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Consultant Profiles
Deborah Stern is the principal consultant at R4. She is a dynamic teacher, school leader, and teacher educator with extensive experience working in underserved communities. She has been working in urban classrooms since 1988, first as an NCTE award-winning middle and high school English teacher in Chicago, and more recently as a teacher, coach, and charter school administrator in Philadelphia. Deborah's teaching and writing have been featured in professional journals and books about teaching, most notably in Teaching English So It Matters: Creating Curriculum For and With High School Students (Corwin Press, 1994). After years in high school English classrooms in Chicago, she began teaching pre-service and veteran teachers, and moved to Philadelphia to study students’ struggles with motivation, learning, and accountability in urban schools.
Deborah was a co-founder at Mastery Charter Schools, and served there as the first Director of Education. Since leaving Mastery in 2008, she has worked as a subcontractor with Children's Literacy Initiative, Bloom Planning, and School Improvement Partnership, and as an independent contractor providing a variety of educator coaching and professional learning services, design assistance, program audits, online schooling support, hiring, and curriculum services.
B.A. Swarthmore College
M.A.T. University of Chicago
PhD. University of Pennsylvania
Strategic Partners
Pamela Abramson is an expert in early literacy instruction and K-12 reading intervention. She is a former classroom teacher in New York City public schools and has worked with a number of urban districts as an Early Reading advisor, teacher coach, and content specialist. Pam helps schools plan systemic literacy support services, showing teachers and school leaders how to use improvement science to increase learning for struggling readers. She has also evaluated instructional practices of tenured teachers for continued service.
B.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.A. New York University
Stacey Carlough specializes in English education, curriculum development, and pre- and in-service teacher education and instructional coaching. She is on staff at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, where she works as the Director of Training at the Office of School and Community Engagement and the Coaching Coordinator for the Urban Teaching Residency Program. Stacey supervises student teachers from Swarthmore College and Drexel University and is an adjunct faculty member at the Arcadia University School of Education. Stacey served as high school English teacher, department chair, and program director in Philadelphia public schools for over a decade.
B.A. University of Delaware
M.S.Ed. University of Pennsylvania