Ella has a BA in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and a certificate in Waldorf education for grades 1-8. She is fully trained in Lindamood Bell modalities where she worked for 5 years and has 18+ years experience in small group and one-on-one instruction, including seven years working with bilingual Special Education students in the San Francisco Unified School District.

Ella specializes in teaching number sense, and elementary math including fractions, decimal calculation (money), basic Algebra, plane Geometry, and telling time. She also teaches reading and comprehension. Her students are those who are far behind their cohort, struggling with math, reading, or to recall their reading, with ADHD, dyslexia, expressive language, or auditory processing disorders. Her pupils have ranged in age from kindergarten to adulthood, from those with mild learning differences to those recovering from stroke and brain injury.

Why Ella and not a tutoring center?

Excellent Question! First of all, Ella will not hold you to a 20 hour a week schedule.

For summer intensive intervention Ella will work with a student for a maximum of 15 hours a week. She believes that the 4th hour is not productive due to the student’s exhaustion. Depending on the student’s stamina fewer hours are more productive for them. Students can make great gains with 10-15 hours a week for summer. During the academic year an additional 2-4 hours a week are recommended for continuing support and help applying their skills to school work. This prevents the loss of the student’s newly developed abilities.

Ella also offers much more flexibility in terms of location (at home, school, or online) and method of instruction. Not limited to using solely the reading program script, Ella can freely bring to bear all her experience and training to make learning more personalized, tactile, and kinesthetic. Students can move about the room, work with clay, origami, sing, use dominos, playing cards, or even practice mindfulness.

As a fully trained Waldorf grades teacher with more than 18 years experience with children Ella is able to provide a consistently high level of instruction. Center workers very often have no training in education other than what is provided at the center. Few center workers stay longer than 3 months. This causes great variation in the quality of instruction, which affects student progress.

Ella always works directly with the student rather than delegating a lesson plan to staff. This allows her to get to know the student deeply. She adjusts lessons immediately to a student’s needs using her own experience of teaching the student rather than dropping in and depending on short observation, or other people’s notes.