Christian Paiz
"STEP provided important tools for my development and growth as an educator, such as backwards planning, developing enduring questions, fostering student participation in heterogeneous classrooms and emphasizing skill-developing lesson plans. It gave me a solid pedagogical foundation for entering the classroom. And although the first year was challenging, I felt confident that I would be able to improve professionally given my training in STEP.”
A major goal of STEP is to create teacher-leaders and Christian sees that there are many things that need to be accomplished in schools and “If an educator takes on any of these responsibilities, with the intention of transforming our schools (and, ideally, our communities) into empowering, democratic institutions, then I think that educator is a teacher-leader.” Some things that Christian did as a teacher-leader were: helping to lead the school’s accreditation process; giving workshops on integrating writing into history classes; and serving as the AP US History core teacher. After teaching history for several years, Christian is now in a history PhD program at USC.