Alana Seidenberg has learned through her years of experience that the way an educator communicates to their students with diagnosed learning disabilities needs to be explicit, direct and sometimes broken down. “Typical learners have the initiative to look and explore, but our students need you to break it down for them and they need practice with the tools you've provided,” she said.  Alana Seidenberg came to Horizon Academy from the Schefa School in New York City. The Schefa School is much like Horizon Academy in that it specifically educates students with diagnosed learning disabilities, like dyslexia. Seidenberg is currently a…

Igniting Real-World Understanding in a 2020 Classroom By Gabi Guillory-Welsh On Halloween night, I saw an incredibly elaborate “2020 Dumpster Fire” costume, complete with dancing flames, graffiti, and two giant dumpster lids flapping in the breeze. While 2020 has been a memorable, stressful, and traumatic year due to a world-altering pandemic, political discord, and reckoning with racial injustice, there has never been a more crucial time to bring real life into the classroom. The world can seem like a scary place, but it is made far less scary when students are immersed in an educational environment that normalizes tough conversations…