Erica Levich

I am the founder of Your Classroom Academy, which I officially started on January 3rd, 2025, though I began working with schools this past fall. My journey in education spans over 16 years, beginning when I was substitute teaching in New York while applying to the New York Teaching Fellows program. After moving back to California to get my teaching credential, I taught at my old middle school for 7 years, where I taught math and the AVID elective class. Through teaching AVID, I attended professional development at the AVID Summer Institute every summer for 6 years, which showed me how incredibly important and useful relevant professional development is for making teachers stronger and classrooms function better. After about 6 years of teaching, I became the AVID coordinator at my school and started doing professional development for my own staff, then began working with our AVID representative from Sacramento doing trainings around the area. I eventually landed a program manager role with AVID and moved to Paso Robles, where I supported about 85 schools across 25 districts in San Luis Obispo, San Benito, Santa Cruz, and Monterey counties for 7 years. I also began presenting at the summer institutes I used to attend, teaching teachers how to become stronger, more impactful educators using research-based strategies. Through all of this work, I noticed that schools struggled to translate the intense learning from summer institutes into their fall practice because school life gets busy and things fall apart. That's why I created Your Classroom Academy - to take all that instructional strategy and professional development planning off teachers' plates by providing a year-long scope and sequence that delivers research-based best practices in bite-sized chunks so teachers can develop confidence over time. Everything is done virtually except for an in-person launch at the beginning of the school year, and I offer coaching that can be layered onto the program. What excites me most is hearing from teachers who are implementing these strategies and experiencing their students doing the work instead of them - having those aha moments about student engagement and learning.