About Me
For over 15 years, I have been providing professional learning to teachers. I am passionate about supporting literacy skills for the 21st century. My work with districts includes planning at the district level and following those initiatives through into classrooms. The majority of my contracts are long term, spanning several years and allowing me to build relationships with staff to customize their professional learning needs.
As a Literacy Specialist, I provide K-12 professional development to ensure strong core instruction. Much of my recent work has been in implementing Common Core Standards. It has allowed me to put my training in backwards design and curriculum mapping to work. I have been both curriculum mapping and implementing standards in classrooms. I have implemented K-8 literacy programs with guided reading, best practices in writing instruction, as well as reading and writing in the content areas in middle and high schools. This includes support within the classroom, working side-by-side with teachers and students.
I have extensive experience with implementing literacy skills in content area classrooms including reading and writing in the content areas, content literacy strategies and skills, as well as disciplinary literacy skills reflected in Common Core Standards. This is reflected not only in past projects, but in my current research.
In addition, I have been heavily involved in Response to Intervention, including assessment, intervention and progress monitoring. I’ve facilitated building-wide interventions, as well as implemented a variety of reading assessments to ensure all students make adequate growth. Beyond training teachers how to administer the assessments and interpret the results, I also give teachers strategies to use in their classroom based on assessment data. This has included both workshops and modeling within the classroom.
Within all of these literacy initiatives, I work with teachers to integrate digital tools in meaningful ways. Within 1:1 initiatives, I specialize in building online reading and research skills to support 21st Century learning. My focus is always using technology to learn, not just learning to use the technology.