Jennifer is a passionate educator and mentor who strongly believes in providing each child with the most exciting experiences offered in international education, and each colleague with opportunities for their professional growth to help ensure that our practices remain relevant and advanced. Research shows that great teachers who exude the school’s culture and share in the beliefs and values (vision / mission) are instrumental to student success by creating an environment of high expectations. This is a significant reason behind which Jennifer focuses her attention on teacher training and development to ensure that our practices are consistently aligned with the school’s philosophy to ensure improved student engagement and advanced student outcomes.
Jennifer began her career teaching English to non-native speakers overseas, where she taught children in the ages of 3 – 16 years. She has worked across three countries – the United States, South Korea, and India. Her experience is quite distinctive as she has worked in both, high-need, low-income public schools and selective, private international schools with children, families, and colleagues from diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Jennifer was the recipient of a selective fellowship in New York City and over the years has worked in schools where she has developed a strong knowledge, understanding, and experience of various curricula such as the IB (PYP & DP), Cambridge (Pathway), Montessori, Early Years and New York City curricula. Her role at Legacy School has been instrumental in enhancing the quality and rigour of the academic programs across our schools. She has been pivotal in the role of collaboratively developing, mapping, aligning and evaluating the effectiveness of the curriculum across the grades, to ensure that the learning experiences we provide always remain engaging, interactive, exciting and meaningful and relevant. Under her guidance, the school has received multiple recognitions and awards.
As a learner herself, Jennifer has recently completed certificate courses in Educational Leadership on Leading Change from the prestigious Business and Education Schools at Harvard University (USA) and the International Baccalaureate.
“Enabling our children to think of their role in the world and their impact on it is essential if we want our children to be the kind of human beings that will make the world a better place to live in.”
It is this passion that helps drive the planning and successful integration of some fantastic trans-disciplinary projects for our children through a unique subject called Global Perspectives, which is offered across all the grades at Legacy. The learning is associated with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) and helps students contextualize their learning to see its relevance/significance/ implication at a local, national and global level. Our students are then further engaged through service learning projects to consider these challenges and encouraged to find solutions to help address them.
Jennifer is a loving mother to two wonderful little toddlers. Her personal interests extend to international cultures, a love for languages, issues of human rights violations of refugees, and a strong sense of empathy for victims of societal injustice. In the recent past, she enjoyed spending her time as a volunteer in Ecuador, educating street children in market places through a pop-up school and also caring for infants and toddlers left in the care of an orphanage. She enjoys advancing her Spanish language skills and has travelled to a little over twenty countries.