Rachel

Hello everyone, I’m Rachel!  I have nine years of experience within the field of education working with students ranging from kindergarten to college in a variety of subject matters.  I grew up in West Los Angeles and knew in high school that I wanted to work in education following volunteering with children at local libraries during summer reading programs.  Inspired by my amazing and creative history teachers for as long as I can remember, I attended UCLA where I was able to further delve into my passion for the world we live in and how it came to be.  I received my BA in History, and graduated summa cum laude in 2008.

Knowing that I wanted to go into teaching, I spent two years getting valuable elementary classroom experience as a teaching assistant before pursuing a Masters in Teaching with a secondary Social Studies Credential from USC’s Rossier School of Education in 2011.  Following graduation, I taught grades K-5 at Fairburn Avenue Elementary School in the school’s first math intervention program, which I founded to help support struggling math students. I also taught reading, comprehension, speaking, and writing in an after school English Language Development program at Fairburn with students from all over the world.  From 2014-2019 I taught History and English, grades sixth through eighth, at Wise School and Parras Middle School. In and out of the classroom, I have developed learning strategies and curriculum across the grade levels to help students reach their educational goals, while having an expert understanding of students with learning differences and their specific needs. 

Following my years of classroom teaching, I decided that one-to-one instruction was where I could make the greatest impact within the field of education.  Each day, I strive to help build a strong academic foundation for students and help meet academic needs that may not be met in the classroom. I therefore became a Learning Specialist, in which I have put together my past experience as an educator to impart, teach, and develop fundamental skills such as executive functioning, organization, time management, and study skills for any subject matter. I also enjoy working at a deeper level with students to strengthen academic sub-skills that are the building blocks for their daily schoolwork. In order to support emergent readers, for example, I am trained in the Orton-Gillingham approach which strengthens their decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension skills. I firmly believe that all students have the ability to access their curriculum with proper scaffolding that I can provide in an encouraging and motivating one-to-one environment.