One 10th-grade English class at the HS for Public Service gets to choose their curriculum every spring. Topics include literature of the diaspora, literature and argumentation or science fiction. Their teacher got the idea from her friend and mentor, Kristen Rush, the English department head at the high school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and one of the Excellence in Education Award winners at this year’s Academic High School Awards celebration.

“It’s awesome, and it was her idea,” said Mariana Hunter, who assisted Rush in offering department-wide choices of English curricula to 9th- and 10th-graders in past years. Hunter and her colleagues work to emulate Rush’s ability to “bend and move and sway” in response to her students’ insights and experiences. It’s what Rush calls “co-creating learning in the classroom community,” and it’s the dynamic that made her fall in love with teaching.

The year after she graduated from college, Rush became a Peace Corps volunteer in China, teaching English to college-age students. She planned a 20-minute debate activity about climate change, hoping her students would use a few vocabulary words. The students, who a month prior had told her they weren’t comfortable speaking in English, ran with it for an hour and a half.

“I floated out of there with perfect clarity that I wanted to be a teacher,” said Rush.

Now an English teacher in her 14th year, Rush brings the same student-centered flexibility to her high school literature classes. For example, when teaching Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” to her American literature students, “sometimes they just love the drama and engage with it on that emotional, high-schooler level,” she said, “but sometimes they bring it back to the hypocrisy of the judges in the play and start talking about the Supreme Court.”

While Rush prizes the adventure of seeing where her students will take her lessons, she achieves it through careful preparation, calling herself a “huge nerd” when it comes to lesson-planning.

Chapter Leader Haseeb Khawaja, who nominated Rush for the award, recalled covering Rush’s classes during her maternity leave. “She had just given birth, and she was on a Zoom meeting with me going over the curriculum,” said Khawaja. “That made me admire her even more — taking care of her newborn and making sure her students would get the best that we could give.”

Rush’s exacting attention to details is driven by an enormous dedication to her students. “I don’t think there’s a student she’s ever had who didn’t get everything she had,” said Khawaja. “I aspire to be as good a teacher as she is.”