EDGECOMB (AP) — An English teacher who won the $1 million Global Teacher Prize is back in Maine.

Nancie Atwell is being welcomed home Friday at The Centre for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, Maine, which she founded in 1990 as a nonprofit demonstration school for the purpose of developing and disseminating teaching methods.

She was selected from a pool of 1,300 applicants from 127 countries for the first Varkey Foundation award. She received it last weekend in Dubai, and says she’ll put the money back into her school.

Hundreds of teachers have visited her center over the years to learn its writing and reading practices. Her school’s eighth grade students read an average of 40 books per year, and the school boasts that there’s never a “raised voice or a standardized test.”