Doug Lemov's field notes

New Crew! Clockwise from upper left: Engstrom, Frazier, White, McCleary

These are exciting times for Team TLAC. The 3.0 version of our core teaching book has hit the shelves; we’re working with an ever-wider group of schools directly to support their teaching and professional development through extended partnerships; our Reading Curriculum is growing daily; and more schools than ever are using our Dean of Students curriculum. Plus our workshops are available online and we’ve started doing in-person training as well.

To do all that requires talent and I’m excited to announce some key additions to our already amazing team.

First, we’re proud to announce that Sadie McCleary, whose outstanding teaching is featured in TLAC 3.0 and who most recently taught at Western Guilford High School in Greensboro, NC, has joined us as an Associate Director of Content & Partnerships and will be working on developing and disseminating new knowledge and ideas and has already made us a better team in a dozen ways.

We’re also proud to share that  Teneicesia White has also joined our team as School Support Fellow. She’s the former principal of Aurora Collegiate, one of the top schools in Memphis, and has deep roots in the Memphis community. She’ll  be supporting our partner schools in Memphis, and elsewhere, in refining instructional leadership practices, executing professional development and strengthening  teacher support. She’s one of the most respected educators in Memphis so we’re thrilled to leverage her wisdom across even more schools.

And we’re also lucky to have added Sarah Engstrom to the team. She’ll be Associate Director of Curriculum Development, designing and developing rich, knowledge driven units for our Reading Reconsidered curriculum and helping to think about how to make reading teachers more successful at teaching our units. She joins us from another outstanding network, Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia where she was Director of Elementary and Middle School Literacy.

Finally we’re incredibly pleased to announce that Denarius Frazier, one of the most influential teachers we’ve worked with and learned from, and who, not incidentally, is on the cover of 3.0, will join us as a Senior Advisor. He’ll provide guidance and support to our team directly and to the schools we partner with while maintaining his post as principal at Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School. Result: he’ll constantly be channeling up-to-the-minute experience into our learning!