Walking into a math room across from Alta High’s commons, something is amiss.

The desks are missing—intentionally.

This past year, Alta High math teacher Kevin Clyde traded desks for more white boards which grace three of the four classroom walls. Students stand, working together at the boards to solve problems. They look to one other, not Clyde, to figure out the steps on how to reach the answer.

“When they do ask me questions, some are returned with other questions,” he said. “What I’m trying to do is get students to think.”

Canyons School District’s 2024 Teacher of the Year said his approach isn’t traditional.

“I’ll set things up for them and give them some things to think about. I ask a couple questions; then they work together. I check in with the groups and I ask more questions. ‘How did you get this answer? Tell me how you came to that. Why do we know this happens the way it does?’” Clyde said.

There is a psychology to the approach, he said.

“When kids have their notebook paper and their pen, they’re afraid of making a mistake. Erasing or crossing it out seems to be a block for them. When they’re at a whiteboard, they can wipe it off and start over again. They’re learning that making mistakes is OK and they become less afraid to make a mistake. Often, they’re quicker to spot their own mistakes. It’s a subtle element to the learning process that sometimes gets missed,” Clyde said.

However, he is open when a student approaches while puzzling out a problem.

“They’re learning advocacy, asking for what they need,” he said. “The students have developed a relationship with somebody who she trusts. That’s a big thing in life. You don’t always know what to do, but if you have people around you, you can ask for help.”

Building relationships and having those connections were key to Clyde’s decision to teach.

“I asked myself some of my best memories of high school. Was it things I learned or was it the people around me? When I asked myself about my favorite teachers, I can think who have more of an impact and the relationships we have years after high school as compared to six months after they leave high school, they’ll forget most of what they remembered most of what they learned. I don’t take that for granted in 10 years, they likely won’t remember how to factor a quadratic, but they’ll remember me,” he said.

Two teachers—Angela Herrin at Thomas Jefferson Junior High and Robert Lake at Kearns High—impacted his life, and his teaching. Herrin played John Williams’ music and “she sparked a really good conversation about how music makes you feel things” and Lake used wit and sarcasm in his teaching. 

Clyde has incorporated those qualities in his teaching and often takes the lead from students if they want to build upon the teacher-student relationship. As a former high school athlete, he can talk sports from Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan sinking the shot against the Utah Jazz in the NBA finals to the Northwest Derby rivalry of Manchester United versus Liverpool. He supports the arts, even having watched “The Great British Bake Off Musical” that premiered in 2022. He is knowledgeable about history, understanding strategies he has learned at World War II museums.

“Kids will ask about English, and I’ll talk about English. Then we will talk about science. Teaching is not what I do; it is who I am,” he said, adding as they talk, often times, students will pick up one of the many logic puzzles on his desk to give it a try.

As a boy, Clyde would choose a letter and sit down to read the World Book Encyclopedia.

“I was a curious person. The subject doesn’t matter to me,” he said, but admitted he wasn’t the family champion of Trivia Pursuit. “It was my dad’s game. If we didn’t answer it verbatim, we wouldn’t get the pie wedge.”

After working in youth ministry, Clyde decided to continue his passion of working with teenagers in high school.

“Growing up, math made the most sense to me. I’d ask a ton of questions, and I had a good memory so it just came together in a way that clicked,” he said. “I can relate to a lot of the kids and talk to them about a number of subjects. I encourage them to think, to ask questions. Carl Sagan was talking to Johnny Carson about children asking a lot of questions and pointed out future generations will need people who ask questions. He said if they’re not asking questions, they can’t problem solve.”

Another thing Clyde learned from his teachers is to be a lifelong learner.

“I realized my best teachers are the ones who want to keep learning new things and were the ones who always were never afraid of being wrong,” he said. “I started challenging the paradigms and the norms.”

Learning about task-based learning by reading books by Stanford University’s Jo Boaler and a Canadian math education professor Peter Liljedahl, he discovered the best approach for students to learn is through exploration.

“Jo wrote that kids achieve higher levels when they’re doing the tasks and Peter said by doing that as they’re standing, there is improved student behavior. Their posture is better, their mood is better, they persevere,” he said.

So, two years ago, Clyde transitioned to starting his class by students working together at a white board or paper on the wall.

“It was really hard to get the kids to commit to a task, so I reflected on what I was doing, the best way to approach it, what they needed to learn and understand and how we could get there,” he said. “This past year I simplified what I’m doing. Rather than give them a page of notes, a bunch of definitions, or eight different points to solve something, I’ve given them pieces of the problem and we build up from there. Before I would do something, but I wouldn’t say what I did or how I did it. Now I’m slicing it and building upon that. If I had done that earlier, I might have seen more success. My teaching has evolved through these eight years.”

At Westminster College, where Clyde earned his bachelor’s and master’s in math, he learned about educational psychology and social learning theory like “how kids learn in groups and how to group things and consequences like behavior management. In my early years, I was figuring out content and how do I best manage behaviors. Now I am able to look at the best ways for them to learn, and not just the math. I want them to become better learners for all subjects.”

While he continues to reflect and fine tune his teaching—“I’m not afraid to try new things” — Clyde often gets good suggestions from his wife, Anne, who is an educator at Union Middle.

“She’ll ask, ‘how do you really approach learners who might be struggling?’ She asks me a lot of questions to get me thinking on purpose,” he said.

At the Teacher of the Year ceremony, Clyde was first congratulated by his own kids, who scrambled onto his lap on stage to a standing ovation. Then, he was congratulated by 200-some Alta High students in his Secondary Math 2, Secondary Math 2 honors, Advanced Placement, Stats and concurrent enrollment classes.

He also will be Canyons’ representative in the 2025 Utah Teacher of the Year selection process, which is part of the National Teacher of the Year competition.

As the teacher of the year, Clyde received a $1,000 cash prize from the Canyons Education Foundation. Park Lane’s Jamie McDonald and Eastmont Middle’s Stephanie Davis were the top elementary and middle school finalists; they both received $500 from the Foundation. 

About 5,000 nominations were submitted by students, parents and employees for deserving teachers. All Canyons school and program Teachers of the Year received gifts and prizes, including a $250 cash card, from the Foundation. In addition, Canyons first-ever Preschool Teacher of the Year is Sandy Elementary’s Kristen Stevenson. The inaugural Instructional Coach of the Year is Glacier Hills’ Jeny Wariner, and top paraprofessionals were honored at each of the Canyons’ schools.

“What has been most gratifying is through the years, I’ve gotten all these notes and thank-you cards that say, ‘you affected me,’ ‘you loved my kid,’ ‘you were a person and didn’t treat me like a number’ and I’ve kept everyone,” Clyde said. “It reminds me what I do matters. I love what I do.” λ