Her Story
About Michelle
I got started in this field wanting to help people communicate, and I just realized over time that doing that at a higher level was a quality approach for reaching people. It's been a very long and happy career. I've been in supervisory positions for over 25 years and have definitely guided people to get doctorates. I've been a reader for dissertations and sat in people's instances, helping them get higher jobs. What I learned as a speech pathologist regarding phonology, sounds, and segmentation all goes very deeply into what we're learning about how to read and how to support a child who's having trouble in reading. I'm also very interested in staying current with mental health for students, challenging students, students with disabilities, students with anxiety. I make sure that we're not just adding more academic accomplishments for students to achieve, but that we're also supporting them in a way that makes sure that they're resilient, so that when they leave public school, they have the tools to be okay if they have a failure. I'm 59, and a lot of my mentors are out of the field now, but their purpose and vision I still carry with me.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Michelle
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say make sure that you stay current in what the research and the data is telling you. You will walk into places with a lot of institutional knowledge and structures, but you need to be curious enough to know which will stay due to tradition and which ones need to change based on what we know, because we can only do as well as what we know at the time, and when we know better, we need to be doing better. You want to make sure that we're committing to the current best practices, because kids deserve that.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The world is getting more and more challenging, and we need to make sure that we're not just adding more academic accomplishments for students to achieve, but that we're also supporting them in a way that makes sure that they're resilient, so that when they leave public school, they have the tools to be okay if they have a failure, because they will have a failure. They need to be able to join people to coordinate and be in cooperative learning and activity, because life is a cooperative learning activity, and you have to be able to negotiate that. Sometimes in the general track of public school, we don't necessarily have a lot of tool building in mental health, and you need that if you're going to prepare people for either college or career.
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