Cindie Cortinas-Vogt arrived late to the college game.
She was 22, maybe, and all of her friends from high school already had graduated.
While they all had apparently felt certain enough to enroll and select their majors as teenagers, Cortinas-Vogt had not. Instead, she took a job.
“I was doing retail management for a while and couldn’t really decide what I wanted to pursue. I knew I liked kids, and I knew I liked sports, and so I thought I was going to be a sports broadcaster,” she says.
“But back then, there weren’t very many female sports broadcasters,” she adds, “and I didn’t know if I could earn a respectable living situation starting out because it would take a while to get into a market where I could sustain myself.”
Enter the elevator – literally.
“One day, I was having a conversation with my late husband’s best friend. He was in town visiting, and he’s like, ‘Why don’t you do P.E.? You love kids. You love sports. Have you ever thought about teaching?’ I said, ‘I have not. I’m going to look into that,’ ” says Cortinas-Vogt, now in her sixth year teaching P.E. at Washington Elementary School in Elgin School District U-46. “That’s really where this idea came from. I was in an elevator at Nordstrom’s or somewhere downtown with him. The rest’s history.”
From there, Cortinas-Vogt went full steam ahead.
Just a few years after realizing her life’s calling, she earned recognition as her undergraduate program’s student-teacher of the year.
“That was something I was really proud of, and I remember thinking, ‘One day, I’m going to be teacher of the year.’ I was so naïve, not even really knowing what that entailed, but I was like, ‘Yeah!’ ” she says. “I remember them asking at the student-teaching seminar, ‘What are your goals? What are your five-year goals?’ And I said, ‘The teacher of the year.’ That didn’t happen. It took a long time, but it’s OK, because I’m a much better teacher now than I was back then.”
NO KIDDING.
Last month, Cortinas-Vogt was named SHAPE America Midwest District Elementary P.E. Teacher of the Year. She now is in the running for National Elementary P.E. Teacher of the Year; that announcement will come in March during the organization’s annual conference in Cleveland.
A mere seven months earlier, the Illinois Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance crowned her Elementary P.E. Teacher of the Year.
Her excitement remains palpable, especially regarding the SHAPE America acknowledgement, which she received while teaching.
“I happened to check my phone, and I saw the email. I already had the script in my mind: ‘Thank you for applying, buy unfortunately …’ That’s what I kept thinking I was going to read. But then I saw the email, and it said, ‘Congratulations!’ ” says Cortinas-Vogt, who lives in Sycamore and who, in 2012, earned her M.S.Ed. Kinesiology and Physical Education from NIU.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I won! Oh my gosh, I won!’ I was crying. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘I cannot believe this is happening.’ I was jumping up and down, and my colleague, Noemi, is like, ‘What did you win?’ And I said, ‘I won Teacher of the Year! I won Midwest Teacher of the Year!’ ”
As the two hugged, Cortinas-Vogt asked Noemi if she could run to tell others. “Go!” Noemi replied.
Cortinas-Vogt sprinted to tell her principal, Lori Brandes. She scrambled to tell fourth grade teacher Lisa Kees, her carpool pal from Cortland and mother of NIU Kinesiology major Maddy Kees.
She phoned her husband, Don Vogt, her “huge supporter.”
“I’m crying,” she says, “and then he’s crying in the background. There’s just a lot of work that goes into this. It’s a long process. There’s a lot of writing that’s involved. You get to the point where you’re like, ‘I don’t know. I can’t do this anymore. I’m just submitting it. It is what it is.’ ”
Despite the honors, and her bold ambitions and declarations of decades ago, Cortinas-Vogt is humble and grappling with a bout of imposter syndrome.
“There are so many great teachers all over and in Illinois, where we are very strong. I would say that within my own network of teacher-friend group, there are so many great teachers who are behind the scenes and who should be applying for it but won’t,” she says.
“I don’t think I’m any better than most teachers. I think I’m just passionate, and I’m really interested in thinking outside the box. I always have been,” she adds. “What sets me apart from others is my passion for integrating other academic content areas into P.E., and some people might criticize that because they think it’s taking away from P.E, but I try very had to make it a seamless transition.”
CORTINAS-VOGT BEGAN to develop her teaching philosophy in Texas.
Recruited and hired by a school district near Houston upon graduation with her bachelor’s degree, she spent the first three years of her career there.
The rookie quickly heard of a cohort program available in her building called “Critical Components of a Balanced Literacy Program.” She was intrigued.
“Some of my friends – my classroom colleagues – were taking it, and it was offered on site, and I thought, ‘You know, why not? Let’s see what I can learn from this and see if I can apply it in my own content area,’ ” Cortinas-Vogt says.
“I learned a lot of different literacy strategies that really are informal types of assessment that very much can be used in the P.E. world,” she adds. “That was the beginning of my spark. I was like, ‘Wow, this is totally outside the box. Nobody else is doing this. I love it. I’m going to use it’ – and that really was the beginning of it all.”
Early strategies included “a morning message where the students would read aloud and scaffold the message, and they would have to fill in the blanks, which was a way of checking for understanding.”
Later, she would ask classroom teachers what would help them. That led to the integration of spelling and phonics concepts, something that spawned the creation of a game Cortinas-Vogt calls “Blends, Digraphs and Diphthongs, Oh My!” to mix language arts with physical education.
“We totally blended two content areas and, in in the end, it’s the students who win because they get multiple opportunities to practice something. I was successful with that, so I just kept plugging away,” she says. “Math is usually the one that most easily blends. We integrate math without even realizing it.”
Her enthusiasm for that model further blossomed during her NIU College of Education graduate school days, when she shadowed Department of Curriculum and Instruction Professor Corrine Wickens for a semester.
Later, she taught full time in the college for two years, delivering undergraduate courses in literacy education to P.E. majors and in elementary physical education to Elementary Education majors.
“It was a really good way for me to win them over and to talk to them a little bit about the importance of P.E.,” Cortinas-Vogt says. “I also showed them ways to integrate movement into the classroom, so it was kind of the beginning of something special.”
Spreading her philosophy throughout Illinois and the United States has also teamed her with dear friend, Kelly Zerby, including in the realm of labels and legend.
Their professional partnership started at the DuPage County Institute, where Zerby listened to Cortinas-Vogt present on her cross-curricular approach.
As they chatted afterward, Zerby suggested they write a book together. Cortinas-Vogt countered with a suggestion to present together; their first proposal was accepted for a conference in Texas, where they presented with Staci Hale, another NIU alumna.
“Kelly’s known as the Dancing Queen, and I’m probably known as the Cross-curricular Queen,” Cortinas-Vogt says, “and, actually, Kelly shares a bit of that with me. We are very close besties. We travel together. We present together. We’ve built a group that now has six people.”
THE LONG ROAD TO THIS POINT has not been as seamless as the bridge between P.E. class and lessons in science, literacy, math, social studies and more.
Raised in West Chicago, Cortinas-Vogt and her young family moved to Sycamore around 2006. She taught part time at St. Mary’s School in DeKalb – “It was a great opportunity for me to still be a mom and still keep my feet wet, staying current and relevant,” she says – while earning her master’s degree.
She realized it was time to move on, and when she started teaching in Palatine, the family returned to the suburbs to put her closer to work.
Life suddenly changed.
“My husband, Mike, passed away shortly after we moved there,” Cortinas-Vogt says. “It was unexpected, and so I didn’t spend too much time there after that. I taught that year, and then the next year is when I decided, ‘Oh, there’s a lot going on here.’ My kids were younger, so I made the move back to Sycamore, to the home that I’m living in now, because this is really where my village was – where my support system was – and this is were I needed to be.”
Addison and Aiden were in middle school then, active in sports and in need of their mother, who was now a single parent.
She decided to take a leave of absence from teaching, and “because there’s always something positive that comes out of tragedy,” decided to contact some people she knew at NIU from her M.S.Ed. days. Jenny Parker was one of them, putting Cortinas-Vogt in touch with Wickens and paving the way to become a full-time instructor for the college.
Returning to teaching wasn’t easy.
U-46 became her new home when she was hired by the principal of Washington, “a peer of my late husband, who knew my story because I was very open on social media about the process that it took for me to get my life together.”
But the job was for an itinerant P.E. teacher, which meant driving from elementary school to elementary school.
“I really didn’t want to be traveling. I wanted my own gym,” she says. “I heard from other whispers in the district that you’ve just got to pitch them, and sometimes they’ll ‘buy you out’ with Title I money and keep you on board. Maybe you do some accommodations for students. Maybe you help with a reading group or something like that.”
Cortinas-Vogt felt her internal light bulb illuminate:
“ ‘Maybe I can pitch.’ ”
Talking to her principal at Washington about the integration of P.E. and classroom curriculum, she found an interested audience.
“She was really on board, and so it started very slowly,” Cortinas-Vogt says. “That first year, even though I was still traveling, I would do a lesson where I had the teachers come in, and I invited her to come watch. She loved the ideas. The next year, I was bought out.”
About 80% of her time was spent teaching P.E.; the rest was devoted to what she calls “Active Content Time.” Teachers come to her and complete forms explaining the content areas where their students need more practice.
“It’s a collaborative effort,” she says. “They and I will work together on the concept. They might say, ‘We need math fluency’ for whatever grade level it is, so then I work on creating a game or activity that incorporates whatever content area they’re looking for with movement. This was a great way for me to find creative ways to find more movement for the students.”
During its trial year, ACT was voluntary. During its second year, the principal encouraged all teachers to participate.
Now “it’s strongly encouraged,” says Cortinas-Vogt, who is based solely at Washington with her itinerant days in the rearview mirror. “I do a two-month rotation. The teacher comes in with the students, so it’s not an extra prep period for them. We work together to facilitate, and it’s been super successful.”
So is her own teaching, a job she adores.
P.E. teachers work with and build relationships with every child in the school while not spending full days with them. Meanwhile, she says, children in the primary grades still enjoy P.E.
“If you can find a way to make it engaging and fun, and create activities and games where you’re kind of disguising the fitness, or whatever skill that they might not be good at, they love it,” she says, “so what’s not to love about being one of the favorite classes in the whole building?”
The NIU College of Education gets some of the credit, she adds.
“Had I not gone to NIU, I don’t think I’d be in the position I’m in now, and I really don’t think I’d be the teacher I am now,” Cortinas-Vogt says.
“NIU made me very passionate about being a better teacher and surrounding myself with good people. When you surround yourself with good people, you become better at your skills,” she adds, “and I think I really have to thank NIU because it came at the right time. I was going through some rough, rough times – not in my graduate program, but when I taught – and that was like a second chance for me to really turn my teaching practice around.”
And should she win the National Teacher of the Year, she says, she’ll share the spotlight with her colleagues across Illinois.
“I’ve had all of these awesome teachers who have been an inspiration to me. We are filled with a tremendous amount of great educators, and I can’t even believe I’m in this position because there are so many better teachers than me,” Cortinas-Vogt says.
“I just really believe that we need to break down our individual silos and that, if we work together, it’s better for us as teachers because I learn a little bit about classroom teaching and they learn a little bit about the importance of movement,” she adds. “I don’t know that that’s what makes me a great teacher, but that makes me different from others. I just really believe in trying things that are different and innovative. I don’t like doing the same-old, same-old.”
