Hello visitors! To fill you in a little about myself….. I am a Speech-Language Pathologist who works full-time with elementary-age students on the autism spectrum, with attention deficit challenges, receptive/expressive language needs, and executive function challenges. My primary roles are to teach peer interaction skills, emotion awareness and management strategies, and support receptive and expressive language skills through a literacy lens. In recent years, I have become more focused on exploring how to the integrate social/emotional instruction within the framework of balanced literacy instruction in a collaborative co-teaching manner with other general and special educators. I have been exploring specific strategies and resources to share with audiences in workshops that can accomplish two critical instructional goals – provide engaging, relevant direct instruction supporting social/emotional skills as an added layer to the existing materials and frameworks used in classrooms that target literacy learning standards in reading, written language and speaking/listening domains. A secondary recent focus for me has been to develop strategies for early childhood/primary learners to weave social/emotional instruction into pre-literacy activities.
I have had the opportunity to provide staff development opportunities across the country for the past 8 years, while continuing to recognize the importance of working full-time – immersed in the classroom with learners. I recognize and personally lives through the unique gifts and obstacles of being in the teaching-trenches. In my staff development workshops, I strive to provide concrete, relevant and immediately applicable resources/strategies that teachers can bring back into their classrooms the next day. I am also an adjunct faculty member at Hamline University in St. Paul for the past five years in their Autism Spectrum graduate program. When not immersed in work, my husband and I have 2 teenage sons, I enjoy camping, watching my sons play football, going to the theater, and reading mysteries.
That is a little about me personally, I hope you enjoy the site! – Jill
© Jill D. Kuzma, Minneapolis MN, 2008. All Rights Reserved.
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