About Me

              I am extremely excited to continue my career at Higley High School, GO KNIGHTS!  This is my eleventh year as a teacher, and this is my seventh year at Higley.  I have obtained a BA in Education with an emphasis in History, and I have earned my MEd in Education Leadership, GO DEVILS!  Prior to my education career, I served in the U.S. Army for four years.  I was stationed in Germany and had the unique opportunity not only to experience military culture but also see almost all of Europe along with parts of the Middle East.  I love foreign cultures and World History, and I cannot wait to grow with you in our experiences as Knights!    

 Philosophy

              I embrace teaching as an opportunity to inspire and empower.  As a teacher, it is my goal to enhance student learning as a transformative experience.  Ideally, I want students to feel personally changed by their participation in a course I am teaching.  Promoting an understanding that social and political forces shape the construction and utilization of knowledge is central to my philosophy of teaching because it helps students sharpen critical thinking skills in order to enable them to transgress epistemological limitations.  One way I work to encourage students to challenge existing boundaries is by teaching them to make the familiar strange and question how they have come to know what they believe to be true about their world.  This helps students see boundaries, whether personal or social, as constructed and affords them an opportunity to challenge and move beyond them.  It is this movement “against and beyond boundaries” that both empowers and transforms learners. 

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.        

-Socrates

Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever.

-Cicero