Teacher Leaders

Alex

Alex holds a B.A. in political science and a TESOL endorsement along with her Nevada teaching credentials. Fluent in Spanish, Alex was primarily a first and third grade teacher when she enrolled in Project E3 after seven years of service teaching ESL. The rural school site in Northern Nevada where she was teaching at the time had a high ELL population and Alex was responsible for 38 emergent bilingual students who were being monitored because they had exited the ELL support services. Alex has also served as the school’s new hire mentor teacher, and been a member of the school’s intervention team, and the school district’s curriculum development team.

Ashton

Ashton has been an educator in the same elementary school Southern Nevada for the last 17 years, the first five of which she served as a specialized programs teacher assistant (SPTA) for the school’s Pre –K program. As a teacher, Ashton has taught students in grades K-3 for 12 years and was a kindergarten teacher when she enrolled in Project E3. Ashton enjoys working with her students’ families as she lives within the school community and is thus committed to serving the community that holds a special place in her heart.

Eva

Eva moved to Southern Nevada from California four years before enrolling in Project E3 as a kindergarten teacher. Eva has a passion for working with young children and her goal is to continue working with them and their families, while enhancing her pedagogical skills, to provide the support the emergent bilingual students need to achieve academic success.

Julia

Julia enrolled in Project E3 after 21 years of teaching students from grades one to four, including those in Title I schools. Julia, located in Northern Nevada, mostly taught in the second grade and holds an aspiration to help new educators become aware of the needs of emergent bilingual learners. Upon earning her TESL endorsement in 2016, Julia was highly motivated and jumped at the opportunity to earn a master’s degree in English language learning by enrolling in Project E3.

Gwen

Gwen’s passion for teaching kindergarten children is clear from her experience in teaching them for eight out of her eleven years of service when she enrolled in Project E3. Gwen, a teacher in Southern Nevada, loves their little minds and big hearts, and believes that well thought-out fun and engaging instructional activities open a child’s mind to endless possibilities. Although the school where Gwen has been teaching has an 88% Hispanic population, Gwen believes that language stimulation strategies benefit all young children regardless of their heritage. Through Project E3, Gwen hoped to further enhance her skills in teaching emergent bilingual students to optimize her instructional impact and confidence in sharing new knowledge with her colleagues.

Melissa

Melissa holds a B.A. in childhood development/elementary education and spent the first 12 years of her career teaching in pre-K settings. She was a third grade teacher in a rural school district in Northern Nevada when she enrolled in Project E3 after four years of teaching first grade students and one year of serving as an instructional aide for a special needs child upon earning her teacher certification in 2012. Melissa has been teaching in a Title I school with 78% of the students in the free/reduced lunch and 58% in ELL programs. Excited to be a part of Project E3, Melissa was looking forward to enhancing her pedagogical skills by learning more about teaching emergent bilingual learners and grow professionally through training in peer co

Taylor

Taylor feels that teaching has been a learning experience for her, as she was only in her second year of service teaching first grade at a rural Northern Nevada school when she enrolled in Project E3. She believed that her pedagogical expertise would improve as she gained more experience and confidence. Through Project E3, Taylor hoped to enhance her knowledge and skills further so that she could better support the learning needs of her diverse students, and she hopes to continue to do so in the future.

Luisa

Born and raised in a Spanish-speaking home, Luisa attended a Spanish-speaking elementary school until she was in second grade. ELL has always had a very positive connotation in Luisa’s heart as she identifies with students’ language experiences. Luisa became a teacher when she found her job in the corporate world of retail to be meaningless. She has no regrets in changing career paths. As a teacher in Southern Nevada, Luisa hoped to enhance her pedagogical skills in teaching emergent bilingual learners by participating in Project E3. She also hoped to engage them in ways that would be memorable - making their time spent in her class some of the richest learning experiences in their elementary school days.

Sandra

When she enrolled in Project E3, Sandra had been a teacher for ten years after working six years in a preschool along with some engagements as a substitute teacher. She completed her teaching internship in a team-taught class when she stayed on as a long term substitute teacher. Out of the ten years of her teaching experience, Sandra taught kindergarten for seven years, second grade for one year, and third grade for two years. She currently teaches in a rural school district in Northern Nevada.

Sharon

Sharon is an elementary school teacher who has taught fifth grade students for three years, first grade for a year, and was a third grade teacher when she enrolled in Project E3. By enrolling in the project as a teacher in Northern Nevada, she was looking forward to enhancing her knowledge and skills in teaching emergent bilingual learners in her classroom.

Prior to coming to Nevada, Kyra (pseudonym) never had the opportunity to teach bilingual students. She was hesitant and lacked confidence in addressing the needs of kindergarten emergent bilinguals. Project E3 coursework equipped her with the knowledge, skills, and tools she needed. In planning daily instruction, Kyra now feels empowered to customize her approach based on her own students’ needs instead of relying on the school curriculum and materials. By getting to know her students and their families, Kyra is more intentional in planning instruction (e.g., vocabulary) and designs cross-curricular activities that reinforce new concepts while drawing on the students’ funds of knowledge (FOK).

Through Project E3, Kyra learned about how to use the WIDA Can Do Descriptors to customize subject-area instruction based on children’s emerging language abilities. Kyra shared her experience:

I had never heard of WIDA before. Now I look at WIDA scores and I know that the Can Do Descriptors allow me to differentiate [content] instruction based on [children’s language proficiency] scores and have students access the same standards from multiple entry points. That has been another positive change in my instruction.

Looking back at her Project E3 experiences, Kyra feels that she has definitely benefitted from the Saturday Advanced Professional Learning Institute (SAPLI). The SAPLI session on interactive reading has informed the ways in which she integrates explicit vocabulary instruction during read-alouds and other literacy (e.g., content literacy) experiences. She understands how to use student data to guide her instruction and program decisions. Upon attending the school’s data lab, Kyra regularly checks and analyzes grade-level data to monitor students’ performance and to inform class goals. At graduation, Kyra was ready to hit the ground running.

The My Teaching Partner (MTP) trainings exposed her to the importance of providing nuanced feedback loops in her peer coaching sessions, which required her to collaborate with colleagues at her campus. Furthermore, observing one of her lessons, Kyra’s assistant principal was so impressed with the quality of children’s learning, that she enthusiastically invited Kyra to share the lesson with other teachers. Project E3, especially the MTP experiences enhanced her leadership skills and prepared her to design professional development (PD) opportunities for her colleagues based on school-wide data and classroom observations. Due to pandemic-related challenges, her school principal has now entrusted Kyra to teach students in the second grade instead of kindergarten and she feels ready for this opportunity.

Kyra now looks forward to serving as a mentoring supervisor for pre-service teachers at UNLV. Kyra expressed her feelings:

Prior to E3, I probably would have stayed within my comfort zone. Now, I am confident enough to use some of the strategies I have learned and go further. I feel that I have a lot more to contribute. I have enough expertise to facilitate instruction for emergent bilinguals and I am a lot more willing to seek out collaborative efforts because I can contribute. Prior to E3, I was receiving the knowledge but now I can contribute as well.

According to Kyra, she now has the confidence to consider broader school district leadership opportunities (e.g., strategist positions) and credits Project E3 for her professional growth.

Didi was a second grade teacher when she began her journey with Project E3. Enlightened by the project’s coursework, the Saturday Advanced Professional Learning Institute (SAPLI), and My Teaching Partner (MTP) trainings, she learned how to use standards to guide her instructional planning within a thematic approach that is more supportive of emergent bilingual (EB) learners’ language development – especially in regard to their acquisition of advanced vocabulary. This approach includes providing multiple exposures to Tier 3 [subject-specific language] vocabulary in reading, writing, and speaking activities so that EB and monolingual English-speaking students have frequent opportunities to engage with new words and the related content - especially science - on a deeper level.

Didi now sets intentional goals in collaboration with students and their families:

….. during parent-teacher conferences, we had data folders and throughout the year, we've had periodic meetings to go over these data folders. That way, students and families can track the students’ progress. Also, during parent-teacher conferences, I make it a point to talk to parents about the value of their home language and the importance of preserving it.

In Project E3, Didi learned to be more intentional in providing oral and written feedback to students and she is now committed to this daily practice. She believes that effective feedback is powerful because it facilitates significant changes in EB students’ learning and growth as evidenced in their work. Shei has experienced the benefit of asking many “how’ and “why” follow-up scaffolding questions, an approach emphasized in the MTP coaching. She now includes the questions, and the scaffolding of her students’ depth of knowledge (DOK) levels, in designing her instructions.

As an outcome of her hard work, confidence, and knowledge gained in Project E3, Didi’s school administrators have assigned her to teach fifth grade departmentalized writing, and science. She is glad to have access to ample science curriculum resources at her school that are available in English and Spanish. Although her school is not a dual language school, she still displays English/Spanish word walls, especially for the Tier 3 science vocabulary that are the focus of her lessons. Complementary to her integrated teaching approach (as opposed to teaching isolated subjects), she collaborates with her class’s reading teacher to promote interdisciplinary reading and writing connections.

Didi feels that Project E3 has prepared her for leadership roles, opening doors for her professionally. Firstly, she was appointed as a part-time Instructor and was hired by her school to fill the Read by Grade 3 (RBG3) program position in addition to her fifth grade responsibilities. The latter position includes managing her school’s reading language arts’ professional development (PD). Didi was prepared for this opportunity from the varied Project E3 professional development opportunities.

In addition to the PD leadership role, according to Didi:

As a direct result of dialogue sessions involving Dr. Bengochea, other students, and me in Project E3, we were able to guide our school administrators in setting up reading curricula. Prior to that, our schools didn't have any school-wide reading curriculum at all. I was also recently hired to work with CCSD’s Onboarding Department….so I’ll be creating and hosting classes for new teachers.

Didi remains committed to growing professionally, supporting her peers, and always serving as an advocate for emergent bilingual learners and their families.

Currently a 4th grade teacher in an urban Southern Nevada school, Maya (pseudonym) has learned the different research-based methods and practices to meet the learning needs of her culturally and linguistically diverse students through Project E3. These include methods to differentiate instruction based on students’ WIDA language proficiency levels, provide more productive academic discourse, and conduct assessments in multiple ways. According to Maya:

I focus more on academic vocabulary and language across all content areas now. I'm also more knowledgeable about how emergent bilinguals learn, what type of supports and scaffolds I could use to support them, and how to maintain the same rigor while still providing those supports.

Maya shared that the Saturday Advanced Professional Learning Institute (SAPLI) sessions emphasized the importance of supporting the home language of emergent bilinguals and prioritizing opportunities for children’s academic language development. The experience significantly enhanced her pedagogical knowledge and skills. The My Teaching Partner (MTP) coaching helped her to intentionally integrate various language discourse strategies (e.g., language modeling, use of advanced language) in her lesson planning and classroom teaching.

She is now more reflective in her teaching practice, focuses more on the assets that emergent bilinguals bring into the classroom, and understands how to leverage the funds of knowledge (FOK) that each child brings with them into the learning process. She appreciates that Project E3 has prepared her well for educational leadership roles by exposing her to multiple strategies and theories on how emergent bilinguals learn.

Maya shared the positive impact that the program has on her teaching and her students’ achievements:

I'm now a co-teacher, specifically for math and science, and I include a lot of my culminating experience [project/research] from Project E3. It was based on mathematical discourse and I included a lot of that this year in my classroom. We just got our data back and the math data for 4th grade, which is the grade that I teach, was off the charts! Better than it has been in many years. So, my principal is asking if I could have teachers come watch to see what I'm doing for math; if she could come watch and share what's going on in my classroom. Maybe there're some practices or strategies that other teachers can include in their own teaching to improve those math scores.

As Maya’s confidence and self-efficacy increases, she has been approached by a school administrator and a university faculty for leadership positions, including serving as a pre-service teacher mentor in a practicum setting.

Erin has been an early childhood teacher for 19 years and, although she's had ample exposure to best practices, she still benefited greatly from Project E3. Erin treasured the My Teaching Partner (MTP) coaching the most:

I have always wanted to become a coach in education. So coaching for me was the most valuable because it helped me really become very intentional. It helped me get really focused in on what I wanted to improve in my teaching, and then communicate what I have learned to other professionals in our field. So I really enjoyed that training the most.

While Erin found the Saturday Advanced Professional Learning Institute (SAPLI) sessions to be a huge commitment, she really enjoyed them and appreciated how the sessions engaged the teachers in diving deeper into specific content areas to get a better understanding of what the emergent bilingual learners were exactly getting from different activities, and being very intentional in their pedagogical preparations. Similarly, the Project E3 coursework pushed her beyond her comfort zone, explaining that the experience….

…. just really helped me to see the “why” behind what we're doing and seeing the end goal. I think we often just do what we do because of the standards. It helped me to really focus on what is it that I'm asking the learners to learn and how do I get from point A to point Z, from lesson planning to doing projects, and to implementations in my class.

Further, Erin appreciated the acquired leadership capacity – serving as a grade level leader at a Title I school with a large emergent bilingual population. Project E3 motivated her to step in and share best practices with her colleagues whenever she heard conversations on what they could do to better support emergent bilingual learners’ academic achievements.

Erin is now very intentional in all her daily pedagogical endeavors. She communicates the rationale for her instructional decisions more effectively to learners in her classroom and to her school administrators. Additionally, although she has extensive experience engaging with diverse learners, Project E3 broadened her awareness of culture and what is valued within diverse families. Erin believes that this knowledge and skills along with the specialist endorsement are extremely valuable assets for educators within the current and future educational context in Nevada.

For Nadia, Project E3 provided space to engage in best practices for English learners (ELs) while allowing her to become more of a reflective practitioner. Nadia elaborated on how she benefited from the Saturday Advanced Professional Learning Institute (SAPLI) sessions that target specific content areas with emphasis on supporting emergent bilingual learners:

For example, in science there are specific things I can do to support language learning through the listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities. It gets built in throughout the lesson. Students explicitly learn the use of specific words. I have to be reflective along the way too so that the conceptual connections are clear to the students. These strategies that I learn through Project E3 build on what I already knew and was already practicing. The program helped me develop more tools to support my emergent bilingual learners.

Nadia also found the My Teaching Partner (MTP) coaching to be extremely helpful. She appreciated the opportunity to discuss her classroom practices with a coach, and is amazed at how she benefited from taking on the role of a peer coach also. She finds the whole process of mutual learning through continuous observations and reflections to be very well thought-out and well-balanced.

While Nadia affirms the importance of all Project E3 experiences, she finds the relationships she built with the course professors to be even more valuable. She appreciates that all the professors were very supportive and helped her connect new ideas that were acquired through SAPLI and the TESL coursework with actual classroom applications:

We developed plans, for example, that we could implement right away. So the SAPLI session might have taught something, like an example or an idea. Then we learned further, through the coursework, how to develop a plan and start to implement. I think that's very effective PD. You're guided in implementing what you have just learned right away and reflect on it.

Further, the enhanced data analysis skills that Nadia attained through Project E3 has given her the confidence to begin to see her own potential as a leader. Project E3 has also opened her eyes to the beauty of collaborative work and goal setting among peer educators. Already part of her school’s Response to Intervention (RTI) team, E3's training reinforced and extended her mentoring and coaching abilities so that she could better support her colleagues in the field.

Nadia acknowledges that her school administrators are aware of her capabilities and see her potential for future leadership positions. Even at the district level, she has become aware that, along with another Project E3 participant, her capabilities and leadership potentials are being noticed by the school district’s superintendent and assistant superintendent. Nadia believes that Project E3 has helped her build the resume and dispositions that will qualify her for future leadership opportunities.