McPhillips, the county-wide elementary teacher of the year, became a teacher after a stint in the financial world. After graduating from the University of South Alabama with a degree in English and a minor in business, she got a job in bank investments.

But it wasn't her calling, she said. She knew what she wanted to do — teach.

So she returned to school, got a master's degree in education and has been teaching ever since.

After 18 years in the classroom, McPhillips said she has learned as much as her students.

“My teaching style has changed tremendously,” she said.

McPhillips has embraced the digital renaissance and uses technology to find activities that send the students on adventures in research, like Mystery Class, a website that teaches students about geography, math and teamwork by giving them clues and having them pinpoint a location somewhere on Earth.

The best part about Mystery Class is McPhillips doesn't have the answer — they're all figuring it out together, she said.

“You just can't imagine how excited they are when it's something they are learning, and they know I don't know about it, and they're excited to teach me,” she said. “We're a learning community.”

Finding solutions to problems as a team is something McPhillips emphasizes every day in her classroom.

“Businesses have said for years the biggest problem is not that kids come out of school unable to do whatever they need to do to perform their job; it's that they don't listen to each other, and they don't work together,” she said. “Independently, they may be able to solve the problem, but they don't collaborate and try to come up with the best solution for the problem.”

McPhillips puts students into small teams the first day of class. The teams change, but students are always working together, she said.

When there are several different answers to a problem, McPhillips has the teams get into the four corners of the classroom, discuss their opinions and pick a spokesperson. The spokespeople then present each position, and if hearing the other groups' positions changes their minds, students are encouraged to move to a different corner of the room.

“It's about learning; it's not about being right,” she said. “It's OK to be wrong. It's about the learning process. It's about understanding what your own thinking is, going to talk to some other people who share your thinking and then having the freedom to change your mind. I think the biggest thing they come out of this classroom with is they talk more and hopefully, they listen to each other more.”

McPhillips said the only secret she's found to helping students get actively involved in their learning is to make it fun.

“The biggest thing you have to do with children is gain their interest,” she said. “If you can start with something they have a deep interest in, you can help them learn all kinds of things and guide their learning. My job is not so much to teach them, but to help them learn.” 

McPhillips said she was honored to be chosen for teacher of the year at the school-wide level and shocked to be the county-wide winner.

“I've taught in great schools, but this group of teachers is truly phenomenal,” she said. “Everybody's doing really neat things. So I felt very honored to be chosen first at the school level. I felt really rewarded for that, but to have been selected from the whole county, I was stunned.”