Princess Williams hadn’t thought initially that teaching kindergarten in an urban area would be her lifelong passion.
“I was a pre-med student,” says Williams, a native of Newark, N.J., who attended New York University as an undergraduate. “I knew I always wanted to work with children, but I thought it would be doing something in the medical field.”
But when Williams failed biology and physics during her time at NYU, she says that she was suddenly at a “crossroad” and was forced to re-evaluate her career trajectory. After talking with a mentor, she realized that she was “really more passionate about teaching kids.”
Williams has spent the past decade as a school teacher, earning a series of accolades and awards, including being named the Outstanding Urban Teacher at the International Conference on Urban Education that took place last week.
It’s not the first time that Williams, 32, has been lauded for her work in the classroom. A few years ago, CNN anchor and talk show host Anderson Cooper surprised the kindergarten teacher by sending her to a New York City spa for the afternoon and teaching the class in her absence. More than 90 percent of the students in her classroom were achieving at grade level.
“You know something is your passion when you think about it all the time,” says Williams, reflecting on her years as a teacher in Newark, a city besieged with many challenges. “In order to be successful, you have to remove assumptions about the community, about the parents and about the school system. You have to be aware of who you are and the privileges you have and how it shapes your thinking. You have to focus and see the child in front of you and the parent as a human being and the community for the value and potential that it has.”
As a kindergarten teacher at Spark Academy, which is part of the KIPP Charter School network, Williams has recently expanded her role by becoming an instructional coach, helping to provide mentorship and guidance to three other teachers. She started her teaching career fresh out of NYU, as a two-year fellow for Teach for America, the national teaching corps that places recent college graduates as teachers in heavily under-resourced school districts across the country.
