Math teachers Laura Deffer, Michele Ratigan and Michelle Williams received the Blue Valley Innovative Educator Award, presented Friday in Ratigan’s Honors Algebra II class.

The award goes to one elementary school teacher and one secondary teacher in the district each year. However, this year was the first year a team, comprised of the three math teachers, was able to win the award.

Principal Dr. Amy Murphy decided to nominate the math team after seeing the success in their classrooms with project based learning.

“This year we were really impressed with the Algebra II team,” Murphy said. “[The team] came to me early on in the year with a catapult activity and then we spent some time at the end of the semester talking about this roller coaster activity. They were just willing to really create some hands on things for kids, which we thought as an administrative team was really cool.”

Math teacher Laura Deffer said the award involved all three math teachers working together.

“It is a team effort,” Deffer said. “I am not reinventing the wheel. We bounced ideas off one another. I think no one person did all the work. It really helped us mold our curriculum into something innovative that our students could take away.”