Oakland Local, News Report, Posted: Dec 03, 2012

Seventh grade teacher I'Asha Warfield believes in getting to know her students well and then setting high expectations for them.

She believes that writing is the best tool for learning and asks her students at Oakland's Frick Middle School to write every day.

"Once a child can put it in writing, cognitively they've got it," she said. "The struggle he or she has to go through just to articulate things in writing, that is when clarity happens."

And she believes that instilling an atmosphere of respect in the classroom should take care of discipline; detentions and suspensions have no place in her teaching methodology.

Warfield must be on to something in these practices. She has been selected as a California Teacher of the Year and nominated by state education officials to be National Teacher of the Year. In other words, you might regard her as California's number one teacher.

There are 273,000 K-12 public school teachers in California.

Read the rest here: Oakland Local