Join us in congratulating our 2021 District Teachers of the Year Winners, Ms. Kristilyn Patterson and Mr. Giles Hill. Best of luck on the next level of the competition!
Meet Ms. Kristilyn Patterson
Business/Marketing Education Teacher @ Fairfield High Preparatory School
and FCS District's Secondary Teacher of the Year
Ms. Kristilyn Patterson has been a teacher within education for 19 years. She entered this field leaving a management position because she felt a calling for the profession. She initially began teaching in the Health Sciences program her first 3 years. Currently, she serves as the Business and Marketing Education Teacher. Throughout her tenure, she has served in multiple leadership roles. Currently, she is the Department Chair of the Career Technical Department, Technology Specialist for her school, Technology Budget Committee Chair, Chair of the Technology Team, and DECA Advisor. She also serves on the leadership team, data leadership team, interview team, as well as several other roles as needed throughout the year. She has been recognized as a recipient of the Vanguard Leadership Award that honors teachers across Jefferson County. All of these roles have been instrumental in helping to aid her in becoming a leader within her school to better serve her students. However, what drives her is a love for her students. She strongly believes that culture and climate are often not given enough attention in respect to developing a school as well as the child. The child is more than a test score. They have many other needs that must be taken into account. As a result, she has spent many years helping to develop students not only in the classroom, but through programs and organizations that allow the child to step up as leaders and demonstrate various skills and talents adding to the student's self-worth.
Meet Mr. Giles Hill
Fourth Grade Teacher @ Glen Oaks Elementary School
and FCS District’s Elementary Teacher of the Year
In his career as an instructional professional, Giles Hill has embraced a pedagogy emphasizing empathetic, growth-minded, metacognitive processes of discovery in learning. At the core of his pedagogy is a desire to consistently immerse students in a microcosm of the 21st century civilization in which they will emerge, while supporting their socio-emotional health.
His journey towards professional education began in his YouTube when faculty members and mentors were emphasizing the importance of identifying passions that could feasibly translate into careers. He found that no single passion of his had more gravity than the thrill of working with children at a local university’s childcare center. He realized that education was truly his calling after he served as a staff member for a scholarship program which transported students living in some of Alabama's most depressed regions for an immersive STEAM learning experience. The hearts and minds of those young people, the potential for their lives to affect change on the scourge of negative outcomes that ignorance caused, and the desperation he felt to bring meaningful and lasting changes to situations like theirs helped him to land on three objectives in education which he maintains to this day: Access for all, to everything good; equity for all, in everything good; and agency for all, to use everything good.
Since earning his Master of Education, he has led professional developments on instructional technology, supervised a variety of mentorship programs for elementary age males, and utilizes differentiated instruction to motivate learning for diverse groups of students.