“Formidable! Very helpful to see and use tools I can use in my classroom. ”
Welcome to EmpowerED where teacher professional development goes to you. Teachers will personally experience easily adaptable and implementable protocols and methods to evolve their instruction toward a student-centered and student-driven environment. Grade level student samples will be shown and templates/guidelines will be provided.
Single PD
For a full or half day, teachers will use contract time to experience lessons, feel EmpowerED, and learn three versatile protocols and other engagement skills they can implement directly in their classrooms.
Continuous PD
For one academic year, teachers will have two whole-group PD experiences focused on various tools and practices. After the first PD experience, each teacher plans lessons with EmpowerED to be demonstrated in the (virtual) classroom selecting the tool and/or strategy of his/her choice, followed by a debrief after each lesson. If desired, a co-teaching lesson will be planned. A second PD experience will be scheduled with tools and protocols not demonstrated in the first experience. Another round of (virtual) classroom demonstration or co-teaching will be in place.
Custom PD
EmpowerED will respond to your school site's and teachers' needs in terms of number of PD, demonstrations, and co-teaching lessons.
Valerie Sun, Ed.D.
Meet Valerie, your coach!
Valerie is a techy dual-immersion educator since 2006 in private and public schools across elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education. She is the oddball who truly enjoys teaching every grade level and has no particular age group preference. She dedicated four years to developing and teaching a tech-infused French dual-immersion curriculum in Los Angeles. In 2017, Valerie earned her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership at California State University, Los Angeles, where her dissertation and research focused on support for teachers and parents in dual-immersion programs. Her dissertation is titled Dueling Complexities: Experiences of Dual-Lang Immersion Teachers.
To stay current as a scholar practitioner, she regularly attends and presents at research and edtech conferences such as ACTFL, NABE, and CUE. She also continues with her immersion research while volunteering as a guest teacher in various classrooms. She is a proud Lead Learner and BOLD Faculty with CUE, an Apple Teacher, a certified Raspberry Pi Educator, a Discovery Education Network Star, a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert, and a certified Nearpod Educator. She is also a certified examiner and corrector for ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL), France Education International Diplôme d’Études en Langue Française (DELF/DALF), and France Education International Test de Connaissance du Français (TCF).
Aside from providing professional development to educators, she teaches part-time at CSU, Los Angeles in the Division of Applied and Advanced Studies in Education and a teacher trainer with the California World Languages Project at Occidental College.
