In her roles as a secondary English Language Arts Educator, Gifted and Talented Teacher, and Associate Professor of Teacher Education, Dawn continually strives to bring authentic and engaging learning experiences to students of all ages. 

Throughout her career as an educator, Dawn has taught in urban, rural, and suburban districts meeting the needs of children from a wide range of backgrounds and cultures. In addition to general ELA coursework, Dawn’s classroom teaching experience also includes teaching English as a second language, creative writing, film studies, and response to intervention instruction. Dawn’s professional teaching experiences have been showcased in scholarly journals and at local, regional, national, and international conferences.

Prior to becoming an educator, Dawn spent more than 10 years in marketing and publishing in the private sector. This experience has given Dawn insight into the skills and knowledge students need in order to be prepared to enter into a competitive, global workforce or into college once they leave high school. This insight helps to support Dawn’s work in developing veteran, novice, and pre-service teachers as they seek to educate students for tomorrow’s work today.

As a licensed Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Development Specialist, Dawn’s primary goal in all things is to support educators with planning learning that ignites curiosity and that engages and inspires students in a way that impacts their growth and achievement every single day. 

Dawn’s first book, Plan Like a Pirate, is set to release in 2021.

Any of the topics below can be modified for facilitation as breakout sessions, seminars, or workshops.

Anti-Racism Education

GritCrewEDU Equity Team Development Program (K-12)

This comprehensive program offers schools and districts the support and leadership to fully deliver a sustainable and transformational experience to students, staff, and communities. Designed to dismantle racism and heighten racial awareness focusing on anti-racism education, this journey can include a number of intensive supports to establish building or district-wide core equity teams and subcommittees and will lay the foundation for awareness, analysis, assessment, and improvement in alignment with the school or district’s mission, vision, and campus improvement plans. 

Intentionally Designed Villages: Creating Diverse Teaching Teams to Support  Anti-Racism Education (K-12)

To meet the needs of all learners, schools must ensure that the collective body that supports our students in the classroom is even more diverse than the world that immediately surrounds them. No matter the level of diversity within their district, Dawn will guide educators and administrators through the many ways in which they can build alliances and design villages that will better serve the body of children they seek to educate. Participants will explore ways to infuse a range of diverse voices into classroom teaching, and not just from students’ perspectives, but in perspectives that will come from the front of the classroom as well.

Backward Designing Anti-Racism Education (K-12)

Educators will be shown how Backward Design in planning (Wiggins & McTighe) can be used to identify and incorporate anti-racist concepts into subject-area curriculum. In this session, teachers will gain the ability to create learning targets centered on anti-racism education that can sit alongside content-area learning targets. They will also learn methods for assessing understanding and awareness of racism as well as how to develop student-centered learning activities that will increase student engagement as they learn about anti-racism.

Exploring Diversity through Dystopian Literature (7-12 ELA)

Dawn will engage participants in the process of developing a unit plan for secondary ELA that allows students to reflect on the effects of collectivist thinking in societies where freedom of choice and individualism are against the law. Educators will learn to guide students through the creation of their own utopian societies that compare their unique visions of an ideal world with one another's. From their work, students (and teachers) will come to realize there is a fine line between “Me First,” and “We First,” thinking which can make all the difference in a society.

Lesson Planning & Curriculum Design

Essential Planning Practices to Engage, Inspire, and Grow Students Every Day (7-12)

This session provides classroom teachers and administrators with a flexible framework for the creation of engaging learning segments for middle and high school level classrooms. The practices presented in this session consist of research-based, high yield methods for improving students' academic, social, and emotional growth. By implementing these essential practices consistently, educators will establish a rigorous, relationship-centered learning environment that students will look forward to as they come to school each day.

Planning High, Deep, and Wide: Differentiating in the Gifted Classroom (K-12)

As educators of gifted and talented students, it is imperative that we find ways, just as our fully-inclusive teaching peers do, to differentiate for our gifted students as well. In this session, Dawn will walk teachers through the process of developing learning targets for gifted learners and will provide support with crafting learning plans that meet the needs of all of our gifted learners using a self-paced, spiraling curriculum filled with an abundance of differentiated learning strategies.

Not Just Tech for Tech’s Sake: Purposeful Use of Technology to Engage and Assess (K-12)

Participants will be introduced to engaging tech tools and apps that offer up useful ideas for activities that encourage participation, offer timely feedback, and that provide the formative data necessary to drive instruction targeted to individual learners.

Project-Based, Inclusive Learning Design

The Credo Project: Comprehensive Language and Literacy Study in 7-12 ELA

The Credo Project allows students the opportunity to design and develop their own web-based blog in which they build upon their personal credo statements to generate published content. Through this project, teachers will help students improve English language, reading, and writing skills via a comprehensive review of ELA concepts and content. Educators will be able to guide students through tailoring their projects to their own individual interests, values, and belief systems while simultaneously helping them to build real-world, relevant skills for life beyond the classroom walls.

Problem-Based Service Learning with Passion Projects (7-12)

Students who engage in problem-based learning tend to experience greater understanding and also enjoy learning much more than when participating in traditional types of assessments that only evaluate a few skills. In this session or workshop, Dawn will guide participants through the process of increasing student awareness surrounding issues in society through service learning projects that students design and create themselves. Using the model of Twenty Percent time, teachers will learn to regularly allocate time in class for students to engage in these self-directed, self-paced projects that address important social issues or community needs.

Educator Professional Growth

The Power of Connecting with Your PLN

Author of the Educator’s Guide to Twitter for Professional Growth, Dawn will lead administrators, educators, and other education professionals through the steps necessary to leverage the power of Twitter to develop deep connections with educators and administrators from across the country and around the world. Dawn will share real-life examples of educator and student growth fueled by connections made within Twitter PLNs.

Communication Arts for Educators

As a seminar or workshop, Dawn will assist both veteran and pre-service teachers in honing their skills as communicators so they can pass those same skills on to students. Educators will participate in various oral and written communication activities and will learn to create engaging performance-based assessments that will help students to strengthen their media and visual literacy skills as well as help students to improve their own communication skills.  

Your Best Evaluation Yet!

Dawn will walk participants through effective planning for formal and informal observations and how to establish talking points for evaluations and pre- and post-conference discussions. The session involves educators in breaking down teaching standards; gathering and assessing data to inform instruction; lesson plan design; evidence collection and presentation; and compiling assessment data that demonstrates teacher effectiveness.