Hello! I’m Erin, and I’m a Literacy Specialist at Mind by Design. I work with students across the literacy continuum, from children building foundational reading and spelling skills to older students who need support organizing and expressing sophisticated ideas in writing.

Reading and writing can feel frustrating or overwhelming for many students. I love helping to demystify the process and make literacy more manageable, meaningful, and enjoyable.

I’m passionate about this work because I believe that reading and writing are fundamental human rights. Strong literacy skills allow us to access information, communicate our ideas, advocate for ourselves, and experience our world in ways we might not otherwise. I especially enjoy building meaningful relationships with students that help them feel safe taking risks and trying, even when they’re uncertain. We learn by doing, and making mistakes is part of the learning process.

As I get to know each student as a reader, writer, and learner, I look first for strengths and then for the skills that need additional support. My goal is to identify and address learning gaps through explicit, individualized instruction while equipping students with tools they can increasingly use independently. Ongoing feedback and collaboration with families allow us to work as partners in each student’s educational journey.

Educational & Professional Background

My background bridges both foundational literacy and advanced writing instruction. Before focusing on elementary reading intervention, I taught first-year college writing as an adjunct instructor, drawing on my graduate training in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse. That experience continues to shape the way I support developing writers with sentence construction, organization, argument, evidence, revision, and communicating their ideas clearly.

More recently, I worked as a reading interventionist in a Title I school in a local school district, and provided individualized and small-group support in phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, encoding and spelling, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and written language.

My professional development includes training through the Santa Clara County Office of Education’s California Collaborative for Learning Acceleration (CCLA) in foundational literacy, as well as 33 hours of Orton-Gillingham Classroom Educator-level coursework in Structured Literacy. I incorporate explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multisensory approaches into instruction while tailoring lessons to each student’s learning profile.

Because students learn in different ways, I also value continuing professional learning and staying current with evidence-aligned literacy practices informed by the science of reading so I can best support students across grade levels.