What did you most enjoy about being a coach with ELP?
My favorite thing about being at Envision Learning Partners has been the people. It has been so great to work with a team of people full of such brilliance, integrity, and creativity. Most of the best moments have been during car (or plane) rides between professional development sessions and post-meeting meetings where we’d all talk and argue and learn about each others’ challenges, questions, insights, and strategies for helping schools.
What was your favorite coaching experience?
It is really hard to pick just one favorite coaching experience but, if I had to, it would probably be working with Vinci Daro [ELP’s Director of STEM Learning] and Tamyra Walker [Envision Education’s Director of Math] to build out professional learning programs for the Envision math teachers.
What are your plans now?
My plan is to pursue a Ph.D. in Math Curriculum & Teacher Education so I can, hopefully, learn even more ways to be more useful to schools.
Jim’s Background
As STEM Assessment Specialist at Envision Learning Partners (ELP), Jim played a key role on the ELP STEM team in his work with teachers and school leaders to improve math instruction, connect assessment and learning, and build educator capacity to support students’ language development in the process. Jim came to ELP from Understanding Language/Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (UL/SCALE), which he joined in 2016 after working for two years as a teacher collaborator on SCALE’s PBL curriculum project Learning Through Performance Middle School Mathematics. He taught 6th grade mathematics at East Bay Innovation Academy (Oakland, CA), which uses a combination of blended learning and project-based learning. Before that, he taught at public schools in Philadelphia and in Ghana.
Jim’s experience as a middle school math teacher brings a classroom lens to his work on performance task design, rubric design, analysis of student work, and professional development. Jim’s curriculum development experience includes building language development opportunities into math and science curricula, including the Illustrative Mathematics OER curriculum, and working with the English Learner Success Forum to train curriculum developers in designing materials that attend to both mathematical and language development. His professional development experience includes working with the CALLI (California Language and Learning Innovation) Collaborative project. At ELP, he continued to facilitate professional development empowering math teachers to write high-quality performance assessments. He is also a member of the research team for the Measures of Deeper Learning project, supporting our work with schools engaged in the assessment of social-emotional learning competencies.
Follow Jim on Twitter @JimMalamut.
