Danielle Trahan: Using creative teaching to meet student needs

Sam Houston State University Charter School encourages its teachers to be innovative. It is a charter school that empowers its teachers to be creative and follow their way of teaching, encouraging them to proceed with the strategies that keep their students' best interests at heart.

Danielle Trahan is a teacher at Sam Houston State University Charter School, who dreamt of becoming a teacher from a young age. She remembers setting up all her stuffed animals and teaching them for hours.

Danielle Trahan is a dedicated teacher who follows the lead of the charter school. Some of the most helpful strategies in her classroom are sentence stems, math vocabulary, and math conversations. She finds that math conversations easily activate students' minds and help them make concrete connections along their learning journey. Danielle follows the strategy of practical and creative learning as she also includes a lot of manipulatives, games, songs, charts and even dance moves in her teaching in order to foster a happy learning environment.

Implementing different teaching methods is essential for Danielle because she teaches in a unique classroom with a wide range of learners. Her wide variety of students include those who are gifted, those with English as an additional language, and those with learning or other developmental disabilities. Whether her students are shy or outgoing, Danielle tries to find a method that can reach all of them.

Danielle aims for continuous self-development to improve her teaching skills. During COVID-19, she was persistent in her pursuit of professional development opportunities as she spent a great deal of her time listening to podcasts, reading articles, and browsing through teaching blogs in order to better understand the learning gaps caused by virtual learning. The time she spent exploring these resources has helped her learn new tools and teaching techniques that will assist her along her unique teaching journey.