Christian Teacher of the Year: Kenneth Okwuonu teaches students to use their hands to build, serve others 

High school teacher Kenneth Okwuonu starts every class with five minutes of gratitude, inviting his students to share the good things happening in their lives.

After that, he teaches them how to build things to bless others.

“If you want to capture the minds of your students, you need to capture their hearts first,” is a piece of advice Okwuonu received, encouraging him to make a small change to his class schedule for a much larger impact.

Okwuonu worked as a biomedical engineer for five years before going into campus ministry. Now, he uses his knowledge to teach high school physics and engineering at Westbury Christian School in Houston as his ministry.

He’s known for his project-based physics experiences, where his students work together to build one functioning object to then give to the community.

“I get to teach physics, and I get to teach them about how beautiful this world is that God has given them,” he said.

This commitment to honoring God and making a real-world impact is one reason Okwuonu is among the 12 instructors across the country named 2026 Christian Teacher of the Year by the Herzog Foundation, publisher of Heartlander News.

Okwuonu has taught at Westbury for 17 years and has recently implemented the Teaching for Transformation (TfT) framework into his curriculum.

“You’re taking your normal curriculum – whether it be math or sciences – but you’re showing them how that fits in this world, how it connects, how God connects to that curriculum, and showing them how to navigate that curriculum through a biblical worldview,” he told Heartlander News.

The students are separated into groups – each group focuses on one portion of a larger, cohesive project – to build something for the community to use after completion. One recent class built an electric scooter for college students, while another built a Bluetooth speaker for the athletics program.

“It’s not just a point to turn into the teacher, but now this is something that is touching someone’s life,” Okwuonu said.

His students have to rely on each other to make the whole project come together. For the Bluetooth speaker project, he explains, one group worked on the battery and tried to implement solar power, the next focused on the internal electronics, and yet another oversaw what the speaker would look like on the outside.

The electric scooter project is one that has stuck with Okwuonu. Because the scooter was specifically for college students, Okwuonu’s students conducted interviews to discover their needs. Instead of building what they thought would work well, they were challenged to listen to a client and tailor their construction to them.

“So that’s kind of what Teaching for Transformation is – teaching them the different facets, whether it be servant leadership, creation builders, or how to be good stewards of what God’s given them,” Okwuonu said.

The importance of Christian education

Okwuonu sees his teaching as planting seeds in his students, and even if they don’t fully understand the importance of the deeper concepts they’re learning right now, those seeds will mature as they grow older.

For him, that’s what makes teaching worth it, and Christian education specifically works to fight the evil in the world, he says.

“As a Christian, and you think about what God has blessed us with, we see what’s happened to our world today and how that is becoming, let’s say, more evil,” Okwuonu said. “As we are tasked with our students … we want to be able to help them to navigate this world so that they’re going to be on God’s side and not Satan’s side. …”

“We believe that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to conquer the evil that’s in this world is by helping them to see things through a biblical worldview.”

The Christian Teacher of the Year honor is part of the Herzog Foundation’s Excellence in Christian Education award series. Each of the 12 winners was invited to attend a special professional development and recognition event.