Last week, students from Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Tenn., saw a familiar face on the LIVE with Kelly and Michael show: Athena Davis, their English and Holocaust Literature teacher. Davis is one of five finalists who are vying to be named LIVE’s Top Teacher thanks to their exceptional work as educators and leaders in their schools and communities.

The public had the opportunity to vote until 3 p.m. EST today on the grand prize winner, who will win a 2014 Ford Escape. Davis appeared on the show on Friday, when hosts Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan presented her with a trip to Israel and 30 Intel tablet notebooks for her classroom.

Davis teaches English, including AP English, and a Holocaust Literature class at Cleveland High. Her colleagues, students and their parents also commended her for organizing the prom, inspiring her students to speak up in the classroom and forming meaningful relationships with everyone in the community.

Davis said teaching the Holocaust is one of the most important things she does as an educator, and she uses the resources of Echoes and Reflections to do so. Echoes and Reflections is a multimedia professional development program for secondary school teachers in the United States that provides them with accurate and authentic Holocaust information for their classrooms, developed by USC Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and the Anti-Defamation League. It includes testimony clips from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which Davis said are the “perfect length” for using in her classroom. In addition, Davis said that Echoes and Reflections curriculum fits in well with the new Common Core State Standards and she has shared certain pieces of it with other history teachers at her school.

Her students are “enthralled” by watching testimony, Davis said. Since she has been showing the clips for about seven years now, she can anticipate how her students will respond to some of the most powerful lines and images.

“It is moving to hear them gasp or see them tear up at certain parts,” Davis said. “We even discuss the way the person tells his or her story and talk about what it must be like to relive the experience, all these years later.”

As part of the class, Davis’s students complete service projects, and she said this has provided some of her most memorable moments from teaching the Holocaust. For the past two years, student groups have organized a 5K to raise funds for a local non-profit that is building homes in genocide-affected Cambodia. They raised $2,000 each year and have funded a total of four homes. Students have also sponsored children, started non-profits, or chosen a career or a major in college based on the time they spent in her class.

“They have seen the effect of evil on the world and have chosen to be upstanders rather than bystanders,” Davis said. “As far as immediate memorable moments, it has meant a lot to me to see the respect my students show toward survivors and the personal meaning of their stories, as well as the responsibility they feel to memorialize the victims.”

As a result of being honored as one of LIVE’s Top Teachers, Davis said she has received emails from Holocaust survivors, children of survivors, Jewish federations, and other teachers asking for educational advice, offering messages of support, and thanking her for furthering the cause of Holocaust education.

She said that teaching the Holocaust is essential in order to teach her students respect for their fellow man. She stresses to them that genocide has happened since the Holocaust and can happen anywhere in the future, so they can’t leave the past in the past.

“My job is to show them that they have to speak out and speak up for right,” Davis said. “It’s about human goodness, human kindness, decency, and respect.”