Tara Korbanics Email & Phone Number

Currently, I teach multilingual learners at the high school level in Virginia. I work with students from Central American countries, Afghanistan and China. I also teach and tutor Chinese students online. I personalize students’ instruction, since my students speak, read, listen, and write in English with varying levels of proficiency. I use their strengths, interests, goals, backgrounds, and metacognitive abilities to design programming that targets the areas in which they need to grow the most. At school, I also push into content area classrooms as a collaborative teacher helping ensure that students can both access the content and communicate their understanding of the content. I collaborate with content area teachers to create high quality modified instructional materials and assessments.As a literacy specialist in New Hampshire elementary schools, I actively collaborated with my colleagues through committee work, classroom observation, workshops, and co-teaching to help facilitate my district's many curricular shifts. I examined data, reviewed best practices in student-centered and data-driven instruction, and developed lessons, and assessments with colleagues that matched our findings. This required an ability to manage multiple design and development projects while maintaining a full teaching course load.I have also served as a University Supervisor for the College of William and Mary numerous times. In this role, I worked with student teachers and their cooperating teachers to develop tailored mentoring. Each student teacher that I worked with had different strengths and areas that needed developing. Mentoring, advising, and evaluating them as they worked toward becoming the most excellent practitioners possible, was rewarding for me. It has always motivated me to stay up to date on best practices in curriculum design, implementation, and assessment.Data-based decision making, responsive, student-driven instruction, and professional collaboration have been at the core of my life, as a classroom teacher, online tutor, university supervisor, and literacy specialist. I have experience recognizing and addressing the priorities, and needs of multiple stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, and administrators) with respect, dedication, and efficiency and through relationship building, which to me, is the very heart of my teaching practice.My love and respect for others’ cultures, as well as my desire to promote equity and inclusion motivate me to continually work to hone my professional skills as a teacher, and a lifetime learner.