Teacher of the Year Asks Rural Students to Tackle Big Global Topics With Empathy

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Ashlie Crosson has always loved the classroom. 

Growing up in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, as one of seven kids of divorced parents, “I found school to be this place of stability, while some other parts of my life were in transition and in changes,” Crosson told The 74 in a recent interview. 

“I was a pretty natural student most of the time,” she added, “but it was mostly because I had incredible teachers who invested in their students so far beyond what is expected of the job.”

She said she can remember all the way back to a kindergarten teacher who wrote her letters over the summer because she’d be her teacher again in first grade. “I think I looked at that and said, ‘This is an incredibly rewarding way to spend a life.’”

It became a 14-year career that rewarded Crosson back — and on the national stage. The AP English teacher and high school journalism advisor was named the 2025 National Teacher of the Year April 29 by the Council of Chief State School Officers. The award, which follows her earning the Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year title, allows Crosson to spend the next year traveling across the country as an ambassador to fellow educators.

She’ll step away from her hometown high school five years after she went back there to answer “this higher calling to return to the place that made me into a successful adult and into somebody who had found joy and happiness in their adult life.”

Crosson, a first-generation college graduate, was selected from a pool of 56 local winners who were narrowed down to three other finalists: American Samoa’s Mikaela Saelua, an English language teacher who is the first finalist from the seven islands in the program’s history; Washington, D.C.’s Jazzmyne Townsend, an elementary school special education teacher and children’s book author; and Colorado’s Janet Renee Damon, a high school history teacher at a transfer school who runs a school-based podcast program focused on mental health disparities.

“Ashlie is an authentic, self-reflective leader who uses her experiences to help elevate her students into successful careers and life after high school,” the National Teacher of the Year Selection Committee said in a statement. “She is also a strong and passionate representative for educators, using her voice to help people understand the weight of the teaching profession and the gravity of what teachers do.” 

Crosson said she grounds the bulk of her classroom work in real-world connections and projects, which allow her students to explore English from a careers-based perspective, while also building understanding and empathy for people of diverse backgrounds across the world.

This is perhaps most apparent in her 10th-grade elective course called Survival Stories, which she began designing as a Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow. In it, she wants her students to consider sweeping questions like, “What problems are we trying to solve and in what ways do we need to communicate across borders?” 

To keep the course accessible and age appropriate, all the material —from non-fiction texts and memoirs, to podcasts and films — come from the voices of teens and adolescents. This allows her students, Crosson said, to have, “really authentic and approachable conversations about things that can feel really big and really unapproachable.”

In today’s political climate, traversing some of these charged topics in rural Mifflin — an almost exclusively white town of just over 46,000, where almost 80% of the vote went to President Donald Trump in 2024 — might seem daunting. Crosson’s approach is to begin with texts that take place as far from central Philadelphia as possible, so that by the time students reach stories from their own community — some of which they may have otherwise met with preconceived notions — they are able to analyze them with more nuance, greater empathy and a stronger text-based knowledge. 

“We are all here, going through our own human experience,” Crosson said. She wants her students to ask, “ ‘How do I relate to these people? How do I better understand these people?’ Because at the end of the day, my students also want to be better understood. So there’s a reciprocity there.”

When her students come to her with challenging political questions — for example about Trump’s recent executive orders looking to eradicate any focus on diversity, equity and inclusion in schools — she encourages them to return to the facts, asking, “What are the actual details?”

“I’m able to keep my opinions out of things because I’m also first asking my students to put their opinions on pause,” she said, “so that we have a chance to become more informed about things and have a better, more well-rounded understanding of what’s going on before we start trying to figure out our feelings about it.”

In addition to Survival Stories, Crosson teaches AP English Language and Composition and 10th-grade English, while also running the school’s journalism elective. At the newspaper and district magazine, called the Pawprint, she functions more as a boss and editor than teacher, she said, a position she cherishes, especially since a number of the high schoolers end up going into journalism.

“If students are basically getting simulations of future careers, I love that. And I love facilitating that.”

Crosson’s classroom is covered with colorful student artwork from floor to ceiling and one corner hosts the “One Word Board,”where students place the word that will most motivate and inspire them throughout the year. 

In a video for CBS Mornings, her students were asked to choose five words to describe Crosson: joyful, funny, caring, energetic (but not too much), passionate and dedicated were among their picks.

One student said she sees Crosson as “a safe space.” Another said that whenever she spots students struggling, “She’ll try to make you better as a student and [in] doing that you also learn lessons in how to take help and help others. So I think it makes students better people.”

Along with her teaching responsibilities, Crosson serves as the communications chair for her union’s negotiating team, assists with the school’s Positive Behavior Interventions and Support programming, leads the district’s international student trips and co-hosts “The PL Playbook,” a podcast dedicated to teachers’ professional learning.

When asked her favorite book to teach, Crosson laughed and said, “I honestly think that every book becomes my favorite book.”

“There are some books that I’ve taught for 10 years,” she continued “and so now there’s so many different colored pens [on the pages]. The book is the timeline of my teaching career. And there’s something really beautiful about that.”

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