Luisa Sparrow, a fifth and sixth grade special education teacher in Boston, is dedicated to making sure everyone in her classroom and the wider school community feels included.
Sparrow sits on the inclusion planning team at the Oliver Hazard Perry School where she teaches, and started an inclusive Cooking Club where general education students and students with intellectual disabilities can learn to make tasty snacks together.
This passion for embracing everyone is what led to the Wilmington resident being selected as the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year by the state Executive Office of Education.
“We try to focus on activities that can help students in my class and students in the general education class build relationships,” she said in an interview. “I think relationships are a huge foundation for students feeling comfortable taking risks.”
Sparrow has been teaching for 16 years, starting in 2005 as a Teach for America member in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas after getting her bachelor’s degree in human development from Cornell University. She didn’t start out in special education, instead teaching science.
The special education class in the school where she worked at the time was located across the hallway from her own classroom. The teacher for that class saw some of the activities Sparrow was doing with her students and asked if she could share some of them with him.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you just bring your class in, and we can do it together?‘” she said. “And that worked really well.”
For the special education students who participated in activities with her own students, Sparrow said they began to see their science standardized test scores go up. This made her realize how much the combined classes helped students grow.
Sparrow attended Harvard Graduate School of Education for her master’s degree in education with a focus in language and literacy. After finishing her graduate degree, inspired by one of her professors, she made the full switch to special education.
During her career, Sparrow has taught in Texas, Delaware, Pennsylvania and even Costa Rica, but has been at the Perry School for eight years. Her class is made up entirely of students with intellectual disabilities, but they get the chance to work with general education students throughout the week on projects and in inclusive homeroom classes.
The Cooking Club meets every other week and uses visual recipes that include photos alongside each step so students with a range of reading abilities can participate.
Her team is also always looking for more ways to make the school community even more inclusive.
“We definitely want to do more,” Sparrow said. “There’s a lot of room to grow, for sure. We’re not thinking, OK, this is it.”
Outside of school, Sparrow serves as an on-call reader for teachers pursuing their National Board Certification and as a Teach Plus senior policy fellow. She also works with youth in the foster care system and with seniors documenting their life stories.
Sparrow is the 63rd Massachusetts Teacher of the Year and the eighth to come from Boston Public Schools. She will automatically be nominated as the state’s candidate for the National Teacher of the Year program.
“Ms. Sparrow is an example of the exceptional educators we have in Massachusetts who go above and beyond to support all of their students and foster an inclusive learning environment,” said Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler in a statement.
