22-04-2025
Miriam Schimmoller is The Washington Post's 2025 Teacher of the Year
The world was in chaos on a morning in April, but inside Miriam Schimmoller's third-grade classroom at Oak Street Elementary School in Falls Church, Virginia, the atmosphere was zen.
In a voice so quiet it wouldn't wake a baby, Schimmoller, 60, asked the children sitting on the rug what they planned to do for their 'morning curiosities.'
The students raised their hands and shared their ideas. Then, as Schimmoller counted down, they took their seats and got to work.
One girl sketched with a pencil. Three boys played with kinetic sand, letting it sift between their fingers. Another boy sewed together a piece of red fabric with string. He was making a satchel. The class had been studying Vikings, and because Vikings are explorers, he thought they might need a bag to put things in.
The relaxed feeling in the classroom reflected the careful thought that went into making it that way. On display was an educational philosophy that Schimmoller has honed during years in the classroom. That mastery has earned Schimmoller the title of The Washington Post's 2025 Teacher of the Year from contenders in D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
The 'morning curiosities' are a daily routine in Schimmoller's class. It looks like play, but it's an exercise in problem solving, inquiry and collaboration, all skills Schimmoller wants to impart to her students.
'That's the thing about teaching. I always tell the kids, 'You might not even know the difference between work and fun by the end of the year,'' she said. 'In morning curiosities, you can see the lightbulbs going off. You can see how the mind of the child works.'
Falls Church is one of only eight public school divisions in the U.S. that offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) program from preschool through 12th grade. Headquartered in Switzerland, IB is an educational program that emphasizes creativity and critical thinking.
It's a unique model for a school in a unique place. Fifteen minutes outside of D.C., Falls Church is only 2 square miles and has a population of around 15,000, making it the smallest county-equivalent city in the country.
As a public school — Oak Street, which educates about 500 children in grades three through five — must follow Virginia's Standards of Learning, but it uses IB as a teaching method.
'If anyone asks, 'Are we an IB school or a standards-based school,' we're both. The curriculum has to be approved by state expectations; however IB is the how, IB is the how are we teaching? How are we supporting our students in truly being critical thinkers, being creative, being collaborators?' said Karim Daugherty, the principal at Oak Street. 'A big part of Schimmoller's role is to make sure that the curriculum doesn't stifle thinking and exploring.'
Schimmoller uses the curriculum as a launching pad for the work the children do in the classroom. 'If you spend the early years just filling in the blanks — you'll get kids with good work ethics, and you might get kids with a lot of knowledge, but you don't actually know who they are going to be, so you want to open the world up to them,' Schimmoller said. 'You don't want to just tell them what to do.'
Schimmoller came to Oak Street in 2014 from a charter school in Texas. She and her husband wanted to relocate to the East Coast to be closer to their children, who were in college, and Schimmoller's parents, who lived in Pennsylvania, where she grew up. Schimmoller's father was a professor of economics at Lehigh University.
After graduating from Cornell in 1986, Schimmoller got her masters in education at Lehigh before joining her husband in Landstuhl, Germany, where he was a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. In Germany, she got her first job as a second-grade teacher at a Department of Defense school.
When her husband was transferred to Fort Hood, Schimmoller moved to Texas, eventually landing in Austin after her husband left the military. In Austin, Schimmoller taught at the private Jewish day school that her children attended, and established a tutoring business. In 2011, a friend recruited her to help start an IB charter school in Round Rock, Texas.
Building an IB school from the ground up gave Schimmoller extraordinary training in its methodology. She was hooked.
In IB, Schimmoller found a framework that supported the way she wanted to teach. It allowed her to teach children through big questions and ideas, and it was flexible enough to make space for the way different children learn: 'The thing about public school is there's a strong belief that you have to find success for everybody, right? That's one of my foundational beliefs. But the hard part about it is it's a very strong structure. As a teacher, your job is to find a place in that structure for everybody.'
Schimmoller's ability to adapt the learning environment to each child is obvious to Erin Korves, whose daughter is in Schimmoller's class. Her son, now a fifth grader, had Schimmoller two years ago.
'She figures out every single kid in her class immediately,' said Korves, who saw how Schimmoller was able to connect with her two very different children.
When Korves's quiet and introspective son was in Schimmoller's class, he was a hesitant writer because he felt he needed to plan out everything before he could start. To soothe his anxiety, Schimmoller sat him on the side of her desk while he wrote, and within a month, he was writing easily on his own.
By contrast, Korves's gregarious daughter needed an outlet for her pent-up creative energy. When the class studied Greek mythology, she and a friend wrote a song about Greek gods. Now, she's setting those lyrics to music on the ukulele, and writing a book.
Schimmoller believes that drive comes when a teacher gives children the agency to do what interests them. She has seen how when a child conceives of a project themselves — whether it's a Viking satchel or a song inspired by Greek mythology — they find it so compelling, they don't want to stop working.
