Brandon Jones realizes that his fourth grade students first need to feel safe in his classroom so they're willing to take "risks" in learning. To build teams and create an atmosphere of belonging, each year the class creates a rope more than 50 feet long, with each child contributing a colored strand. The rope is knotted to represent every student, and if a child leaves during the year, he or she takes the knot to his or her next home. Students who come back years later say they "still have the knot for good luck."

Mr. Jones plays the guitar and writes and sings songs to illustrate the curriculum. Sometimes he dresses in character and uses many other devices to engage his students in learning. The day we visited, his class lesson was "starting writing." The students looked at the first sentence of each chapter in a book to see how the author drew readers into the story. Word painting and description are important to their own future writing, they learned. "Did any author write, ‘Now I'm going to tell you about Chapter 2?’" Mr. Jones asked. "NO!" they assured him. (And the students won't do that either!)

In the Teacher of the Year big book that the students presented to Mr. Jones, there were testimonials from former students. Mr. Jones' teaching certainly figured prominently, because they wrote statements such as "Mr. Jones is as cool as a pair of new shoes" and "Because of Mr. Jones, I can remember my math tips faster than a car going 1,000 miles an hour."