Carolyn Berry has been
advocating for students with disabilities since she was a young child. Her
first "job" was to organize backyard carnivals to raise money for the
Muscular Dystrophy Association. “I loved it,” she says. “Every year my
neighbors and family members would play the games I had set up and buy lemonade
and cookies my mother and I had made. I raised no more than $50 each year, but
I learned a lot about disabilities, entrepreneurship, and the importance of
volunteer activities.”
As a teenager, she babysat
for a young boy who had muscular dystrophy. That led her to volunteer as a
counselor at camps for students with muscular dystrophy and intellectual
disabilities. “I also volunteered each Labor Day Weekend to answer the
telephones during the telethon Jerry Lewis hosted to raise money for MDA,”
Carolyn says.
Fast forward to today and she
is the director of the Virginia Center for Learning and Achievement, a center
that provides tutoring and other academic help for students of all abilities
and consulting and coaching for parents, teachers, and administrators.
“Consulting, coaching and
teaching are great jobs for me. I am very passionate about helping students
learn, and coaching and consulting give me the opportunity to utilize the
skills I've developed and the knowledge I've absorbed throughout the years,"
she says. Plus it fits perfectly with her personal mission to empower those
around her to achieve goals beyond their dreams.
Her passion for the students
is hard to miss. She becomes quite animated when she talks about assessing
students and figuring out which strategies would be the best to incorporate
into her lesson plans.
“My leisure reading is the
stack of educational journals that sit on the end table,” she says. “I belong
to several professional organizations, so I receive three or four journals each
month. I love to read the articles because that’s how I learn about classroom
strategies and how to implement them.”
Carolyn says it is important
to use research-based strategies in the classroom. “They are a blueprint for student
success. If students need more intensive instruction, teachers already know the
next steps. There is no guessing.”
To learn more about
research-based strategies, contact Carolyn Berry at carolynberry@vclatutoring.com or (540) 625-2184.
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