Andrea DiCicco-Holsombach’s time as a teacher has been a mosaic of moments that have influenced her all the way to her most recent accomplishment, being chosen as the 2025 Cranston Public Schools Teacher of the Year.

A special education and English and Language Arts teacher at Cranston East for 23 years, DiCicco-Holsombach was chosen from more than a dozen nominees across the city on June 6.  

She said she was honored to be nominated by East’s leadership team to represent the school. For more than two decades, she has made Cranston East her professional home, so being chosen was an overwhelming feeling – as if all her hard work had culminated in a single moment of validation.

She began teaching in 2002, right out of college. She said she always felt teaching was her calling. Her mother was a teacher aide in the Providence School Department, working with special education and bilingual students, and passed to her a deep respect for education.

In her days as a high school student, DiCicco-Holsombach said, her classroom experiences with her English teachers brought literature to life.

“Every step of my journey reinforced what I’d always known: I was meant to be a teacher,” she said.

She said she now realizes she has taken the best parts of the lessons she learned from her teachers and given them to her students. The media focus in her Mirror-Mirror course, she says, was inspired by a former teacher, Mr. Rounds, and his use of a TV cart in the classroom.

“I’m like the embodiment of all my favorite parts of all my favorite teachers, and that’s what I bring to my students,” she said.

She says those moments when, years after being in her classroom, students reach back and share how a piece of their time together sticks with them reminds her of why teachers matter.

“That’s the true magic of teaching: knowing that your lessons live on in others,” DiCicco-Holsombach said.

One way DiCicco-Holsombach continues to do that is through her Mirror-Mirror class, a course she created in 2012. The class explores contemporary teenage issues through literature, film, music and other media relevant to youth.

“You want to give them the tools to build the world they want to live in,” she said.

Each day, she teaches three 84-minute block periods with an average class size of 22 students. With activities like weekly creative journal writing to the tattoo project, in which students work on designing identity tattoos based on their personal research, DiCicco-Holsombach says it is important to know that students also have a story to tell and in sharing them, they know they are not struggling alone.

Recalling her Facebook post on receiving the award, she said it was overwhelming to see comments from former students and others.

Having been nominated first by her colleagues at Cranston East to be the building’s top teacher and then by a selection committee to represent the entire district, DiCicco-Holsombach will now join the statewide cohort of District Teacher of the Year educators for the 2025-2026 school year. She will attend professional development meetings through the state Department of Education to bring ideas back to the district.

She will be honored in September at the Educator WaterFire event, and at the September Cranston School Committee meeting. And next year, she can apply to be the State Teacher of the Year.

DiCicco-Holsombach says she sees herself continuing to spark conversation and help shift the education landscape in the future.

But more than anything, she wants “students to understand that education doesn’t happen to them – it’s something they actively shape.”