Geoffrey Chaucer captured the essence of a good teacher six centuries ago. Describing an Oxford scholar traveling among a group of pilgrims to Canterbury, Chaucer wrote, “Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.”

Danielle Seymour embodies this attitude. Her love of teaching has pushed her to repeatedly master new disciplines. Today Seymour teaches psychology, economics and government at Baker High School in Mobile, Alabama. Earlier, she taught AP US History. While these subjects always interested her, she majored in none of them during her undergraduate years at Auburn University.

Initially she planned an accounting degree. But a love of reading and interest in people led her into an English major and psychology minor. To fund her studies, she took substitute teaching jobs. Her husband observed, “You talk way more about what’s going on in your substitute teaching than about your classwork. Have you ever thought about teaching as a career?”

“A lightbulb switched on,” Seymour recalls. “I took a chance when I graduated and put my resume online. A small community 30 miles from Auburn came calling and took a chance on me. I ended up staying there for eight years.” During her first years at the rural, majority African American school, she earned a Masters in Secondary School Language Arts through an online program designed for teachers needing alternative certification. Later, when the AP US history teacher left the school for another job, Seymour agreed to take over that course. She went back to school for another certification.

Then Seymour and her family relocated to Mobile to be near her mother, who had fallen ill. Hired to teach English at Baker High School, Seymour was asked on her first day to again fill a last-minute vacancy in social studies.

Building Trust Through Openness

“My students always laugh when they discover I’m teaching government and psychology with an MA in English,” Seymour says. She is “relatively open” with her students about her background  and interests. “I think it helps me establish rapport with them. If I trust them enough to share something about myself, they feel a little safer sharing information about themselves as well.” One thing she hopes they all realize: “Seriously, on my worst day, I love my job.”

She loves responding to the curiosity of students. Recently, a student in her AP Psychology class raised a hand, saying “I have a question; I’m sorry.” Seymour asked her, “Why are you apologizing? What have you done wrong?” The student replied, “Well, some teachers don’t like it when you ask a lot of questions.” Seymour assured the student, “You never have to apologize for asking me a question. In school, I was that kid who constantly asks questions, and as an adult I still do, whenever there’s something I don’t understand. It’s the only way that I can learn.” Then Seymour reminded the class of psychological concepts they had earlier studied: “classical conditioning” and “operant conditioning.” Their classmate had been conditioned to apologize for asking a question. Which kind of conditioning produced that result? she asked them. And why did it happen at all?

Resources for a Required Course in Government

Seymour is currently teaching the honors version of the government course Alabama requires all high school seniors to take. Before graduating, they must pass a civics test loosely based on the naturalization and citizenship exam. Seymour tells students, “Don’t worry, if you don’t pass, at least the government will not revoke your citizenship!” Yet the course and test are not “so difficult as they expect.” She is glad of the requirement, since students need “to see what somebody who wants to become a citizen has to learn.” More important, they need to learn how their government works and “feel invested in it. Government will affect them every day for the rest of their lives.”

With 2600 students, Baker High is the second largest high school in Alabama, and Social Studies, with 27 teachers, is its largest department. Not infrequently, Seymour welcomes and mentors new colleagues. Several years ago, while helping a new government teacher search for easily accessible resources, she came across Teaching American History’s online library. It became her own “instant go-to” for primary sources. “I love that the website allows teachers to build their own collections of frequently used documents,” she said. Teachers who register on the site can search for the documents they need for particular historical eras or governmental institutions, compiling those texts in personalized lists.

Seymour has found TAH resources on the Supreme Court particularly helpful. She was glad to find more than case opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas’s “Defense of Conservatism” showed her students how a sitting member of the court distinguishes judicial restraint from judicial activism. She’s drawn several readings from the core document volume on religious freedom, especially when preparing her students to participate in scholar exchanges offered by the National Constitution Center.

Insights and Ideas from a Multi-Day Seminar

In 2018 Seymour attended one of the multi-day seminars TAH offers. When she told students in her economics class that she’d spend a weekend discussing “Adam Smith and Political Economy,” they stared back at her in pity. She assured them, “It’s going to be way more interesting than it sounds!” Returning from the seminar, she told students about one question she and the other teachers had discussed: how Smith would have felt about marriage. What trade-offs and opportunity costs would he have seen in married life? “My kids were fascinated by that. They were operating under the misconception that economics is all about money. I told them, ‘No, economics is about choices.’”

Attending the seminar gave her pedagogical ideas for other courses. She noticed that other teachers had prepared for the seminar just as she had—not only reading, but annotating print-outs of the texts they would discuss. During the discussion, they raised questions they had scribbled in the margins as they prepared. Seymour resolved to ask students in her government class to prepare in the same way. The next time she taught the Constitution—which her students read in its entirety, a section at a time—she asked them to mark the passages that confused them, writing questions on post-it notes. “I would tell them, ‘Everybody needs to bring one question for tomorrow—one question about Article II. Let’s use those as a jumping off point for discussion.” One class tried to figure out “the Vice President’s actual job according to Article II,” Seymour recalled. “That launched us into a great discussion of implied powers, and the precedents that have been established by different administrations. The big takeaway for my students was, ‘So actually, the vice president does whatever the president tells him to do.’”

Continuous Learning, Continuous Improvement

Seymour constantly works to improve her teaching practice. She has completed the rigorous multi-year certification program designed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She assessed her students’ strengths and needs, wrote lesson plans to foster their learning potential, video-recorded herself giving the lessons, and critiqued her own performance. To maintain momentum, she took the videos with her on vacations, writing her critiques in spare hours. “It was a tough two years,” she admits, before wondering why more teachers do not take on this challenge. “Many would easily master National Board certification, but doubt themselves.” She tells colleagues, “If I could do it, anybody could.” The only requirement is to care about students and what they learn.

“I tell my students, ‘I teach like I mom. If my daughter were here, she’d tell you I talk to her exactly like I talk to you guys.’ As corny as it sounds, I’ve had really good results with that,” Seymour says. Her job is to prepare students to make informed decisions about politics and community life. But first she must make students “feel that their opinions are valuable.” Only then will they buy into the work of gathering and assessing information.

Good teachers “gladly learn.” Doing so, they inspire students to keep learning throughout their lives as citizens.