On-the-Ground—More Than a Classroom: Where Students Feel Seen

Back-to-school 2025 felt like 2011 for Brandon Thornton, a high special education English Language Arts and math teacher for District 87 Bloomington Public Schools. The district where he teaches is ahead of the state in implementing a phone ban – or rather something that restricts use of them during the school day. One would imagine how anxiety-inducing  that could be for a generation of digital natives, but not so, as far as Thornton is seeing.

Some may say it is no surprise that student learning in Illinois and elsewhere has been stagnating. They weren’t listening to – you know – the lessons.

“I put up a good face on social media,” Thornton said. “But at the heart of it, I wasn't reaching kids. I wasn't forming relationships because that phone was, like, just a big barrier between us.

“It's almost like, I've made this comparison before about being on a plane and the flight attendants going through the motions. I felt like the flight attendant.”

With their phones stowed away, students are cranking out a paragraph a day in his English class. In math, where last year it took about a week to learn how to use a compass, students were now constructing circles in a day.

The students are locked in because they have no other choice.

“Our homeroom surprised me the most,” Thornton said. “We’ve been together for years and they’re yapping with each other. They're saying things like school is really fun this year. Like it is clicking for them too, that there’s more social engagement.”

More social engagement, less fighting, less discipline prompted by fighting, and importantly, he hopes, more learning.

He’d been contemplating leaving the profession. The work of reaching and connecting with distracted students and then working even harder to catch them up on the content because they had been distracted had taken a toll on Thornton and other teachers he knew, he said.

But this past September was feeling like Thornton’s first year of teaching.

“You know, everything is fresh and fun, and you’re staying up late and you're going there (school) early. I felt like that again.”

Brandon Thornton, Ed.D., is a high special education English Language Arts and math teacher for District 87 Bloomington Public Schools

Thornton says he probably didn’t become aware of his own aspirations to be an educator until he was in high school. There were teachers in 3rd grade and 6th grade – Black women who made him feel seen, valued, and respected the same way his mother did. But it was in later years when math and English teachers in junior high showed their belief in him by putting him in positions of leadership – asking him to help other students in in the subject during lunch or after school. He didn’t consider himself the best person in the subject, but his teachers saw otherwise, and he liked that feeling: “Just useful, you know.”

He considers his mother, now retired, who began a career in early childhood education in the 90’s with an in-home daycare that over time she built out to a formalized preschool with a certified teacher: “Yea she was tired at the end of the day, but she was a figure in the community. Everyone knew Mrs. T.”

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Thornton’s students and those he interacts with across any given week call him ‘T’ actually. “Mr. T” would confuse him with about three other teachers with t-names in the building, and explaining “Doctor T” - Thornton holds a Doctor of Education in Special Education and Teaching from Illinois State University where he also earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees – was a journey itself. So, simply ‘T’ will do.

He holds many roles, though fewer now as the wisdom that comes with experience has helped him appreciate but shed some added responsibilities. Among other things, Thornton’s been a speech and debate coach, a cross-country coach, and anime club sponsor. In recent years, the Teach Plus Fellow and Golden Apple alum is exploring leadership roles in the teacher's union, and at school helping kids become interested in the teaching profession. Above all, he is focusing on what has become central to his teaching over the years: cultivating safe and productive spaces and relationships where true learning can happen.

In 2011, Thornton’s objective was to make sure kids knew that they could learn math, he recalled. “And now it's like I want to make sure kids know that they can learn and that they have an adult who's going to be their champion.”

Bloomington Public Schools district is the second most diverse district in the state but in a school of 1,282 students, Thornton is just one of five Black teachers at Bloomington High School. It’s a story not unfamiliar to Thornton that also plays out in similar fashion across Illinois and the country where despite the increasing diversity of students, teacher diversity isn’t keeping pace. As reported in Advance Illinois’ report  The State We’re in 2025, only 18% of Illinois teachers are of color compared with an overall student population composed of 54% students of color. The percentage is smaller for Black teachers and even lower for Black men.

“It's overwhelming almost to be the only in the room, or what, maybe one of five,” he said. “And you're looking for them, and especially because there's been a big push for DEI, we, at least are in a good way in our district.”

Thornton acknowledges that the state has been taking steps to increase both its recruitment and retention of teachers of color. Initiatives including the diverse pipeline pilot, the Illinois Educator Preparation Profiles system, and the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship program have in different ways worked to target the disparity that decades of research have shown impact student achievement: students who have teachers who look like them score better on standardized tests, have better attendance, and more likely to graduate from high school. Still, a lawsuit filed last fall challenged the constitutionality of MTI, putting into limbo the 30+ year program that helped make educator prep more affordable for thousands of Asian, Latinx, and Black students including Thornton. [Read the latest: Illinois quietly changes scholarship for teachers of color amid lawsuit, threats from federal government]

Thornton remembers his family driving down to Normal for a special ceremony for the newest MTI scholarship recipients where the students received a laptop and $5,000.

“It was so cool, and coming after Golden Apple, I was like I know for sure I want to teach,” he said.

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Thornton’s value for authenticity is apparent with just one step into his classroom.

Students walk by, even those who aren’t his, to peek inside. Funko pops are everywhere. There’s an entire wall of anime. There are references to K-pop.

“When I meet kids for the first time in the first week, they're right at that wall and they're like, ‘have you seen this anime?!’ ‘Have you seen this?’ And so I think it just sets the tone,” Thornton said. “This is the space where you can nerd out, which math is nerdy to kids, reading is nerdy to them, unfortunately.”

He’s seen some of the tougher kids resist this quirkiness at first but by the end of the year, they’re talking about anime, too. Disney? That’s no sweat either. Thornton wears his spirit jerseys all the time – all of this to say to students that it is okay to have interests outside of the mainstream, it is okay to melt into yourself – you will be accepted here.

“In this space, we're going to be nerds together,” he said.

Safe relationships are critical for vulnerability, and vulnerability essential for learning and flourishing, a truth that made the last few years so difficult for Thornton.

One day this fall, a typically reserved student in Thornton’s homeroom unexpectedly opened up. Thornton was doing his customary, back-to-school check-ins with each student – ‘How was your summer? ‘– when this particular student told him about his breakup. It was bad, and he was heartbroken. If anything, the student was actually relieved to be detached from his device (and the messages and social media and old photos that could reel him back in).

“And I'm just like, oh man, this is why I got into teaching, because you could tell that he's never had a conversation with another man like that.”

Yes, relationships are crucial to Thornton’s teaching practice today and inherently the joy that comes in being able to build and sustain them with students. He wants his students to know that when they graduate, he will still know who they are.

"Already I feel like I've formed lifelong bonds with some of my students because I've seen them,” Thornton said this fall. “I've seen them when I was working concessions on Friday (at a school football game): 'Hey, Mr. T!’”

A type greeting he hasn’t heard in years.

“So I'm like, man, I'm here to stay now. I can teach till 67.”

Bravetta Hassell is the Director of Communications for Advance Illinois.