This fall, NPR Ed launched a new series looking at America’s greatest teachers. Its recent installment looks at a teacher who uses Bruce Springsteen to teach her students.

Amanda Siepiola, teacher at Horace Mann Elementary School in Washington, D.C. channels two role models in her second grade classroom, said the article on NPR.org said.

"I'm a big Bruce Springsteen fan," she said. "And when I go to his concerts, I end up leaving and saying, 'I want to teach like him.' "

Her other role model, the article said, “is Siepiola's own English teacher from the 1990s at Clinton High School in upstate New York: Ms. Hepburn.”

"She was a performer, where she was on all the time," Siepiola said. "That made me want to stay in that chair and be there." Siepiola, NPR said, “has been teaching for well over a decade and says she is naturally quiet and reserved but, in the classroom, she amps up her enthusiasm. She mixes the energy of Springsteen and the drama of Ms. Hepburn.”

"I am performing,” she said.

The article looked at one morning when Siepiola whispered to her class, “See what makes you feel excited” and that “the students are learning to browse the classroom books.”

"See what makes your heart race a little bit, your face get a little hot,” she said in the article. “Which book adventures do you want to go on?"

Siepiola, the article said, “swears her own energy makes the students more engaged and motivated.”

"I don't think I have ever learned any techniques in any kind of formal way," said Siepiola.

Read the full story and comment below. 

Article by Kassondra Granata, Education World Contributor