Meet three of Philly’s best teachers

Students are forever knocking on Njemele Tamala Anderson’s classroom door at Science Leadership Academy at Beeber, asking for a snack or a hug or telling her about a breakthrough they’ve had.

Judith Grant gets stopped on the street often, hailed by former students at Spring Garden Elementary who want to tell her what an impact she has had on their lives.

And Hannah Kleeman knows she was born to the classroom, that Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts is where she’s supposed to be.

Anderson, Grant, and Kleeman are among the Philadelphia School District’s best teachers, among 60 winners of the 2025 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

» READ MORE: Here are Philly’s 60 best teachers of 2025

Here’s what makes them shine.

Anderson learned early to revere education and to center community.

Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother didn’t just say those words; they lived them, marching to integrate Girard College, protesting a lack of jobs for Black workers during the construction of the Gallery mall, prioritizing school and the ways it could lift up people.

That molded who Anderson is as a teacher and a person. The classroom where she teaches English at SLA Beeber is an oasis, a place where students are seen, supported, and challenged. And if she doesn’t give her pupils everything she has, Anderson says, she is doing them a disservice.

“These young people, there is nothing more important than them to me,” said Anderson. “I’m very clear about their destinies and my destiny being linked. What I give to them today, that’s what is going to continue to help them as they grow, whether they’re dropping the fries or planning the surgery.”

Before Anderson came to SLA Beeber, Christopher Johnson, the school’s principal, heard stories about Anderson — was she really as fantastic a teacher as he heard? Johnson visited Strawberry Mansion High, where Anderson had moved from teaching English into serving as the school’s dean, overseeing climate and culture.

“Watching her in action, I knew I was witnessing greatness,” Johnson wrote about Anderson. “She spoke to students in a way that was both direct and nurturing — commanding their attention while making them feel seen and understood."

Anderson’s own story informs that.

She grew up at 53rd and Berks, graduated from Central High, and became a mother as a teenager. From her oldest child’s first days in a classroom, Anderson was an involved parent, noting what she loved and what she didn’t about her daughter’s education.

Along she way, Anderson earned degrees at Community College of Philadelphia and Temple University as she worked running an after-school program, for neighborhood organizations and for Philadelphia Freedom Schools. Eventually, she became a teacher at Imhotep Institute Charter, Sankofa Freedom Academy Charter, and Mastery Charter-Shoemaker before moving to the Philadelphia School District.

Decades into her career, Anderson still bubbles over with enthusiasm for the profession — have you heard about her student’s work? Do you want to know about the private school she dreams of starting someday?

“There is nothing,” Anderson said, “greater than being a teacher.”

Other kids played with dolls, or spent hours on sports. Grant played school growing up in Jamaica. When she was in elementary school, she tutored older kids studying to pass their high school exams — being a teacher always felt like her destiny.

Grant moved to Philadelphia at 15, and graduated from University City High School and Temple University. Things weren’t always easy — she had to take a few years off from school to work a retail job to pay the bills — but she persisted.

In 1999, she landed her first job out of college, teaching at Tilden Middle School, then on the U.S. Department of Education’s “Persistently Dangerous” list.

The class she joined midyear was on their fifth teacher of the term. Grant was braced to struggle. But her students surprised her.

“They were coming every single day, and they were looking to see if you were there for them,” Grant said. Sometimes she was frustrated about missed assignments or standoffish behavior, but then she heard their stories — young people in foster care or who lost family members to gun violence — and she straightened her spine.

“I was working with kids that were difficult because their lives were difficult,” Grant said. “Of course, I quit about 3,000 times, but I was fortunate enough to have administrators saying, ‘I’m going to give you time and space to get better.’”

Grant has been a teacher for decades, including at Spring Garden, a small K-8, for more than 20 years. But she’s still evolving, still fine-tuning lessons, and meeting her students wherever they are in her sixth-grade math and science classes. She gets incredible satisfaction when students who are struggling with a concept master it and teach it to their peers.

“At the beginning of every year, I tell the kids what I want from them, and I ask them, ‘What do you want from me?’” Grant said.

One student said something that reduced Grant to private tears after class was over.

“She told me, ‘Don’t give up on me,’” Grant said. She hasn’t given up on a student yet, and she doesn’t plan on it.

Teaching can be incredibly heavy work at times — the student funerals she has had to attend, the problems outside the classroom she can’t solve.

But the joy lights Grant up. She can’t step outside without a student or parent or former student stopping her.

“Now,” she said, “they’ve giving me their babies to hold.”

Teaching ninth grade is not for the faint of heart: Students are kids in some ways, adults in others, suddenly given more independence and not always sure what to do with it.

Kleeman teaches ninth grade on purpose. She loves it.

“I love the growth you see from the beginning of the ninth grade year to the end of the ninth grade year,” Kleeman said. “They come in like fawns, and they emerge at the end of the year as little adults who have voices and thoughts and opinions.”

Kleeman grew up in Philadelphia. She attended Masterman, but “always felt a little bit on the periphery. I wasn’t exceptional; I fell through the cracks a little bit in making connections with teachers.”

In 11th grade, David Neale was her English teacher, and he saw things in Kleeman she hadn’t yet seen in herself. She felt seen, and that made all the difference for her. It made her want to be the kind of teacher who made connections with every one of her students someday.

Kleeman studied English at Temple University, detoured for a short time into marketing, then took up what she now knows she is supposed to be doing — teaching. After teaching at Overbrook High, School of the Future, and Meehan Middle School, Kleeman landed at KCAPA, where she has worked for the past three years.

She has found her place at the school. Kleeman advises the school’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance. She’s the ninth-grade class sponsor and teacher leader of the ninth-grade faculty. She takes pride in knowing every one of KCAPA’s freshmen.

Kids know she’ll help find them a uniform shirt; parents know she’ll proofread their job application. Last summer, one of her former students was shot; the first person his mother called was Kleeman.

“When he stepped back onto the football field a few months after almost losing his life, Hannah was one of the loudest people cheering in the stands,” her Lindback nomination read. “She is the quintessential supporter in all ways of her students and their families.”

Kleeman has taken on leadership roles at her school, but never wants to stop teaching.

“I love being in the classroom; it’s where I get my energy,” she said. “I love making jokes with my kids. They make me laugh and not laugh at them — they are funny, they have great personalities.”

Sure, Kleeman’s students test her — they’re teenagers. But negative behaviors tend to come from students not being heard, and Kleeman does her best to combat that.

“At 14, these kids are old enough to have this sense of needing to be heard, but they’re so young that they’re often overlooked as having something worthwhile to say,” she said. “The easiest way to cultivate a relationship with anyone, regardless of their age, is listening to what they say.”

It’s not a chore to listen to her kids, Kleeman said.

“I am daily inspired by the way my kids interact with each other and the world around them,” she said. “They’re so engaged with the world around them in a way that I think is really incredible.”