Teachers' Lounge

On a new Teachers’ Lounge Radio Show, this fall, we’re following a high school marching band’s quest to defeat a rival school who has won their big parade every year for over 20 years! We've got that and other school stories right here.

On Teachers' Louge, we’ve got an education power couple: Kelly Mandrell is the Superintendent of the Polo Community School District here in northern Illinois, and her husband, Jon Mandrell, is the new president of Sauk Valley Community College.

This school year, our teacher correspondent is Kelcey Dodd. She’s a kindergarten teacher at Spring Creek Elementary in Rockford. Kelcey's in her first-year as a teacher, so we’re going to be checking in on her every month as she figures things out.

It's a brand-new school year and we kick it off with our first conversation with our classroom correspondent — the teacher we'll interview every month. We're following a Rockford kindergarten teacher in their first year as a teacher! We'll also introduce you to our very musical student correspondents for the fall.

Picture Chicago in the dead of winter. It's a cold morning, still dark as students walk the icy sidewalks to school. On the far south side of the city, Dawes Elementary School teacher Anne Shippy watches her middle school students walk in without hats and without gloves. They often don't have school supplies either like pencils, notebooks, or folders. And the classroom needs books.

At the end of this past school year, Tracy found herself strutting down the hallway, wearing a sash and a crown, as kids held up homemade signs and mobbed her with hugs.She was retiring after 30 years as an elementary school teacher in her hometown of DeKalb.

On a new Teachers' Lounge Radio Show, we follow a group of high school students starting their own small businesses. We also chat with two Illinois teachers trying to recruit the next generation of educators. Hear those conversations and more!

We’re revisiting our lovely 2024 conversation with Cacie Miller! She's a music instructor at College DuPage, director of music at United Lutheran Church in Oak Park, and creator of the musical project 'Composing the Climate.'

You might think you want to be a teacher until you come face to face with 30 kids."There's nothing worse than getting to your junior year of college, being placed in your first observation, and going, 'I hate second graders.'"We talk with the teachers who lead the Southern Illinois Future Teachers Coalition about giving students early opportunities to see if the career's for them … and recruiting the next generation of teachers.

Every year, we bring you our classroom correspondents. They’re a group of students in a club or activity whom we interview every month through their season or semester!Over the years, we've featured an upstart esports team, a speech club, a school play and, this past fall, a student newspaper. This spring, our correspondents were students in the Whiteside Area Career Center's CEO Program, where they built their own small businesses from scratch!