Crosson said seeing her sister struggle to fit in had a profound impact on her approach as a teacher.
“I was starting to learn how to teach high school when she was going into high school,” Crosson said. “And I wanted to make sure my students had a better experience that would then translate to somebody like my sister having that experience.”
Crosson compared her own journey as an international traveler to her growth as an educator.
She explained that, at first, her international experiences were largely “superficial” tourist experiences that were not immersive in the local culture. But as she took more trips to more places, her adventures became increasingly authentic and gave her a greater understanding of the culture she was visiting.
She gave an example of her own experience teaching a lesson on the book “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini. The novel follows the lives of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, whose fates become intertwined under Mariam's abusive husband and the brutal rule of the Taliban. The novel explores love, sacrifice and the resilience of the human spirit set against Afghanistan’s turbulent history, especially as it relates to its treatment of women.
Crosson said that when she first began assigning her Advanced Placement (AP) students this book, her goal was to have her students view the novel through the lens of feminism, which, she said, was well outside many of her students’ comfort zones.
She then pulled ideas from the Pulitzer Center that led her to not only having her students read and discuss the novel, but also hear Middle Eastern poetry written by women, and, ultimately, write their own.
Crosson said she was proud of the work she had put in to bring more authenticity to her lesson.
“It was the hardest thing because there are just so many levels of interconnectedness,” Crosson said. “It was like my shining beacon for the year. I get a gold star. And then the next year it’s like, ‘OK, now do it again.’”
She said she realized she needed to make her lessons more globally relevant, update her unit on “A Thousand Splendid Suns” to reflect current world affairs, and adapt herself as an educator.
“In 2020, after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan and the Taliban came back into power, I said I had to change how I thought entirely — that's the 'before,'” Crosson said. “Can you modify as the world is changing? At this point I realized that if I'm going to be adapting all of these ideas, I really need to globalize my pedagogy in terms of what I believe I should be doing.”
But no teacher can do this alone, Crosson said. Teachers must be willing to work collaboratively to move from well-intentioned one-off lessons designed to broaden students’ cultural horizons to developing a culture of like-minded educators who share resources to create a much more immersive educational experience for students, she said.
It also leads to more teachers feeling as though they have support from their peers, she said, and that they are not alone.
“How do you see this room full of 100, 150 people or whatever and make this into a culture within our campus or within our school or district?” Crosson asked. “How do we expand the profession? How do we grow the profession?”
One way Crosson has tried to give her students the opportunity to experience the world was to leverage her status as a Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms Fellow to organize international trips with students in her school district. The trips expand her students’ horizons beyond their small, rural hometown, much in the same ways that trips she took as a high school student did for her.
Crosson said establishing these trips as some of the most fulfilling — and impactful — work she has done in her career.
“There are students here whose families worked multiple jobs to get them on these trips,” Crosson said. “There are students here who are now dating because they met on their trip and found the love of their life, which I wasn't expecting. There are families and students who, like me, met people that they never would have.”
She said the trips also helped break down walls and bond students who otherwise may not have ever become friends with each other.
“We had 20 kids this year,” Crosson said of her most-recent trip. “And before we left, I wasn’t sure how this was going to go. These kids were all very different from one another. Their social circles don't overlap. But we had the best time. What they took away from that was so much personal growth in addition to all of their cultural experiences.”
It is one of countless ways, Crosson said, that teachers have and can continue to positively impact their students and leave them with lessons they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives.
“What is your legacy?” she asked the conference attendees. “You have the ability, through your career to influence hundreds, thousands of people. And that is a tremendous act of service to our country and to our planet.”
Crosson received her bachelor’s degree in secondary education from Susquehanna University in 2011 and began her teaching career in Delaware. After a year, she was able to return to Pennsylvania as she joined the Bellefonte Area School District. She taught at Bellefonte for eight years before landing a position in Mifflin County.
As National Teacher of the Year, Crosson is spending a year outside the classroom as an ambassador and advocate for educators throughout the U.S. She will return to her full-time teaching role in the 2026-27 school year.