Ana teaches the Career and Technical Education courses of Fashion Design & Crafts, CAD for Screen Printing & Vinyl Cutting, Food Science, and Life Skills (Consumer Education, Health & Wellness) courses at Miller Middle School. She has formerly taught Culinary Arts, Developmental Psychology, Child & Adolescent Development,  Foods & Nutrition, Catering, Personal Finance, English Language Arts, Math, SAT Prep, and administered diagnostic tests with the Folsom Cordova and Cupertino Union School Districts, Huntington Learning Center, and Skylab (an after school academic and social emotional program for youth in transitional housing).

She is the founding adviser to the region's largest Girls Who Code chapter, which has received a feature and accolade from the national organization as well as recognition from the founder, Reshma Saujani, for the vast opportunities girls are being provided through the club including, but not limited to, tours to major tech companies (Roblox, Pixar, Tesla, Adobe, and Nutanix to name a few), workshops with industry professionals (including top Silicon Valley executives), networking forums, internships, and scholarships. She volunteers to facilitate the  two hour middle school coding meetings on Friday afternoons and also assists high school officers/interns and technology industry professionals on the development and delivery of age appropriate lessons for interested females ages 10-18.  She also oversees and approves the creation of infographics for social media posts and website updates as well as communications between the club officers and members of the community. Ana manages the various projects headed by student officers to ensure fluidity across teams and policy congruence within club operations and ed code. Prior to the pandemic, she also supported a small subset of girls in the club to compete in Technovation (an all female, global app development competition focusing on creating innovative solutions for current issues plaguing the world).

Ana formerly advised Baking Club- a virtual gathering of foodies for socio-emotional support during the pandemic. During the meetings, students and staff choose a recipe to follow together while they discuss the science behind the ingredients and techniques. During meetings, they also talk about other leisure topics such as favorite winter activities and pet care. She also manages a campus cafe that trains students to independently run the operation (making the beverages and food for staff consumption- available for pick up or special order and delivery). In exchange for volunteering their time, student workers (baristas) have access to free food and beverages on weekdays during the class period, bunch, and lunch. The cafe is volunteer based and runs off of community donations to provide staff and students with complimentary snacks and beverages during the school day. 

Before founding those other programs, she served as an adviser to Student Council (student government created to discuss and align with policies and fiscal concerns relating to non-academic campus activities such as club funding and extra curricular offerings), Leadership (student, staff, and community engagement through coordinated events), WEB (Where Everybody Belongs, called Link Crew at the high school level- an inclusionary training program aimed to prevent bullying, increase engagement, and celebrate diversity), Lunch Club (daily gathering for foodies to share edible creations with those interested in expanding culinary knowledge and provide meals to those that don't have the means to pack/purchase their own lunch during the school day), FBLA Partnership With Businesses- Google (working with various Google Apps to learn the ins and outs of how the company model works), and Fashion Club (a creative space for designers to get help with ideation, iterations, and advanced construction techniques that would culminate in a fashion show where food and beverages were provided by local companies for an evening of music, fun, food, and fashion). 

Ana has co-coordinated many campus events such as Tech Talks (a speaker series aimed to bring industry professionals to campus for informative/interactive/inspirational sessions open to the community as well as former students now working in the tech industry to speak about their journeys), dances, field trips, community engagement events (such as the Back to School Bash, which invites the community members and local businesses to gather on campus with food trucks and family friendly activities), volunteer opportunities (such as blood donations, food bank collections, and adopt-a-family events), and also assists in supervising students, managing volunteers, and reviewing/editing/approving the detailed project plans for said events. 

Ana is a lead Curriculum Developer for the Family & Consumer Sciences Department and with her rich course history and diverse work experience, also contributes her Instructional Design skills to other subject matters such as Socio-Emotional Learning and Coding.  She collaborates with a vast network of educators throughout the country on curriculum creation and lesson design. She is the lead of finance in the FACS Department- working with budgets, donations, money reconciliation, grants, and purchases . Ana is well versed in Ed Code regarding the legalities of various types of expenditures due to her years of experience, education, and proactivity with professional development in the field. Within the Career and Technical Education spectrum, Ana has started several electives on campus and has single handedly developed curriculum and assessments, as well as acquired the necessary supplies and equipment for the success of the new courses in order to provide more real world experiences for students in her continued effort to grow course availability for life skills. The most recent addition, Graphic Design for Screen Printing & Vinyl Cutting, also has a business component where students learn how to track market trends, gather potential customer feedback, and start/grow their own businesses. In the first few months, the class was able to raise a considerable amount of cash for cancer research by selling their designs printed on various apparel items at sporting events on top of paying for their overhead costs. 

With her talents in lesson design, Ana was recently accepted into a small team of local educators to co-design data science curriculum for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. She was also accepted to be a NASA HUNCH educator, which allows her students the opportunity to take on projects which could end up at one of the national NASA facilities or the international space station.

During a time of rising social, emotional, and mental health issues in the student population, Ana began designing lessons to encourage conversations on sensitive topics to help develop students' socio-emotional skills. She shares her lessons nationally and has been designated as a site and district level Social Emotional Learning Experience Designer.

With SB 1383 coming into effect to reduce the waste steam going into our landfills, Ana proactively sought out ways to implement portions of the legislature early by training students in the proactive of composting to help the school garden flourish. She also created a partnership between the cafeteria and Peninsula Food Runners, so leftover food would go to people in need. During this process, she created a space for students with exceptionalities by partnering with the Special Education teacher to provide life skills training. Daily, the students interact with kitchen staff to get the leftover food and bring it to a room where they weigh, log, and store it until it is picked up. Last year, the composting program and sustainability movement was taken school wide through her partnership with the City of Cupertino and Recology, and this year, there will be district wide implementation.

She has taken on serving on the Miller Community Education Foundation Board as the Teacher Representative. The mission of the foundation is to educate all the children. The foundation believes that all children can excel at academics, and activities and citizenship are just as important. Students know that the community has high expectations from them, so they strive to meet them. The fountation welcomes involvement from the staff, parents, and the community.

Ana has an uncanny ability to read people and tailor communication accordingly.  She keeps up with current events and is constantly refreshing and revamping to remain relevant in the fast pace of the Silicon Valley. She adapts well to many situations, regardless of external factors- be it environmental or human, which makes her a favorite amongst staff and students in general, but particularly the special needs population. She is often assigned a high case load of special needs students as she is able to find ways to connect with each child and bring about growth both socially and academically. Using her curriculum development and instructional design skills, as well as her knowledge on developmentally appropriate benchmarks for specific age groups for regular and special education students, she is able to artfully craft lessons that meet the diverse needs of her of any population she works with. Ana is a creative storyteller that links new information with prior understandings to maximize retention rates. Ana also invests time into forming strong socio-emotional bonds with her students, many of whom continue to keep in contact well into adulthood, which speaks highly of the rapport she is able to establish, even with the most difficult to reach students. She is a firm believer in Maslow's Hierarchy and believes it's the key to getting people to engage and produce, intrinsically. 

Being extremely tech savvy, Ana has been appointed the position of EdTech Mentor on campus, loaning her skills to the less tech inclined for troubleshooting (with only one assigned Technology Officer on the entire campus for 100+ staff members and 1200+ students, wait times for help can get lengthy). When new tech is pushed out, manuals and tutorials can be difficult for novices to understand, so she takes it upon herself to rewrite portions of documents, find more resources and consolidate them into quick reference guides, and/or create video tutorials to make the information more accessible to the average user. She also hosts tech help office hours to make sure her colleagues receive support in a time frame that works for them (she gets her step count up running around campus helping teachers with classroom tech issues). With the shift to e-learning during the pandemic, she became a recognized leader within the district with her innovative tech adoption/integration of both new software and hardware into her courses/curriculum. She has been sought out for early adoption for new hardware and software within the district and participated in a pilot/user feedback program with Google for emerging educational technology. She is constantly striving to be on the forefront of the latest and greatest in order to bring fresh and engaging lessons, ideas, and activities to those she works with. She is also a certified AI Pioneer through Magic School and a certified Creative Educator with Adobe.

Photos from top to bottom:

1. Teacher of the Year Award Celebration

2. Technology Innovator of the Year Award Reception

3. 49ers Heroes in the Classroom Award and Surprise Campus Visit

4. Girls Who Code Volunteer Recognition

5. First Graduating Class of UniDiversity- Makerspace Coordinator Certification

6. Celebrating the Completion of a Certificate in CS at the Computer History Museum

7. Girls Who Code & Leadership Coordinated Tech Talk with Henry Garcia from Pixar

8. Always a Student- Taking Classes at the KCI to Keep Bringing Fresh Ideas