Rodney Robinson

Robinson received the R.E.B. Award for Teaching Excellence in 2012. In 2018, he was named Virginia Teacher of the Year and in 2019 he was recognized as National Teacher of the Year. He described his reaction to winning the national award as humbling and noted: “as a black male educator, we’re put in this box where we’re told to only coach, only deal with difficult kids, only do discipline, and we fight to try to escape that box, and now here I was being chosen to represent all teachers and students in America. It was validating”.

Robinson, known to some of his students as “Big Rob”, began teaching in 2000. He taught for 11 years at Armstrong High School in Richmond, as well as at Lucille M. Brown Middle School and George Wythe High School. In 2015, he was hired as a social studies and history teacher for grades 6 through 12 at the Virgie Binford Education Center, located inside the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center in Richmond, Virginia.

Rodney Alexander Robinson (born September 9, 1978) is an American educator. After teaching for over a decade in middle and high schools in Richmond, Virginia, he became a social studies and history teacher for grades 6 through 12 at the Virgie Binford Education Center, located inside the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center. He was named Virginia Teacher of the Year in 2018 and National Teacher of the Year in 2019.

Rodney Alexander Robinson was born on September 9, 1978, in Richmond, Virginia. He was inspired to become a teacher by his mother, Sylvia, who had wanted to be a teacher but did not have the opportunity in segregated Virginia. Instead she operated an at-home daycare and worked to get a GED. Robinson remembers “(w)atching her work hard to get her GED when I was in high school [while she worked full-time and raised a family] — that was a lasting memory”. His father had pushed Robinson toward college by having him work as a farmhand in eighth grade; Robinson lasted only a couple of hours at the job.