Congratulations to high school teacher Chuck Nicholas for being South Carolina’s State Educator of the Year presented by the National Speech and Debate Association. Mr. Nicholas will now compete with 31 other speech and debate teachers for the National Educator of the Year title to be presented in March of 2018. For over 30 years Mr. Nicholas has taught all the speech and debate classes in the high school as well as has coached the speech and debate team and the high school and middle school mock trial teams. He is a 5-Diamond NSDA coach.
According to the NSDA, the teachers were nominated based on “their work fostering critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration skills in the field of speech and debate education.”
The NSDA website gives the following criteria for selection of the state winners:
- Be a high school or middle school coach member of the National Speech & Debate Association.
- Be an active classroom teacher in the field of speech and/or debate.
- Have a minimum of five years of classroom experience.
- Demonstrate broader contributions to the field of education outside of their own classroom (e.g., presenting at an education conference; writing curriculum and/or education standards for speech and debate; publishing articles on the educational benefits of speech and debate; instructional coaching to non-speech and debate teachers on how to incorporate speech and debate into their curriculum).
- Provide significant and ongoing support to others in the field of speech and debate education (e.g. mentorship, peer observation, modeling lessons).
- Model the Association’s Coaches Code of Ethics.
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