Teacher has rare talent for identifying students’ innermost strengths

Once a week, Laura Senturia hands a paper butterfly to each of her fourth-grade students with a classmate’s name on it, and asks them to write them a compliment.

“Sometimes I give them a butterfly and they walk away like they’ve won the Super Bowl because I just handed them their best friend,” says Senturia, a teacher at Colin Powell Elementary School in Fairfax County. “If I hand them someone they don’t know, they say, ‘I need help.’ Even if that person is someone you had an issue with at recess, I say let’s find something really nice that they’ve done.”