Literacy Coach, K-5th grade
At PS 8 since 2004
Stephanie has been running parent workshops at PS 8 since 2004, offering ideas on how to get kids excited about reading and writing, and continues to offer these strategy sessions once every couple of months. But in 2006 she took on a greater role as PS 8′s literacy coach, upping her presence at the school to three days a week and hopping from classroom to classroom. Her job, essentially, is to teach teachers–that is, help them help their students improve their reading skills and their reading comprehension. During a typical classroom visit, Stephanie will conduct a group lesson then work with students one-on-one. “The work the teachers do here is really good,” she says. “I’d like to bring top-drawer, cutting-edge methods to their practice.” It’s important to get kids to engage in a story, she explains, because “comprehension isn’t just about remembering what happened–it’s also about interpretation and analysis, which are two big words, but which can happen even at a young age.”
Stephanie is originally from California. She studied art, photography and sculpture in college, then moved to New York to study acting at David Mamet’s school. She later went back to school to get her master’s in elementary education at Columbia Teacher’s College. She taught 1st grade for four years at PS 321. From 2002 to 2006, Stephanie worked as a staff developer for the CTC’s Reading and Writing Project. She is the co-author of Poetry: Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages (2003) and the author of First Grade Writers: Units of Study to Help Children Plan, Organize, and Structure Their Ideas (2005). She is now working on a book for 2nd-grade teachers. On days when she is not at PS 8, she is often traveling to do private consulting work at other school districts in Houston, Portland, Ore., and other cities across the U.S.
