Kayla Winkler Bio

Mrs. Winkler

Kayla Winkler is teaching World Religions to the Junior Class and The Bible to the Sophomore Class.  She has been teaching for two years at Concordia High School, and she has taught at Immanuel Lutheran School in middle school and at Concordia University Texas.  She received her Bachelor’s Degree of Director of Christian Education from Concordia University at Austin (now Concordia Texas), in 2005. Kayla earned her Master's Degree of Family Life Education from Concordia University St. Paul, MN in 2010. She chose Concordia University at Austin because when she was five years old that is where her parents told her she would go to college. They didn’t intend for her to feel obligated to go there, but they wanted to impress upon her at a very young age she would be attending college. When she was a senior in high school, she had decided she was going to be a Secondary Education Major with a focus on math. God put a new calling on her life in January of her senior year, and instead shifted into Youth Ministry; Concordia University was the only place where she could receive the degree she was looking for. It has taken many years, but she has now come back to her passion of teaching high school students.

She is currently reading “The Good Shepherd” by Kenneth Bailey. It is a book which draws connections between all the times Jesus is called the Good Shepherd between Psalm 23 and the New Testament.

One person she greatly admires is her great grandfather, Crocket Smith. While she did not get to know him during his lifetime, his legacy of traveling throughout Texas setting up schools for all people shows the value of education passed down to Kayla. His faithfulness to God’s calling on his life, regardless of whether he was doing what man thought was right or not, is inspiring.

Her favorite charity is Family Link, a foster licensing agency, which takes care of children in central Texas as well as has a group foster home near New Braunfels. Fostering is a tremendous need in the world today. She and her husband were foster parents for several years. She sees it as a blessing to parent in a child’s time of greatest need. Children need a safe loving home while their parents get the help they need to be better parents.

If she could only eat at one restaurant for the rest of her life it would probably be Souper Salad because they have so many different foods, and it’s unusual to get a lot of raw vegetables at other restaurants.  That said her top ten favorite foods are salmon, avocados, chocolate, coffee, ice cream, mac and cheese, spinach, blueberries, pineapple, and Greek yogurt.  We’ll assume that they should not all be at the same time.