Experience Summary
As a teacher trainer for the past 7 years, I have taught teachers research based instructional strategies to help struggling learners as well as applied these concepts in my own classroom. Although I primarily caught art during my 17 year career, I also was interested in ways to help students learn reading skills. I was a volunteer tutor in the 1997-98 school year for a program called Reading Rescue that used research based strategies to help below grade level readers, taught remedial summer school program one summer, and have many in service hours of CRISS training.
Teaching Style
I believe all students can learn but some need explicit strategies to be shown to them. Research shows students who fail often have less background knowledge, remember less, their attention wanders and they lack automaticity, the ability to recall basic facts. I have a tool box full of research proven strategies that work. Discovery learning is not what kids in remediation need. These kids need to be shown specific ways to organize information so they can tell what is important to learn, study skills to recall information, and ways to connect new information to their background knowledge.