CareerThe 2020-2021 school year will be my tenth year teaching and my fifth year at Big Hollow! Over the past nine years, I have taught 6th, 7th, and (primarily) 8th graders in Reading, Writing, and Social Studies. During the past three school years, I've been teaching 8th grade Social Studies.
In college, I specialized in history, earning a grant to study in London and getting two of my articles published. I hope to bring my passion for using history as a lens to view our world to my students through project-based, student-centered learning. In my classroom, students learn through active discovery and show their learning with projects and performances. They get to choose many of the topics and questions they want to pursue, explore history through the lenses of equity and justice, and use what they learn to take informed action in their communities. Moreover, students are actively involved in determining their grade for each trimester by reflecting on their performance and conferencing with me to determine grades for their summative assessments. Learn more about how I'm using Feedback in Lieu of traditional grades here. As a teacher, I love helping students find great joy in reading, writing, and thinking critically about the world around them. That's why so much of my class is devoted to examining topics that have relevance to our world today--and that students enjoy learning about. I firmly believe that students need to be given plenty of opportunities to explore, inquire, and study independently rather than being forced to memorize dates and facts from a textbook. I enjoy creating engaging units that help students develop 21st century inquiry skills. I've presented at the Illinois Reading Conference twice (2013, 2015) and was named the Kane County Early Career Educator of the Year in 2015. |
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