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Summer Spotlight
Nicole Rivers
Nicole Rivers
Nicole Rivers teaches junior English at Gray's Creek High School in Hope Mills, NC. She also serves as department chair, leads county-wide professional development, and helps develop curriculum for ELA in Cumberland County Schools. Nicole advises clubs at her school, including Girls Expecting More Success, Gray's Creek Slam Team, and the poetry club.
Nicole is passionate about the art of teaching. "Imparting essential information into the next generation in a way that is palatable and useful" is her ultimate goal. According to Nicole’s philosophy, education should "empower, sharpen, and enlighten." Students in Nicole’s classroom learn to handle information in appropriate and powerful ways. Her motto is to focus on what matters most, knowing the rest will fall into place. Nicole’s favorite resource for teaching has been the Bible. It gives her an in depth look into human nature, which, as an educator, helps her "accept strengths and weaknesses, use authority coupled with grace, and wisdom as well as boldness."
Nicole believes in the value of timely and immediate feedback and uses shorter texts to address issues in understanding. Nicole says, "good reading is more than someone pronouncing words with a good cadence. Students need to understand content on deeper and multifaceted levels, which requires a lot of mental work. It means building bridges from prior knowledge to new and then continuing to build that bridge to a place of relevance." To that end, Nicole has recently implemented student choice into her classroom with a nonfiction book project and a young adult novel unit.
Nicole’s curriculum focus is on rhetoric and understanding how it is a part of everything we do. In her classroom, “students need to know that they are constantly being persuaded to think one way or another. We start with simple things like commercials and end up in more complex texts like the Declaration of Independence and The Crisis.” Students deal heavily in identifying the usage of ethical, emotional and logical appeals, as well as other rhetorical devices and their effectiveness. Students then move on to produce their own speeches on topics by applying the appeals and rhetorical devices. In the process, Nicole stresses the word “intentional” to her students. Authors write the way they do on purpose and so should students. Nicole teaches, "One's level of effectiveness should not be accidental" and she has found that students can produce writing of great significance once they understand the techniques behind the art.
Nicole came to join NCETA through the persuasion of a coworker. At our recent spring symposium, she co-presented a session on the power of spoken word poetry and, in 2016, co-presented a session on using mentor texts such as the Declaration of Independence in writing instruction. Because of these experiences, she started to see the benefits of a wider range of collaboration. In her own building, Nicole realized that "just because one shares a profession doesn't mean one shares the same passion for growth and fresh ideas." Stepping outside of her immediate environment, Nicole found that NCETA was an essential avenue for professional growth and networking with like-minded teachers.