His Story
Sergio de Alba became a teacher after substituting for a week as a favor. He needed extra money and thought it would be easy work, but he found a purpose that he says no other job could fill, and he went home and told his wife he was going to become a teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies and a master’s degree with distinction in education from California State University, Stanislaus, and a National Certificate for STEM Teaching from the National Institute for STEM Education in 2020. After a few years as a teaching assistant in Turlock, he began teaching at R.M. Miano Elementary School in the Los Banos Unified School District, and he has been there for about twenty years.
His approach is to build STEM into everything, from social studies to math and language arts, so that students see how their lessons connect to the real world. For him the classroom is the entire campus and sometimes the whole community. He has built and maintained sixteen learning gardens, a baseball field, a veterans memorial stage, a patriot plaza and other projects, and his colleagues use them for lessons in every grade. His principal says that on first arriving he saw dirt beds, dead grass and weekly graffiti, and in his first year he began transforming the school, and that he is on campus every weekend working on those projects.
His lessons are known across the school. Each year he hosts an Olympic Games for all sixth graders, complete with a shot put and discus area he built himself, to teach math, engineering, science and ancient world history. The Oasis Garden, built about eleven years ago, supports lessons on ancient Egypt and serves as an archaeological dig site. His colleagues say they bring him a unit that is not working and he helps improve it.
Beyond the Classroom
De Alba founded the Doctor Is In Club, which he has advised for twenty years, after a mother asked him in his first year to talk her daughter out of becoming a doctor. Instead, he created a club to show the girl he believed in her dream, and many of its members have gone into medicine. He has also created nine student-inspired clubs, coached the spelling bee and the academic pentathlon, advised the yearbook, and built a year-long sports tournament to motivate students.
He runs annual events that bring families to campus, including potlucks, astronomy nights, reading and science events and garden-building days. He is a mentor teacher, a district mentor and a mentor to student teachers who observe him each year, and he has presented at state and national conferences. His honors include the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s National History Teacher of the Year (2020), a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching (2021), an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Energy (2021-2022) and an NEA Global Learning Fellowship (2022). His principal says that he has earned twenty-six Teacher of the Year awards, fifteen of them national.
Philosophy Into Practice
the first day about their backgrounds and needs, reviews their state assessment scores and talks to their past teachers about what worked and what did not, and then builds a program to fit that class. Students show what they know by creating comic strips, songs, posters, models, plays and videos. Creativity, he says, gives students excitement and pride, and shows them that their dreams and aspirations are relevant.
His Gateway Program offers clubs and activities before school, after school, at recess and at lunch, so that every student on campus has an outlet to excel. His principal reports that his state test scores are about twice the district and state averages. He believes that the best way to keep improving is to keep learning, and that mentoring new teachers keeps veterans from thinking they know it all.
“My instructional approach is based on making real-world connections to prepare students for the future.”Sergio de Alba
In His Own Words
“Exceptional educators are never done learning.”Sergio de Alba
“A truly effective teacher searches for individual aptitudes and offers an opening to develop them in each student.”Sergio de Alba
“My physical classroom is not a room with four walls; it is indeed the entire campus, and at times, the community at large.”Sergio de Alba
What Others Said
“Mr. de Alba is an extraordinary teacher.”Zelda Dias-Harper, principal, R.M. Miano Elementary School
“Sergio is known for his unique skillset, level of success, student engagement, and incredible implementation of creative teaching methods.”Tara Fullington, teacher colleague, R.M. Miano Elementary School
“Mr. de Alba made learning an adventure.”Maritza Magallanes, former student