All of my experience at YES Prep Public Schools led me to my proudest achievement at YES: earning the title of Director of Academics. As the Director of Academics, I managed the team of instructional leaders including Deans of Instruction, the Literacy Specialist, and Special Education Manager. In addition to managing and coaching this team, I continued to also directly manage six math teachers at the same time. As the Director of Academics, I created the instructional vision and expectations for the campus, created a year-long professional development calendar to support this vision, hired teachers and managed the teacher progress monitoring process, analyzed data weekly from a variety of sources and used that data to influence my team meeting agendas and priorities for my team. This role helped me grow in my ability to manage people who are managing others, my data analysis and implementation skills, my professional development writing and facilitation capability, and even furthered my ability to connect and build relationships with people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

As the Campus Testing Coordinator, I established the testing project plans, led the staff trainings, and created the campus testing schedules that were used by over 1,000 students and staff members. This role helped me to grow by requiring me to collaborate with other departments on campus, learning the state mandated testing expectations, create extremely detailed testing plans, communicate testing procedures to staff, and ensure all testing requirements were met by staff and students. All of these project plans were done over three months per testing session which increased my ability to manage multiple projects over a long period of time.

I served as a Dean of Instruction for two years at YES Prep Public schools and during this time, I was a member of the leadership team while I executed the main part of this role which was to manage and coach teachers. Over the course of two years, I onboarded and engaged in coaching cycles with over twenty teachers with varying degrees of experience ranging from 0-15 years. In classroom observations, I not only took detailed notes that influenced my coaching sessions, but I also engaged in in-the-moment coaching to address gaps immediately. During our coaching sessions, I used data from formative and summative assessments along with notes from my observations to facilitate practice-driven meetings. This role not only helped me to grow in my instructional leadership, but it also increased my ability to individualize support for teachers that was rooted in trust and relationship building.

As a math teacher at YES Prep Public Schools, I served as the lead co-teacher for three different math courses which increased my knowledge of curriculum writing, lesson facilitation, and data analysis. I consistently differentiated instruction for all learners and led my students to over 95% pass rate on the STAAR exam. My passion for strong instruction and eagerness to expand my impact on students led me to apply for and earn the Dean of Instruction role following this teaching position.