27 May Teacher Spotlight: Casey Kellogg
Our Northshore Schools Foundation Teacher Spotlight this week is on Casey Kellogg, History teacher at North Creek High School.
Mr. Kellogg is in his 8th year teaching in Northshore School District. This year is his 3rd year teaching at North Creek HS. He currently teaches 3 sections of US HIstory and 4-semester courses of Intro to Law (Started by John Messner, a previous “Teacher Spotlight” at BHS)
Mr. Kellogg was nominated for our teacher spotlight by a current student who told us:
My law and order teacher Mr.Kellogg in my opinion is one of the best teachers that the Northshore district has to offer and I think it’d be awesome if he was recognized.”
When we heard about what Mr. Kellogg was doing in the classroom, we were really excited to share his work with our community.
Mr. Kellogg’s students are just wrapping up a six-week-long project where they were asked to interview someone who lived through all or any of the 1960s or 1970s. The project aim was not only for students to learn history, but to learn from those closest and dearest to their own lives, in hopes to learn more about a time that shaped those around us we love today.
The idea for the project came from a conversation Kellogg had with his grandmother-in-law Joanie over the summer months. She and her husband Herby have lived in the Seattle area most their lives and she mentioned that once during a job interview in the 1970s that she was asked questions such as “Do you plan on having more kids?” and “How often do you miss work because of your children being sick?” Kellogg says, “The ‘history’ was not new, but hearing someone I love to experience it in story form made me feel something. That was my hope for my students.”
To help with the project, he called upon one of his mentors, retired Northshore legend, Bob Mikulich, to see if he would help. For the past two years, Bob has spent a day with Mr. Kellogg in the classroom and allowed him to interview him in front of my students as a means of modeling the interview process.
Educators never stop teaching if you listen and Bob has taught me so much. I am forever grateful for his friendship”, says Kellogg.
Moving into a virtual format, Kellogg wanted to keep the philosophy of students teaching students. Although, some changes had to be made within the project to help all students be successful. Through weekly screencast lessons, the utilization of previous student examples, and allowing for more student choice of expression, the end product was just as powerful as previous in-class submissions.
This year’s students turned in phenomenal projects! Interview submissions included grandfathers to favorite teachers like Ms. Sutton, an English educator at North Creek HS. Students made phone calls, zoom calls, and one even drove 10 hours to get an in-person interview. One group even conducted an interview solely in Portuguese with a team member’s grandmother in Brazil, only to take an additional 10 hours of meticulously translating the interview into English so they could add captions within their video for their peers.
“It has been difficult for the students and me in adapting to our current situation. I think it is good to recognize that fact. My strength comes from my family and my colleagues I have had the pleasure of working with in NSD over the past 10 years. Again, we can learn a lot from those around us if we listen and my students are teaching me much more than history.
This recognition is a reflection of the hard work my students have put in during these challenging times. I am proud to be a student in their classroom, even virtually, every single day” says Kellogg.
If you’re pretty impressed after reading all that, you’ll be even more inspired to learn that Casey Kellogg is a husband and father of 3 young children, ages 4, 2 and 6 months. In addition to his role at home and his excellence in teaching, he is also currently in graduate school for educational leadership.
We are so lucky, here in NSD, to have some amazing teachers who strive every day to reach their students in creative and innovative ways. Thank you, Mr. Kellogg, for the work you are doing at North Creek high school.
If you know of a teacher in our district who is doing creative and innovative education in our new virtual classroom platform that we should know about please email their info to julie@nsdfoundation.org
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Northshore Schools Foundation is a local 501(c)3 non-profit serving students and teachers in the Northshore School District, located in the communities of Bothell, Kenmore, and Woodinville. Since 1995, Northshore Schools Foundation donors have funded more than $2 million in grants to benefit the district’s students and teachers. To learn more, visit www.northshoreschoolsfoundation.org.
