🇺🇸 [lalilo] Juliana
Lalilo is interviewing education changemakers in order to shine light on the extraordinary work they do each day. Meet Juliana, literacy specialist at Lalilo.
What are you doing at Lalilo? Since when?
I started at Lalilo 14 months ago. In the last year, I’ve worked on building our English language program from only 10 lessons to almost 300 lessons in phonics, word recognition, and comprehension. I work with our content production team to get new lessons in front of students. I also collaborate with our product team to build new features for both teachers and students. Another part of my job is working closely with teachers — both Lalilo users and non-Lalilo users — to understand how to build a better tool. I serve as something like a bridge between teachers and our product team, and I ensure that teachers voices are heard loudly across all decisions we make at Lalilo.
What were you doing before? Why did you decide to change your job?
Before joining Lalilo, I taught for 12 years. I started off as a New York City Teaching Fellow. I taught ESL at two elementary schools in New York as a push-in and pull-out teacher. That’s when I really became passionate about teaching young students how to read and write. I especially loved working with English Learners and seeing how quickly they grew in their language skills. I moved to California in 2013 and became a classroom teacher. I taught kindergarten for one year and a 2nd/3rd grade class for 4 years. I started to work as an instructional coach and teacher mentor, and I loved helping teachers improve their practice. I decided to look for a job where I could continue to work together with teachers to improve instruction and where I could focus on literacy. That’s when I found Lalilo!
What kind of student were you?
I was a goody-goody student, but I was pretty quiet. I never wanted to get in trouble or get called out in class for doing the wrong thing. I always tried to impress my teachers. In high school, I was very competitive (mostly with myself) and I spent many late nights studying for exams and completing assignments.
What do you like most about Lalilo?
I really love that Lalilo allows me to work within my passion for literacy education. I love building a tool from scratch that is helping kids improve their reading and writing every day. I also really love that all of us at Lalilo are very passionate about changing the reading experience for kids and so respectful and supportive of teachers. We have a really cool team and we’re building a great tool!
What do you think needs to change in education? Why/How?
There are so many trends in education these days that put pressure on students and teachers — standardized testing, benchmarks, grading are all sources of stress. So much weight is put on these methods of evaluating children and teachers. I would really like for education to be more focused on igniting a passion for learning and on developing the whole child. Students learn best when they have the opportunity to be creative and build their own knowledge around a topic. I’ve seen students do such amazing and advanced work when they are given the right supports to follow their own interests and strengths. We should be putting more efforts into developing responsible, creative, and autonomous critical thinkers who identify and solve problems in their world and not on preparing children to take standardized tests.
