EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

Orange County teacher Xavier Adams named Beginning Teacher of the Year

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/2022-02-25-orange-county-teacher-xavier-adams-named-beginning-teacher-of-the-year/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:
Xavier Adams, North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT) 2022 Prudential NC Beginning Teacher of the Year. Photo courtesy of NCCAT. Terri Clark Photography.

If you were to ask Xavier Adams, the 2022 Beginning Teacher of the Year, when he first knew he wanted to be in the classroom, he wouldn’t know exactly where to start.

“I think I’m still learning that to be honest,” he said. “Just constantly learning and growing as a teacher right now.” 

Initially, Adams set out to follow in his dad’s footsteps. A pastor’s son, Adams grew up in the church and went to Baylor University in Texas to study religion and Spanish in 2016. He wanted to go into youth ministry.

He said from the moment he started at Baylor, he was working with students, be it through a local nonprofit, camp, or church.

After graduation, he worked as the assistant program director at a Waco, Texas nonprofit. He ran the afterschool program, working primarily with middle and high school students of color. From there, he came to North Carolina to attend Duke Divinity School. The church was still his calling.

Sign up for the EdWeekly, a Friday roundup of the most important education news of the week.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

While at Duke, he continued to work with students at a local nonprofit. But there, he said, he came to a realization.

“I just came to realize that church and nonprofit work is great and important,” he said. “But all of that work is extracurricular, or requires additional student buy-in.”

He realized that he could, instead, become a public school teacher and see students every day.

“I would already be embedded in the systems that they are a part of,” Adams said.

He changed his degree so that he could wrap up his program in the divinity school. Now, a teacher at Orange High School in Orange County Schools, Adams gets to do what he does best: Develop relationships with students.

“I think approachability really goes a long way for both personal and academic success,” he said.

Adams was named the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT) 2022 Prudential NC Beginning Teacher of the Year on Feb. 17.

NCCAT Executive Director M. Brock Womble said in a press release that Adams is a great example of “what it means to be a teacher.”

“Not only is he committed to teaching — he inspires his students to learn,” Womble said.

For his part, Adams said in an interview that the honor feels like appreciation for the work that he does. He also says that with his personal focus on equity, the honor feels like an acknowledgement that equity work is good.

And he said that winning the award is the culmination not just of his work, but of the work and relationships he has developed with so many others, including his own youth pastor, professors from college, and his students.

“When I think about my students, they’re in this award,” he said.

And when his students think about him, they don’t think of Mr. Adams. That’s because he insists they call him Mr. Xavier.

At 27, Adams said that some of his students have siblings older than him, and he isn’t going to expect them to come to class and start treating him as a parent figure. But he said his laid-back demeanor with students shouldn’t be confused with him having low expectations. He said he holds his students to a high standard, but also wants them to know that they have an ally in him.

“I recognize that many students are often enduring hardships that they might not always share with adults, yet they are still carrying these burdens with them as they navigate discovering their identities, completing their homework, and trying to find their group in school,” Adams wrote in his application for the award, according to the press release. “I hope they learn that I am here to support them.”