Growing up, Gabriela Tagliamonte “always knew that [she] wanted to be a teacher,” she told IW Features. Her dad even built a classroom in their home’s basement where she and her sister would “play school after school,” she recalled.
“He drilled big whiteboards into the walls and we had old desks down there,” she said. For Christmas one year, she added, Santa gifted her sister an overhead projector.
“We just would play down there every single day for hours. My grandparents would come and they would be our students and anyone that would be our student, we would take,” Tagliamonte said.
Despite her lifelong passion for education, when Tagliamonte decided to pursue a career teaching, she wasn’t certain about which grade or even what subject she wanted to teach. That all changed, however, when she stepped into an eighth grade math classroom at Wilson Middle School in Ohio, where she has taught since 2019.
“I knew that that was where I was meant to be,” she said.
Tagliamonte noted that eighth grade is formative because high school is just a year away, “so [the students are] trying to figure out who they are and what they want to bring to the world, and they’re trying to figure out their friends.”
“They’re kind of to the age where they’re not a kid per se anymore. They’re kind of becoming a little bit of a young adult,” Tagliamonte continued, adding that for her personally, “it’s great because I am able to talk to them like I talk to adults — like they start to understand it.”
As eighth graders, she added, “they need role models in their lives –– somebody that they can look up to, that they can ask questions to as they kind of start that transition into high school where their classes matter because they’re trying to graduate and they’re trying to be future-focused and future-ready,” Tagliamonte told IW Features.
“And so what can we do at the middle school level to start training them, for lack of a better term, for their futures so that they’re the most successful?” Tagliamonte said. “I think eighth grade is really the time that they’re able to do that, and so to be a part of that is really, really special, and it’s important that they have teachers that care about that and care about them and want to set them up for success in that way.”
Unlike Tagliamonte, Monica Morton didn’t always have her eyes set on becoming a teacher. However, she “always loved” two things: science and working with children, she told IW Features.
Morton entered college intending to become a pediatrician, but realized the program “just really wasn’t the right fit for me.” The opportunity to work with children, however, didn’t end there.
“There was a daycare on campus and my sorority sister encouraged me to come for the day and help out,” she said.
“As soon as I walked in those doors, I immediately knew that was what I was meant to do and I just never looked back,” Morton told IW Features.
Morton went on to double major in early education and elementary education. She later received her master’s degree at New York University.
Over the last two decades, Morton has taught pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, first grade, and she currently teaches second grade at the Bolles School in Florida. To her, second grade is “just the most amazing, important grade.”
As second graders, Morton said, “children have really cracked the code to reading, they’re writers already, and now, I get to really just zoom in on those amazing abilities,” Morton said, adding that she can “really challenge and support each child.”
“I get to teach them new things, but really enhance what they’ve already kind of learned, and it’s such a loving age and we get to be creative and do fun things,” Morton added.
In addition to her students, “I love working with parents,” Morton told IW Features.
“I know sometimes teachers feel conflicted [about] having parents in the classroom, but I just love having parents in the classroom and interacting with the kiddos and helping out and being a part of that relationship, and building that communication between teacher and parent and fostering that love of learning,” Morton said.
Similar to Morton, Megan Tucker didn’t plan on working in education. In fact, coming from a family filled with teachers, Tucker wanted to do something different, so she went to college to become a zookeeper.
But after she began tutoring at a school as part of Auburn University’s work-study program, Tucker said she “fell in love” with teaching.
“I think teaching chose me. It’s really something I love to do. It’s in my blood,” she shared with IW Features.
For Tucker, “it’s not the big moments, really.” Instead, “[i]t’s the little ones that make me love my job every day. Making that small difference that you know later will make a huge difference in the kids,” she added.
Tucker is currently a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) specialist, gifted teacher, and Dean of Curriculum at Hillsboro Charter Academy in Virginia, where she works with students in kindergarten through fifth grade.
Her career in education hasn’t been confined to Virginia – or even the U.S. In July 2024, Tucker taught in Nigeria, helping bring STEAM lessons and experiments to children there.
As a kindergarten through fifth grade teacher, Tucker said that the most important thing a child learns as they grow through grade school is “how to have courageous conversations and get along with other people,” noting that “the soft skills are the most important thing.”
Those soft skills include “critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity—the skills that are hard to teach, where you have to give them the opportunities to have those grow in a scaffolded way. I would say [those are] just as important as learning grammar, math, facts, all of that—how to get along with others and how to be a good human,” Tucker explained.
Rosella Sena, a kindergarten teacher at Santo Niño Regional Catholic School in New Mexico, agreed that “teaching fundamental kindness, I think, is huge for kids” in grade school.
“I think I’ve seen that throughout the grade school process, and I think it’s important to be able to understand and to teach kids that it is OK and we have differences in the world, and it is OK to be different,” Sena told IW Features.
“It’s the golden rule: Just treat everybody the way you want to be treated, and I think that’s the most important thing that is taught,” she added.
According to Sena, “whatever you learn in kindergarten shapes you for the rest of your life, and you learn not only fundamentals—we learn to read, we learn to write, we learn morals, we learn values.”
Sena has over two decades of experience as a kindergarten teacher, and what she loves about teaching is “just making learning so fun” for students.
“That’s what I love to do, and I love to pique that interest in kids, to be able to want to love school,” Sena told IW Features, noting that her students “love coming to school because I love making it interesting. I love making it fun for them.”
As a seasoned educator, Sena shared some advice to those considering a career in teaching: “Be in it for the right reason.”
“I know sometimes it’s just like, ‘Well, I want to be a teacher. I want to try this out ….’ But I think, really, it’s so difficult right now that if you’re not really in it, I think if you’re not truly 100% vetted in becoming a teacher with all the negative stuff that’s attached to it, you’re going to go through ups and downs, and more downs than ups. But you definitely need to be in it for the right reason because you are impacting children’s lives,” Sena said.
“And like it or not – what you do and how you do it every single day is going to shape the person, and that’s what we need to always just remember,” she added.
Independent Women’s 2025 “Teacher of the Year” will be announced on Monday, January 19, 2026.
