Projects

WMS House Teams

Our slogan at Wellborn Middle School is “You Belong Here,” and for several years our primary vehicle to teach character and make each student and staff member feel like they are part of the family was House Teams – our signature program – which I coordinated.

The school was divided into six houses, which competed for the house championship through academic achievement, demonstrating character, and winning competitions. Each house was further divided into four “families,” smaller groups that met weekly with 2-3 staff members for lessons based on our WMS core values and for developing a sense of belonging.

My role included leading a nine-person design team in creating these weekly family lessons and monthly house competitions in the gym – an organization-intensive task. I also created a leadership academy for 30 student leaders elected by our house families; this included semi-annual full-day retreats, regular meetings with community leaders, and preparing them to lead their family lessons and take responsibility for their school community. I continue to run this program, having merged it with Student Council.

You can read more about my work with House Teams in this article in The Eagle.

Curriculum Design

As one of two 8th grade social studies teachers on the College Station ISD curriculum writing team, I spent dozens of hours creating the district’s US History curriculum.

Beginning with the TEKS, we mapped out the topics and assigned a range of days for each unit. Traditionally, CSISD teachers had heavily emphasized the first four units, leaving only February – April for the (more frequently STAAR-tested) final two-thirds of the course content. Our scope and sequence was more evenly distributed, and the teachers seem to have bought in.

Each unit contains essential questions, enduring understandings, lessons and activities for individual topics, and a performance assessment (separate from the unit exam) that evaluates students’ understanding of the key concepts and their ability to apply these understandings to real-world tasks. Here is a sample curriculum document.

We piloted the new curriculum – including implementing spiraled review activities – at WMS during the 2020-2021 school year and saw tremendous gains on our STAAR results.

Transformation of AP / Pre-AP Spanish

At Victoria East High School, I taught Spanish II, Spanish III (Pre-AP), and Spanish IV (AP). On taking over the AP course, I discovered that the existing course was entirely based on reading classic literature, but the AP exam required students to speak, read, write, and listen to Spanish in a wide variety of modern contexts. Additionally, the course only attracted about two students each year. So I convinced the district to approve a new textbook and set about redesigning the course.

These changes significantly increased the course’s rigor, leading to a new challenge: students exiting Pre-AP Spanish III were unprepared both for the level of Spanish and for the amount of new content. To solve this, I met with Victoria ISD’s director of secondary instruction to propose a plan for a new, vertically-aligned Pre-AP Spanish program. The plan created (previously nonexistent) Pre-AP Spanish I and II courses, distributed AP-tested topics among all four years (as opposed to covering all the AP topics in Year 4), and called for teaching all four levels in more of an AP-style immersion format.

The district approved my plan, and I was given several professional development days to train the district’s secondary Spanish teachers in the new program. By the third year of implementation, I had 15 students in my AP course and a 73 percent passing rate on the AP exam, and other VISD schools experienced similar success as well.

School Director in Puebla, Mexico

As the director of Puebla Christian School, I was responsible for the school’s academics, finances, and general operations. I took on the role later in the fall semester after the unexpected departure of the previous director and led 19 multinational staff members in navigating the challenges of life in a foreign country while also providing a quality education to an extremely diverse student body.

A major responsibility was recruiting and retaining talented staff members. On taking over as director, I had to give up many of the administrative tasks I had previously performed and was able to hire a talented assistant to handle much of my former workload. I had also taught a couple of high school math classes and was able to hire a part-time math instructor to fill those roles. When I left, all positions (including the director) were filled for the following school year.

The school was woefully lacking in technology, which I saw as a potential solution to the ongoing difficulty of attracting a wide enough variety of qualified teachers from the United States. The board agreed to purchase laptops and subscriptions to distance-learning options, allowing high school students to greatly expand the electives available to them. Additionally, I worked with teachers to add elective courses in their areas of interest – for example, one teacher who had majored in economics was thrilled to be able to add an AP course on the subject.

Other responsibilities included caring for staff members – everything from listening to their challenges to driving them to pick up groceries to hosting conflict mediation – as well as planning events, handling student discipline, and even managing details like getting the school vehicles inspected and plunging toilets (an all-too-common occurrence). But perhaps my favorite part of the job was mentoring a group of secondary boys through soccer-themed meetings at a nearby field. When we returned to Texas at the end of the year, I was satisfied to feel like I was leaving the school in better shape.