Susan

I was a Professor of Education at Alma College in Michigan where I taught Education and Early Childhood Education courses for 15 years. Following my career at Alma, I served as Senior Research Associate at RMC Research Corporation in Denver, conducting educational research. For 5 years, I was a tutor for Boys and Girls Club of Milwaukee’s SPARK early literacy program for struggling readers. My activities for SPARK included: providing 1:1 instruction to children in: phonemic awareness; phonics (using Words their Way); sight words using the Heart Words approach; reading comprehension and writing. I recently earned a micro-credential in the Science of Reading from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Earners of this microcredential can understand and teach the five pillars of the Science of Reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. They can also analyze and synthesize data from literacy assessments and build on Science of Reading content to use professional judgment, fair-mindedness, empathy and ethical behavior using the knowledge and skills to help students read. In addition to the SOR credential, I have also completed three online courses on the teaching of reading: the introductory course for the Wilson Reading System and Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties and Equipped for Reading Success led by reading expert, Dr. David Kilpatrick.

Willing to travel: 15 miles

Experience: For the past year, I have been a tutor for Tutor Doctor in southeast Wisconsin. In that position, I`ve tutored 3 students, two with serious reading delays and one child with dysgraphia, i.e. difficulty expressing his thoughts in writing. I met with each child two or three times a week. For the children with reading difficulties, my lessons stressed phonemic awareness, phonics (using Words their Way), syllable types and syllable division, reading fluency and comprehension and writing. For the student with writing difficulties, my lessons emphasized improving sentence-level writing, using strategies from The Writing Revolution and producing narrative, opinion and information writing. Prior to this experience, I was an early literacy tutor for 5 years for struggling readers for a program in Milwaukee. We tutored K-3rd grade children who had been identified by their teachers as in need of extra support.