Get to know the state’s top teacher: Colonial’s Shelby Borst

It’s probably not surprising, but the students and colleagues of  2025 Delaware Teacher of the Year Shelby Borst have nothing but fluttering positivity and appreciation when talking about the educator.

“It’s really easy to be good in the class when you like the teacher, and Ms. Borst makes it so that any type of student would like her, even someone whose nose is never out of their book or the student who never comes to class and wanders the halls,” said Oyinladun Akinroluyo, a senior at Colonial School District’s William Penn High School, where Borst has taught social studies for nearly a decade.

No matter a student’s personality or interests, Akinroluyo – who’s had Borst for three years – said they’re all going to like having Borst as a teacher because she’s very understanding and easy to talk to.

Shelby Borst’s upbringing and journey to education

Her professional career has been a bit of a homecoming.

Borst grew up in Bear and went through the Colonial School District up until high school when her family moved to Middletown, and she entered the Appoquinimink School District.

“I took an AP Psychology course, and I absolutely fell in love with it,” Borst said.

She went to the University of Delaware to pursue a psychology degree, but describes herself as being at a standstill, where she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go into nursing or education.

A mentor, Dr. Hannah Kim of UD’s Social Studies Education Program, told Borst she would make a great teacher.

“I remember laughing at her and just being like, ‘Yeah, okay, right, whatever, sure.’” Borst said, “So I gave it a shot.”

Kim told her to take a couple of credits, observe a middle school teacher, feel it out, and see where it goes.

“And here I am,” Borst said. “I stuck with it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The kids were magnificent. They just came up with all of these creative ideas, and they really enjoyed being there.”

She rounded out her UD experience with a degree in psychology education and a minor in history, and is now in her ninth year at William Penn where she teaches psychology and sociology, specifically AP, CP, and dual-enrollment courses.

“I always loved Colonial, and I was actually kind of sad when my dad pulled me out of the district,” she said. 

She joked that while her father had reasons for moving her to another district in high school, she got a kick out of telling him, “Hey, dad, I have a job interview. Guess where it is?”

 “It’s lovely being in Colonial – you get all of these diverse people from the neighborhoods around here, you have some choicing in, you have all of different abilities, different ages,” Borst said. 

She said it’s beautiful to see generations of families move through Colonial and hear all of the different stories and experiences they bring.

“What really brings me joy is being able to learn from students and learn alongside students,” she said, “and being able to watch them grow and then getting their younger sibling later on down the road.”

Her aunt was a middle school math teacher who taught special education students.

I remember she would bring me in during the summer. I would help decorate her classroom or help grade little things that she would be able to give me,” Borst said, “So I’ve been around teachers my whole life, and I’ve gotten to see the insides of what it means to be an educator, so I definitely attribute that exposure to her.”

She praised her third-grade teacher, Ms. Scott, who she also gave a shoutout to in her acceptance speech when she won the Teacher of the Year award at a ceremony in October.

“She really had an impact on me,” Borst said. “She believed in me when I didn’t feel like I did anything special.”

Borst shared a story of Ms. Scott settling a debate between young Borst and another student on how to spell the word ‘exercise,’ one of their vocabulary words.

“She had just calmly stood next to us and said, ‘Okay, how do you think you spell it? And how do you think you spell it?’ and then she told us to get the dictionary, and she took us through the process of learning together,” Borst said. “It wasn’t a ‘you’re right or you’re right situation,’ it was a ‘here’s what we can do to find the solution together.’”

Borst said that inspired her and shaped her style as an educator.

She pointed out many teachers throughout her lifetime who have inspired her, some now her colleagues in the district, like Pam Nolte, Borst’s middle school English teacher.

Borst said she loved writing poetry at the time but always kept it hidden – “No one could know that I write poetry,” she recalled.

But in Nolte’s class, everyone was writing poetry, there were poetry projects, and there were different topics and perspectives to craft a poem about, and that experience was one of Borst’s highlights as a student. 

Creating a positive learning environment

Now Borst is creating similar highlights for her students.

“She helps her students as much as she can and she loves to help prepare her students,” said Kiara Jones, a junior at William Penn who has had Borst three years in a row. “She finds a lot of sources we can use to help study for our exams, and she really checks in on all of her students, makes each and every one of us feel seen and heard, and she doesn’t make anybody feel neglected.”

As much gossip is tossed around in a high school, Jones said there’s never a bad word spoken of Borst – her students respect and appreciate her.

So does the administration. 

“She’s the type of educator that you want to have 100 of because everything is genuine,” said Damon Saunders, principal of William Penn High. “She’s giving you 100% of everything. I mean, you would never know she had a bad day.”

This is Saunders’ first year in the role, and he said even just being around a few months, it’s clear why Borst’s students love her and why she was honored as the state’s top teacher. 

Borst said she fully believes she is the facilitator of learning. 

“I enjoy creating experiences for students, whether that is something like the posters in my classroom, where they are navigating chapters on their own, and I’m there as a facilitator, or maybe it’s an interactive experience where they go on a safari and they have to figure out what has happened to the different people that are working within that safari,” she said.

She likes to have her students navigate their learning space independently with support and the help they need, but they should be doing the heavy lifting.

“We just recently went on a scavenger hunt the other day for our perception concepts, so students were tasked with using their devices and technology to take photos of these perception concepts, wherever they see closure or similarity or continuity, and they were able to leave the classroom, and the world was theirs,” Borst said. “The learning is in their hands, and I’m a facilitator.”

Perception is the process of recognizing, interpreting, and responding to sensory information from the environment. Some perception concepts related to perception include social perception (understanding social cues), visual perception (making sense of what the eyes see), and auditory perception (understanding auditory signals).

Evolution of education

The best part about how education has changed in the past decade, Borst said, is the transition from a traditional approach to education to a more inclusive view of education.

“There are changes to systems that we see in place that have been leaving students at disadvantages because of whatever factor, because of X factor, because of their socioeconomic status, because of their race, because of their gender or gender identity…these systems have left students behind,” Borst, who teaches grades nine through 12, said. 

Now, there is more of an inclusive approach that is more trauma-informed, that is more based in social-emotional learning, and culturally inclusive, Borst said. 

“Those pieces have given us a well-rounded education as teachers on how we can bring strategies and practices in the classroom that meet the needs of the whole child and that individual child,” she said. “I feel like the evolution of education has become hopefully less biased and more inclusive to make everyone feel welcome and safe in this environment, which helps them prosper, thrive, and grow.”

The state legislature has put a heavy emphasis on improving the state of education in Delaware in recent years, with laws pertaining to improving reading and writing, bringing more mental health specialists into classrooms, teaching high-level African American history courses, improving teacher pay, and more. 

But, Borst would also like to see more support for teachers and the voices of teachers and students to be considered more as they are the experts of the classrooms and the ones in them daily. 

“Because really what we want to see is more funding, not necessarily in things like roofing or an extra sports field, which is great for schools’ extracurricular activities, but I would love to see more funding placed in maybe sending teachers back for their master’s degrees,” Borst said. 

If the state is investing in its teachers and investing in them as experts in the classroom, then that trickles down into better practices in the classroom and places more power in the state’s students, who Borst said are the true experts in the field. 

Borst had to take a minute to think about some of the drawbacks and challenges of teaching.

“I really struggle with that question because I don’t know, I just love teaching so much, and I don’t often see a lot of the challenges that maybe some of my colleagues or other educators might,” she said. 

After some thought, Borst said one challenge she faces is having enough time to juggle all of what she wants to do to be an effective educator, like meeting individual students’ needs, and being able to go to equity meetings, supporting teacher effectiveness, supporting her mentees, developing professionally, lesson planning, grading, and more.

“There are many of us that want to do so much for our students and want to grow ourselves in the process that it’s a balancing act,” she said. “It’s quite a balancing act to be able to do all those things and be as involved as we are.”

Borst’s personal life

The 31-year-old is married to her high school sweetheart. 

“These are my kids, so we have quite the responsibility on our own just from them,” she said, speaking of her students.

Her dad’s in Hawaii, her mom’s in Florida, and her brother is in Kentucky. 

“My family’s out doing their own thing,” Borst said. “Everybody has their own separate life going on, but I stayed here, and somebody said to me earlier that they’re glad I stayed.”

When she’s not in the classroom, Borst enjoys playing tennis, and it helps that she has a neighborhood court she can run down to when she wants.

She loves reading, but with her busy schedule, she’s started using audiobooks to listen to on her way to work.

Borst also enjoys gaming on her PlayStation, and she likes playing Fortnite – but her favorite game is Dead by Daylight, a survival horror video game.