Experience

Synergy Academies

• United States
• Primary and Secondary Education
• 1 - 100 Employee

• English Teacher

  • Jul 2020 - Present

  As my school's only 6th grade ELA teacher, I teach 5 periods of ELA to 6th grade students, with about 155 students total. My goal as an ELA teacher is to make grade-level reading and writing instruction engaging and accessible to all 6th grade students, regardless of academic ability upon entering middle school. I work hard to develop rapport with my students and a sense of classroom community so that students feel comfortable with me and with each other. I use benchmark data and an understanding of student personalities to seat students heterogeneously where they will be both productive independently and as a group. After disliking the curriculum materials provided to me by my administrators, which I felt were not rigorous enough and did provide adequate instruction towards Common Core Reading and Writing standards, I opted to develop my own standards-based curricula. I have worked closely with the ELA department coach over the past three years to choose and create thematic, grade-level materials and develop lessons that are both engaging and rigorous. This year (2022-2023), I was able to entirely phase out the workbook based curricula and replace it with my own. I have completed 4 quarter long units of study, 2 literature based, 1 informational, and 1 argumentative, although there are some cross-over reading and writing activities in each unit. These units all have essential questions that are presented at the start of the unit, returned to throughout, and culminate in a final writing assignment that asks students to respond to the essential question. Each lesson has a clear connection to a specific reading or writing standard, which is assessed using a variety of formative and summative assessments. Spiral teaching is used in order to ensure that students have multiple lessons around each standard that reinforces and deepens previous understandings of that skill. Show less

• Reading Interventionist Teacher

  • Jul 2019 - Jul 2020

  Due to increasingly low benchmark reading scores among incoming 6th graders, my school administrators asked me to help them design and implement a reading intervention class for the entire 6th grade. Using the resources my school provided me, I developed a curricula that involved a multi-faceted approach to reading instruction. Each class started with a short phonics-based DoNow using Megawords materials, then moved into a rotation-based lesson. Students rotated between independent work on Lexia's Power-Up program, small group worksheet activities using leveled QuickReads workbooks, and targeted small group support lessons with me. Students were grouped homogeneously using data collected from the Scholastic Reading Inventory assessment and NWEA/Maps assessments. Readers who needed the most support were given targeted small group lessons with me every class period, while students who were only a year a two behind worked with me every other day. Students reading at grade level and above were given a novel study activity to complete in lieu of targeted teacher support, but I sat down to check in on their progress and discuss the novel once a week. Each month, I used student progress in Lexia's Power Up and work samples from QuickReads assignments to reorganize student reading level groupings. Although this class was interrupted by school closures in March, 2020, data reflected large student growth in reading ability. Students maintained the reading skills they had developed in this class during distance learning and SBAC scores from their 8th grade year (2021-2022 school year) showed this cohort of students out-performing 8th grade SBAC scores from prior to the pandemic.Prior to the start of the 2020-2021 school year, I was given a position as a 6th grade ELA teacher and the reading intervention class was eliminated due to difficulty running such a highly differentiated class in a distance learning setting. Show less

• Resource Specialist Teacher

  • Sep 2014 - Jun 2019

  For 5 years, I worked as the 8th grade Resource Specialist Teacher, managing a caseload of 20-30 8th grade students with various learning disabilities. In this role, I provided academic and behavioral support to students in accordance with their IEPs. I worked closely with the math and ELA teachers to ensure that the lessons I created during pull-out time were in-line with classroom instruction and would re-teach and reinforce the skills and concepts being taught in the general education classrooms. I closely monitored the progress of my students to ensure that IEPs were written with clear understanding of student abilities and next steps. I conducted and scored academic assessments using the Woodcock-Johnson IV and wrote academic reports for student triennial IEPs. I monitored non-academic services, such as APE, OT and Speech. I also advocated for my students and worked closely with them to help them develop their own abilities to advocate for themselves.When I began in this position, my school largely used a pull-out model to provide pre-teaching and re-teaching support in ELA and math in the Resource Classroom. During my 2nd year in this position, I initiated a shift to more of a co-teaching/push-in model with pull-out support when needed. This allowed me to co-teach periods of math and ELA, helping to ensure that all general education classroom instruction was accessible to students with IEPs. By co-planning with the ELA and math teachers, I helped ensure that work was accommodated and scaffolded in a way that would allow students on my caseload to access grade-level lessons. Even after I left Special Education, my school has continued to use a co-teaching model to provide students with IEPs with support in ELA and math. Show less