Jennifer Finney-Ellison
www.teachingwithjen.com
[email protected]
Theresa Hancock
[email protected]
Blanca Tolpezninkas
[email protected]
Jennifer combines over 20 years of experience in teaching, coaching, and providing training to K-12 teachers and administrators with a mindset that every student and educator endeavors to be successful.
Over the last decade, Jennifer’s work has focused solely on providing instructional support, coaching, and professional development to educators on implementation of district wide ELD programs, improving ELD instruction, creating and enhancing opportunities and instruction of academic English, and the CCSS and California ELD standards.
In addition to being a classroom teacher, she has also been an instructor for a pre-service teacher preparation program through San Francisco State University, and an instructor for Stanford University’s CLAD/CTEL certification program. She has also co-developed second language acquisition coursework for Sacramento County Office of Education’s teacher intern program.
Theresa Hancock is a nationally recognized educational consultant and expert teacher educator. As Dr. Kate Kinsella’s Director of Grants and Senior Associate, Theresa has worked with Kate to co-develop numerous trainings and workshops, and has presented extensively at conferences and county offices, and intensively in districts and schools nationwide. She is the co-author the Academic Vocabulary Toolkit, a supplemental program that focuses on explicit instruction of high-utility academic vocabulary.
Theresa also led the professional development for three major United States Department of Education grants supporting language development from grades K-8 in California and across the nation. As the chief instructor and coach, her grant work helped the districts involved achieve statistically significant gains on language proficiency and English language arts assessments.
Blanca Aguirre-Tolpezninkas is an experienced teacher trainer, coach and practitioner. Her twenty-five years of educational experience include 13 years of teaching in rural schools and 12 years of service as a district lead ELA/ELD coach and ELD consultant in the Central Valley. She has provided guidance and professional learning opportunities for paraprofessionals, instructional coaches, teachers, and administrators in K-12, as well as pre-service educators through university teacher preparation programs. Blanca specializes in analyzing school systems, data, culture, and classroom instruction and determining a plan of action based on a school’s/district’s mission and goals. She has experienced much success by operating as part of a team while effectively taking action towards improvement, building capacity and sustainability. Doing what is best for students and helping them attain their highest potential is at the core of everything she does.