We are happy to announce the addition of five phenomenal women to the reDesign team. We are humbled by the ways these brilliant, thoughtful women have been forces for transformation in our field, and are thankful for the energy, wisdom, and creativity they are bringing to the reDesign team.
Patricia Lesesne
Patricia brings years of experience inside and outside of the classroom advocating for, facilitating, and championing, equal access to high quality instruction on behalf of at-promise student populations. At reDesign, Patricia is leading our efforts to create culturally responsive, competency-based curriculum. Prior to joining reDesign, Patricia served as the Director of Integrated Learning in the Office of Educational Technology, School District of Philadelphia (SDP). In the spirit of the educators who personally constructed empowering educational experiences for her, as a teenage parent and an at-promise youth, Patricia strives to shield and inspire the young people who are too often considered disposable. She also seeks to honor- and study- the deep and rich legacy of the Black educators who protected, empowered, and transformed the lives of Black children through their pedagogy during the Jim Crow era and beyond.
Laurie Gagnon
From teaching in Japan and doing international development work in Guatemala, Laurie’s passion for international work and travel serves as a springboard for her current work, where she applies the tools for international development to educational transformation domestically. Prior to becoming a reDesigner, Laurie was the Director of the Quality Performance Assessment Program (QPA) at the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston, MA. She was a key designer of the QPA model and she led the program’s expansion from a research and development pilot to a flagship program. At reDesign, Laurie is leading work in systems level transformation at the district and state level, using her deep expertise around performance-based design and building assessment systems. Laurie is deeply committed to creating designs that that benefit the entire learning system by keeping the focus on learners.
Angela Stepancic
Angela is committed to reimagining schools to increase equity from the inside out.Through this design focus, Angela believes that schools should work from and through the margins to influence the center of education and permanently alter academic norms. As an educational leader in Washington, DC, Angela opened two schools which targeted underserved and marginalized communities, one an all-girls middle school in Anacostia, the other an alternative school for Opportunity Youth. Old teachers and new teachers alike remained committed to the school due to her focus on their professional development and growth. This investment in human capital has become a cornerstone of her leadership. As an Educational Designer at reDesign, Angela is a leader in our efforts to transform coaching in the competency-based, personalized learning space.
Gianna Cassetta
Gianna’s passion for the teaching and learning process, and her commitment to whole child-focused opportunities for all students led her to co-found and lead elementary and middle schools in Harlem, New York, and Denver, Colorado. She began this work as mentor teacher in the classroom, and then as a mentor principal for aspiring principals through New Leaders for New Schools. As Director of Leadership Development for Denver Public Schools’ Office of New Schools, she shepherded new school developers through the start-up process. As Director of Literacy Services at Generation Ready, she supported principal, coach, and teacher development. At reDesign, she is refining our learner-centered framework for meeting students where they are, while expanding our personalized coaching supports, to nurture and sustain educators at all levels of the system.
Vicky Kim
Vicky consults and collaborates with organizations around the globe to help them evolve their models and build capacity with smarter strategies and systems. In her partnership with reDesign, she is our fearless project management leader, who keeps reDesign running smoothly and efficiently. Through her complex Korean-American- woman- mother-worker-consumer-activist lens, she is continually awakened to the gaps in our intricately designed human systems, and gains strength through collective, positive movements to rethink, rebalance and relearn. A firm believer that you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them, she loves her work with reDesign’s sharp team. Co-designing meaningful systems with people and communities focused on positive social change — that’s Vicky’s sweet spot. She consults and collaborates with organizations around the globe to help them evolve their models and build capacity with smarter strategies and systems. She is obsessed with busting knowledge silos and connecting people, ideas and tools for greater access and impact
SHARE
“Creativity follows mastery.” These are the words of Benjamin Bloom, who believed that learners are capable of incredible things if they have access to powerful learning environments. This is why we’ve chosen the name “Bloom” for our knowledge-sharing initiative. Bloom is all about our stake in helping to build the capacity of practitioners and leaders who work with our most marginalized youth to reimagine, recreate, redesign our models for learning–within schools and beyond. For us, this is fundamentally a matter of social justice. Reach out if you’d like to submit a guest post, or sign up for our monthly newsletter: Bloom@reDesignu.org.
