2022 Summer Institute Facilitator Bios

Jessica Catoggio: Elementary Ed Facilitator
Jessica Catoggio, Director of Professional Learning for World Leadership School has deep experience coaching teachers around inquiry-based pedagogies. She is passionate about building communities and aims to connect with others through differences and similarities. She values inquiry, curiosity, and in-depth questioning and helps teachers create dynamic classroom communities in which all students thrive. Jessica is a veteran teacher with 20 years experience in both public and independent schools, including the last 13 years as a lower school teacher at Collegiate School in Richmond, VA. While at Collegiate, Jessica evolved her project-based approach after taking multiple PBL trainings and receiving her coaching certificate from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. She coaches and trains teachers at all divisions, but especially loves returning to her elementary roots in working with Lower School teachers. She earned her Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia and went on to receive a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In her free time, she enjoys reading, baking, traveling, and paddling Richmond’s beautiful James River with her husband and two children. She can’t leave home without her Sheepadoodle puppy, Rally!

Ellie Donnell: English Facilitator

Ellie Donnell’s first teaching experience was leading a group of high-schoolers on a cross-country bike trip, where she learned the value of giving students the maps, giving them ownership of and responsibility for the trip, putting them in charge of changing their own tires, and deciding when to stop for breaks and what to cook for dinner.  For 15 years after that, she worked hard to find ways to give students the maps in her classroom.  Ellie taught English (to grades 8-12), journalism, and art history at Swiss Semester, Walnut Hill School for the Arts, Chadwick School, Marlborough School, Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, and Rye Country Day, where she designed place-based courses and was involved with Round Square, service learning, and outdoor ed (and in efforts to break down the silos that so often keep school initiatives from being integrated).  Ellie recently joined the team of curriculum writers at Great Minds, where she is working to design an inquiry-based high school ELA curriculum to be adopted by school districts throughout the U.S.  She learns best by doing, and she gets excited about backwards planning, Kurt Hahn, interdisciplinary and experience-based course design, ways to shake up traditional ideas about teaching and learning, and how to make four years of high school English more authentic, more relevant, and more interesting for students. She has an undergraduate degree from Williams College and a master’s degree from Teachers College at Columbia; she loves Santa Fe, and she's thrilled to be joining the Summer Institute.

Jeremy Goldstein: History Facilitator
Jeremy is a passionate education leader with demonstrated experience leading key growth initiatives within education and nonprofits. Known as an expert in delivering innovative, experiential education strategies that focus on mastery-based assessment and human-centered design. Articulate, committed, and hands-on with a proven progressive career reflecting strong management experience that builds and leads motivated teams. Highly praised for work ethic, accountability, ability to delegate tasks, problem-solving and communication skills, and successful delivery of work.

After graduate school, Jeremy worked as a Forensic Archaeologist and Anthropologist in Southeast Asia. In 1998 he was fortunate enough to pursue my passion for teaching and learning when I served as a long term substitute in a Chester, S.C. public high school. My independent school background includes teaching grades 5-12 in a wide array of subjects that cover Modern Languages (French/Spanish), World and US History, Science, Global Studies, and World Religions. I began working in educational leadership when I was tasked with directing a growing Global Education program in Rhode Island. Jeremy currently serves on the senior leadership team at Episcopal High School as the Executive Director of the McCain - Ravenel Center where he leads teams in developing innovative place-based curriculum, design new professional development opportunities, and helps grow the school's network of partners in the greater Washington area and beyond. Using anthropology and a design thinking mindset as a foundation, Jeremy strives to build energy around innovation and connecting communities to unique strategic partnerships.

Megan joins us from Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where she teaches physics and robotics. Megan’s students have learned through experience in diverse ways, including playing music on instruments they built, taking photos with pinhole cameras they designed, and analyzing the physics of popular viral videos. The key, she says, to make a classroom experiential is twofold: 1) adjust your traditional notions of “covering content” and 2) allow students the time and space to genuinely reflect on their experiences. Before finding her way to the classroom, Megan worked in the factory automation and internet security industries. Megan holds a MAT in Secondary Mathematics Education from Georgia State University and a Bachelor of Engineering in Materials Engineering from Auburn University.

Math Discipline Facilitator - Erik Johnke
Erik Johnke has been a math educator for 30 years, and has taught every level of math from Pre Algebra to Calculus, including Probability and Statistics. For 17 years he worked at CITYterm at the Masters School. A leader in experience-based education, the CITYterm curriculum was an interdisciplinary, experience-based semester program for students around the country who studied New York City for one semester. Projects at CITYterm integrated the literature, history and urban environment of New York City and students were in the city an average of three times per week. Erik has also researched and written extensively on collaboration and led workshops on the design and assessment of collaborative projects for NYSAIS. He teaches math at Greenwich Country Day School, where he is currently teaching Algebra 2, Precalculus with an emphasis on mathematical modelling and real-world applications, and electives he has created this year: Mathematics of Personal and Public Finance, and Mathematics of Sustainability. He is also the coordinator of Intersession, a three week learning intensive in which students do a deep dive into one topic. 

Sarah Tiamiyu: Elementary Ed Facilitator

Sarah Tiamiyu is an  Elementary Ed Facilitator co-teaching with Jessica Catoggio. Sarah formerly taught Elementary Education at  Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. She currently teaches multi-aged students at the first modern global school, the Whittle School and Studios in Washington, DC. As she embarks on her 19th year of teaching, in both public and independent schools, she continues to make arts integration central to her teaching and experiential education work.  She is deeply focused on personalizing curriculum that is adaptable to both student's needs and strengths. For Sarah,  learning is pervasive and must go beyond both  the classroom and teacher. She has written multiple grants in her career focused on differentiation, mindfulness and experiential learning. She has completed all PBL courses through the Buck Institute as well as being an active participant at the annual POCC hosted by NAIS.

In her current classroom setting, you can find her students driven by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, building structures that personify an emotion, or producing and filming their own documentaries. 

Lynne West: World Languages Facilitator
After spending 17 years both teaching and leading teachers in K-12 schools in San Jose, California, Lynne West founded Sunodia Educational Consulting to share her passion for teaching with her fellow educators. As a teacher, Lynne shared her passion for language with her students.  She used her foundation in backward curricular planning and cooperative learning to design creative and engaging lessons for the students in her French and Latin classes. In 2016, she was a recipient of a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching grant and spent six months conducting a research project in the Netherlands on language learning methodologies. A true lifelong learning, in 2018, Lynne moved to Valencia, Spain to continue to explore her love of language and culture.  Lynne has presented workshops on cooperative learning, differentiated instruction, backward planning, and teaching with technology. In addition, she provides personalized instructional coaching sessions. Lynne earned her teaching credential from Santa Clara University, her masters in Classics from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and her BA in Ancient Greek and Latin from the University of California at Los Angeles.