CCSD Teacher Wins Two Prestigious Awards!

A Cherokee County School District teacher has earned two prestigious awards for outstanding classroom instruction!

Samantha Westerlind, who teaches technology classes at Little River Elementary School, won both the Discovery Education’s Educator of the Year award and the Presidential AI Challenge’s Georgia State Champion Award presented this spring.  Congratulations to Ms. Westerlind!  Our School Board is laser focused on ensuring our students are learning more, growing more, and achieving more in our classrooms than they could anywhere else.

Above: Ms. Westerlind is congratulated by Principal Joni Adams, left, and Becky Plotkin of Discovery Education.

She is only one of five educators in the nation to be named one of Discovery Education’s Educators of the Year, who were selected based on evidence of student academic growth and the effective use of instructional solutions.  This year’s honorees, said Brian Shaw, chief executive officer of Discovery Education, “demonstrate that when instruction is relevant, rigorous, and connected to the real world, engagement deepens, and academic growth follows.”

The Presidential AI Challenge, a national competition co-sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Education, recognizes excellence in AI literacy and the ethical implementation of technology in K-12 education.  Honorees were selected following a rigorous evaluation of their lessons and evidence of their lesson’s success.  Ms. Westerlind is the 2026 Georgia State Champion for the Educator Track 3a award category, which focuses on innovation and instructional mastery of teaching complex AI concepts.

Her winning lesson, “The Gentle Teacher,” teaches students about human-centered engineering and environmental sustainability.  Fourth-graders, through the analogy of training a dog, learned how AI learns from consistent, clear signals.  They then acted as data architects and engineered a “Gentle Petting Meter” using local micro:bit hardware and Create AI to explore high-level machine learning.  Their work helped kindergartners learn safe and empathetic interactions with therapy dogs.

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