The finalists for Palm Beach Illustrated’s 2025 Educator of the Year Award are outside-the-box thinkers who challenge their students to ever-expanding opportunities and successes.
Rebecca Donovan-Bain
Theater Director
Palm Beach Lakes Community High School
“Sometimes, teaching Shakespeare to a high-school student starts with a TikTok,” says Rebecca Donovan-Bain, theater director at Palm Beach Lakes Community High School.
A veteran teacher, Donovan-Bain taught English and theater to students in the Caribbean as well as theater and special education in Kentucky and Florida before committing totally to theater. She notes that “this generation is into anything quick.” The works of Shakespeare, however, require slowing down and figuring things out. So, she challenges her kids to teach her the social media trends.
“It’s a way for me to compare the learning, especially now that I’m older,” Donovan-Bain explains. “If they can teach me their content, then they can learn mine.”
Learn it they have. Donovan-Bain’s students have participated in on-campus performances, the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, the Kravis Center’s Student and Teacher Arts Resources (STAR) series, and competitions—some winning cash prizes for their performances.
“Many of these students had never been exposed to Shakespeare at all, and they’ve learned to apply themselves,” she says.
This past summer, Donovan-Bain was selected to attend the Teach Shakespeare Through Performance program at the Globe Theater in London, where she spent her days digging deeper into her favorite subjects and learning more about why sharing these works is necessary in today’s world.
“I want to make this interesting for the kids so that they want to read,” explains Donovan-Bain, who adds that she spends a great deal of time recruiting high schoolers to become educators. “If they read, then they can relate. They can see that what Shakespeare struggled with, we are still struggling with today.”
Adam Richardson
History and Business and Entrepreneurship Teacher
Jupiter Christian School
Adam Richardson believes that learning shouldn’t be confined to the classroom. That’s why he’s taken his students at Jupiter Christian School on multiple field trips, connecting them with local businesses, universities, civic organizations, and business development boards. He also directs student government, mentors DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) participants, and heads 700 South, a student-run business enterprise.
Richardson leads the school’s business and entrepreneurship pathway and often turns to those who can provide greater expertise than he can. “I’m trying to get as much community connection as possible,” he says. “I want to build twenty-first-century skills for my students.”
When a group of students came to High School Principal Joshua Wade with the idea to launch real-world businesses—an on-campus coffee cart and merchandise store—Richardson and the school’s dean of students, Adam Dickens, helped them pave the way. “The students created a pitch and raised money, bought equipment, learned to balance books, put together marketing, put in orders,” Richardson explains. “They learned a lot of very valuable firsthand lessons.”
These lessons have been dissected and explored in the classroom, helping Richardson demonstrate what it means to be an entrepreneur. He explains that he teaches four principals of thinking like an entrepreneur: growth mindset, grit, redefining failure, and seeking new opportunities.
He uses his own path as an example, saying he wasn’t instantly sure he was the right person for his current role. “I’m not a financial advisor,” says Richardson. He does, however, admit that he possesses a growth mindset, “and that makes me an entrepreneur too.”
Richardson is excited to see what this year’s crop of students does with the business foundation previous students laid. What else is he looking forward to? He replies with a laugh: “Planning more field trips, obviously.”
Chris and Michelle Hogan
Music, Band, and Choir Director/Theater Arts Director
St. Ann Catholic School
Aristotle came up with the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but at St. Ann Catholic School in West Palm Beach, Chris and Michelle Hogan put the theory to the test. The couple has fostered the school’s performing arts education and created a culture that surprises even them sometimes.
Chris started in 2011 as the full-time music teacher for the school (which serves students in pre-K through eighth grade), with a focus on general music education and a background in choral and instrumental composition. Michelle, who works three days a week as a speech-language pathologist in private practice, joined in 2015 to teach theater to all grade levels.
Together, the Hogans started the Performance Ensemble, which is open to middle school students by audition and focuses on choral and theater skills. The Performance Ensemble serves the school and community, participates in competitions and workshops, and performs along with select fourth and fifth graders at the Kravis Center each spring. Prior to that, Chris launched the St. Ann Youth Choir in 2014. Comprised of St. Ann students as well as alumni students up to grade 12, the choir provides music for school masses and has toured internationally.
“We’ve set a high bar for them and help them to learn what they’re capable of, but the kids have created the culture,” Chris explains.
What they learn in this culture, the Hogans say, will serve them no matter what they decide to pursue in high school and beyond.
“When the kids really embrace and connect with [performance], it impacts them,” Michelle says. “It shows them how they can apply themselves to anything in the world.”
Steven Hammerman
Social Studies Teacher
The Greene School
Middle schoolers aren’t typically known for their love of history—but when paired with someone who’s not your typical history teacher, magic happens. Steven Hammerman, a 21-year teaching veteran who has taught sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at The Greene School in West Palm Beach since 2022, believes that social studies presents the opportunity for tweens to come of age.
“I’ve sought to redefine history education as something immersive, purposeful, and deeply connected to the world in which students live,” Hammerman says.
Hammerman’s eighth graders at The Greene School participate in a museum studies program for their social studies course. In addition, he plans travel for students that enables them to study history and enjoy the local culture, to include arts and sporting events. These excursions give the students an opportunity to develop “self-independence and build life skills,” he notes.
His trips at The Greene School have included touring Washington, D.C.; working in the archive facility of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto; and backpacking along the Appalachian Trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Seventh graders have traveled to Boston and learned how to navigate air and public transportation systems on a trip filled with historic research. Eighth graders developed a six-panel pop-up exhibit that they donated to the West Palm Beach–based Holocaust Learning Experience (HLE), which plans to use it with visiting students as well as at local and state conferences. The HLE has also digitized the exhibition—titled “Nazism and Jim Crow: A Comparative Study of Systemic Racism and Antisemitism”—to be used by students and teachers across the country.
Passion and excitement bring history to life, notes Hammerman, who feels lucky to work with his students. “Middle school is the greatest age track. They come in as big-eyed babies and they leave as capable young adults.”
Ednesha Willingham Brown
Third-Grade Math Teacher
Pioneer Park Elementary School
Ednesha Willingham Brown knows her students at Pioneer Park Elementary School in Belle Glade. She knows their worries, their strengths, their weaknesses. Most of all, she knows that they can learn, achieve, and dream.
Brown has taught math to third graders at the Title 1 school for four years. After working behind the scenes at area community organizations, Brown stepped into the classroom “so I could make a bigger impact,” she says.
Test scores demonstrate that she’s done exactly that, earning Brown the Palm Beach County School District designation as the Glades Region Beginning Teacher of the Year during her first year in the classroom. She was also the school’s nominee this year for the district’s Dwyer Awards in the STEM Education category. Her first goal, however, is to make sure her students have a good day.
“You can’t learn if you’re upset,” says Brown, who celebrates all growth, even if it misses a benchmark or takes place after hours on a ball field or performance stage. She credits those who have come before her, including mentors at Pioneer Park and especially Maceo Golson, whom she encountered as a student at nearby Rosenwald Elementary.
“He taught with passion,” says Brown, who employs key strategies of building relationships of repetition in her classroom. “He wasn’t there for a paycheck, and that made a huge impact on me as a student and as a teacher.”
Brown dreams of becoming a guidance counselor someday. Until then, she’s aiming “to help students be successful, to know they should never give up, and to see their smiling faces.”
Shakendra Moorer
Journalism and Communications Teacher
Bak Middle School of the Arts
Shakendra Moorer never expected to be a teacher. She studied communications and planned a career in broadcasting. Shortly after graduating in 2010, she found a job with a production company—and a crisis of confidence. “It’s cliché, but I knew it wasn’t for me,” she says.
At the suggestion of her boyfriend (now husband), Moorer took a chance and applied for a job at Bak Middle School of the Arts teaching journalism and communications. “I got an interview and was hired on the spot,” she says of the part-time position that started her on her teaching journey.
Moorer soon was teaching full-time and went back to school to pursue a master’s in educational leadership. Now she helps sixth, seventh, and eighth graders tell compelling stories in journalism and video and audio production classes, where they learn to conduct interviews, record podcasts, and create documentaries, short films, school-related and community news packages, and a radio show. She employs creativity and enthusiasm to meet kids on their level. “I want them to feel comfortable, and say ‘Okay, this teacher gets me,’” she says.
Moorer also mentors first-year teachers, coaches the school’s national award–winning step team, and runs the after-school programming at Bak. Her husband is the band director at McArthur High School in Broward County, and Moorer has stepped in to coach the color guard there as well.
Even though—or perhaps because—her career didn’t take off as she expected, Moorer is extremely dedicated to her students. “I want to empower, educate, and elevate,” she says. “My goal is for them to find something they can be true to, something they can connect with, and to give them the communication skills to apply to whatever they do in life.”
Story Credits:
Shot by Palm Beach Illustrated on location at the Cox Science Center and Aquarium, West Palm Beach
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