Here’s more on how the Lifetime Achievement honorees are making a lasting impact on students:  

• In the 30 years he’s been teaching, Richard Harris has always been a big believer in experiential learning. For him, that often means moving beyond the classroom. 
  
  And sometimes high above it. He and two Charlotte Latin colleagues took students to the top of Crowders Mountain for a lesson on the Hudson River School of en pleine air painters. Harris asked students to write about visual artwork using William Cullen Bryant’s poem, To a Waterfowl, as inspiration.  “Taking them to a mountain peak and having them see the world from that perspective changes things,” he said.
  
  Cross-curricular lessons are part of Harris’ personal pedagogy. He often integrates music into his lessons. To teach the James Baldwin short story, Sonny’s Blues, he showed students footage of jazz great Thelonious Monk on the piano. He wanted students to hear the similarities between Baldwin’s use of repetition in the story and a jazz riff.  
  
  Harris loves teaching the Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I dwell in Possibility.” That line could easily be his motto. “Every moment I’m with my kids is a moment of possibility,” he said.  

• Teaching digital natives has changed the way Melissa Leftwich teaches. When she began her career 34 years ago, students wanted to learn how to use the tools of the artist’s trade; they were interested in mastering technique.
  
  Today, many of her middle-school students come to class with an impressive mastery of tools and techniques they’ve learned from the internet. “Some are already creating and sharing content,” she said. “So, it’s no longer just about teaching them how to use a paintbrush or charcoal, but helping them refine their methods, slow down their process and use these tools in a creative way.” 
  
  That may be in an old-fashioned, analog way. Every project in her media arts class has a paper component to go along with the tech component.  

• Greg Lekavich is always looking for creative ways to engage students. Anything can be fodder. He based one lesson, a writing warm-up, on the reality TV cooking competition, Chopped. “I’ll give students three historical terms,” he said. “Two will obviously go together, but the third will be an oddball term. They have to figure out how they all fit together.” 
  
  The class activity he calls 1920s Coffee Talk involves interpreting a front page of The New York Times from that era. When he first started using this exercise, he asked students to develop a fictional character from that time period and react to a particular headline as that character might have. “It was always a good activity,” he said, “but I felt something was missing.” 
  
  Now, students assume the persona of a real historic figure — Henry Ford, Marcus Garvey, Gertrude Stein — and respond as that person. “It’s no longer just an exercise in creativity,” he said.  

The work of these educators has undoubtedly left a lasting impact not only on their students’ lives, but on the lives of everyone their students go on to touch, giving them the courage and confidence to live creatively.