Miller Middle School Extended Learning Program (XLP) Teacher Ann Jackson of Garwin is one of 78 nominees from across the country for the National History Day (NHD) Teacher of the Year Award. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

MARSHALLTOWN – Miller Middle School Extended Learning Program (XLP) teacher Ann Jackson brings a unique passion to her role facilitating the National History Day (NHD) program there, and this year, she is among 78 nominees from across the U.S. — and the only one from Iowa — for the National History Day Teacher of the Year Award.

Jackson, who hails from Garwin and has spent the last decade teaching for the Marshalltown Community School District (MCSD) at Miller Middle School, said NHD allows students to learn about a wide variety of stories and gain exposure to history in a different way beyond the basic details.

“It focuses more on, or it can focus more on individual people’s stories, and it can really go in any direction that the student’s interested in. If the student’s interested in sports or music or art or whatever, they can choose that topic and then pursue it,” she said. “So I really like that part of it. It teaches those historical thinking skills in any topic area that fits the student’s passion.”

This year has been particularly successful for MCSD’s NHD students as a total of 15 are headed to the national competition in Maryland between Miller and Marshalltown High School (MHS). One aspect that Jackson loves is the wide range of topics, which have ranged from the history of lobotomies to the Armenian genocide to Ukrainian independence.

“Really, anything can just get us going in a direction where they can be successful. It’s fantastic,” Jackson said.

Some of the projects have been much more locally focused, profiling Adrian “Cap” Anson and, more recently, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on Swift, which is now known as JBS. Another tangentially related school project Jackson leads is research into the people buried on the Iowa Veterans Home (IVH) grounds — one turned out to be a freed slave who fought in the Civil War and had a grandson who became a Tuskegee Airman.

She even brings in items of her own father’s, who served in the Vietnam War himself and eventually moved to IVH, in a “history mystery” before sharing his identity with her students.

“As the kids make those discoveries, they just get excited and want to learn more, and I think that kind of encapsulates the history day process,” she said. “They pick a topic, and as they find out, they want to learn more. They want to ask more questions.”

NHD Teacher of the Year Award

The National History Day Teacher of the Year Award recognizes two outstanding NHD teachers at the national level. Teachers can be nominated by others or can nominate themselves. Two national winners, one at the junior level and one at the senior level, will be selected and announced in June 2026. Each national winner will each receive $5,000.