Aleda (she/her) is passionate about supporting educators in learning about and adapting instructional and assessment practices to better meet students’ learning needs. Since 2010, Aleda has worked in the Waterloo Region District School Board, holding a range of roles. As a reflective classroom practitioner, she has implemented building thinking classroom practices and witnessed their significant impact on the students’ learning: through consistent opportunities to think deeply, to question, to care for each other, to contribute to a learning community.

In coaching and consultant roles, Aleda’s work has focused on building teachers’ capacity to implement more student-centred approaches to instruction and assessment, focusing most recently on grades 7-10 numeracy, literacy and destreaming in Ontario. Aleda believes that the thinking classroom framework offers educators tangible practices to meet students’ diverse learning needs, differentiate opportunities, and build students’ self-efficacy. A mathematics and English teacher by qualification, Aleda is skilled at seeing how tasks, learning experiences, opportunities for consolidation as well as assessment might elicit more thinking and discussion with and from students.

Aleda is a skilled adult learning facilitator in classroom-embedded and workshop settings, and has presented at conferences, including those hosted by the Ontario Association of Mathematics Educators and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. She has supported WRDSB and other Ontario boards in their implementation of BTC. She is committed to learning alongside and engaging educators through meaningful experiences and conversations that centre responding to, and improving, student learning.