Principal

Our Visionary!....Our Leader!....OUR PRINCIPAL!

As a teacher, I have devoted my craft to developing students’ capacities as lifelong learners and as empathetic beings. By converging social justice components with literacy skills and project based learning, my students were able to remain engaged and excelled in their achievement because they understood the relevancy of their work. It is through this lens that I have formed and implemented my vision of leadership for a school environment. It is with this same vigor and passion that I have approached my leadership.

As the Resident Principal at South Loop one my proudest accomplishments was forming the diversity committee. This collective of teachers helped to develop strategies for attacking the achievement gap by providing supports for underachieving students. We examined data weekly to target areas of instructional concern. I instituted the reading of research articles to encourage the committees’ goals of including more diverse instruction to engage all students. Some of our successes included implementing a sophisticated mentoring system, including student voice and reporting these findings to the middle school team for consideration and implementation as they planned instruction. Additionally, I worked with teachers to develop internal professional development cycles around math instruction. Our work included instructional rounds, peer feedback, adapted professional developments and the institution of deprivatized practice. I created surveys to determine the effectiveness of the PD’s that included teacher voice in the upcoming sessions. Under my leadership the PLC worked really hard to produce innovative teacher led PD’s that led to a successful and collaborative year.

Send Taranika Sander's an email at taranika.Sanders@tusd1.org!