only when my students attain new knowledge and find it relevant to their own lives do I feel that successful learning has occurred.”— Martha McLeod
In Her Own Words
“A top priority for me is to create a daily sense of wonder in my students.”— Martha McLeod
“We are recyclers and stewards of our environment.”— Martha McLeod
“Every day I approach teaching as if my own child is in the classroom because every child deserves my best.”— Martha McLeod
What Others Said
“Martha McLeod is the epitome of teaching excellence, igniting in students a life-long passion for learning unparalleled in most teaching careers.”— Suzanne Ransleben, nominator and colleague
“Martha’s unyielding commitment to students, colleagues, and the community distinguish her as a master educator.”— Neva Kelly, Ed.D., Aransas County ISD district administrator
“It takes teachers as dedicated as Mrs. McLeod to truly educate the hearts and minds of every student, every day.”— Jeremy Saegert, Principal, Fulton 4-5 Learning Center
“Martha has transformed our school into a nature wonderland.”— Colleague, Fulton Learning Center
“She possesses the gift of being able to make a complex subject understandable.”— Christopher J. Krupa, school board member