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Audio Title: 084 Designing an Effective PD for Faculty with Alexa Johnson
Audio Duration: 0:40:25
Number of Speakers: 2
Transcript
Fred Jaravata: Hi everyone. My name is Fred Jaravata and welcome to our show, the Teaching Bites Podcast, where we connect you with awesome people and some amazing ideas to take your teaching to the next level.
Today I have a very special guest. Now I’ve been chasing her around the past six months or so, maybe something like that. She’s a very dear colleague and friend I work with here in the boys’ school. Her name is Alexa Johnson and I’m going to go ahead and turn over to her and introduce herself real quick.
Before we do that, I want to congratulate you with the Cubbies going to the World Series.
Alexa Johnson: Thank you. I’m very excited.
Fred Jaravata: You guys beat the Giants, yes, and I’m a Giants fan. But you also beat the Dodgers.
Alexa Johnson: Yes.
Fred Jaravata: Which is awesome.
Alexa Johnson: Exactly. Well, it’s about time, 108 years, I think. Hopefully this is the Cubbies’ year.
Fred Jaravata: This is the – yeah. All right. So Alexa, so go ahead and give us an intro about yourself, a minute, two-minute intro about who you are, what you do and how did you get to this part of the universe.
Alexa Johnson: Wonderful. So name is Alexa Johnson and aside from being – from Chicago, as we just discussed, I am an educator and I’ve been in my current position for about five years. So right now, I am the lower school dean at Stuart Hall for Boys and I work with kindergarten through fourth graders and prior to that, I taught as a classroom teacher for 13 years and taught grades one through four. I’ve loved being able to bring that wide range in perspective to this role in administration.
Fred Jaravata: Now, hold on. Now, when I was getting my master’s at USF at 2010, I student-taught under you.
Alexa Johnson: Yes!
Fred Jaravata: Remember that? Yeah.
Alexa Johnson: Yes, that was a while ago.
Fred Jaravata: So you have a lot – that was six years out of that. But that was an amazing experience. I get to see you – we taught the same grade levels over the years but also I was able to learn from you, when I was getting my master’s also. So thank you for that. Sorry to interrupt. But I might interrupt a lot by the way.
Alexa Johnson: That’s fine.
Fred Jaravata: All right.
Alexa Johnson: No problem. And I would say – so for the most part, when we were working together as teaching fourth grade and for the most part, I did teach fourth grade and really just love that year and I think that fourth grade instruction really led me to student-centered teaching and really became a passion of mine, which is going to be a large part of our topic today and I think as I evolved as an educator, I really leaned more and more heavily in that direction and realized how much fun it is to teach with that kind of philosophy and how much fun it is not only for the kids but for me as well, and just really love to pass that, what I’ve learned, along to others because it can take kind of a mindset shift from our traditional ideas of instruction and teaching when you look at moving towards a more student-centered model.
So anyway, I started here actually as an assistant teacher at Stuart Hall for Boys years and years ago and then left and worked in charter schools for a couple of years in East Palo Alto and Marin City and found myself really missing the Stuart Hall for Boys community and Sacred Heart community and I ended up finding my way back here to Stuart Hall as a first grade lead teacher and...
