Emily A. Rinkema

Emily Rinkema is a proficiency-based learning coordinator in the Champlain Valley School District in Vermont, spending half of her time supporting standards-based instruction and learning at the high school, and half supporting the middle schools in their transition to standards-based learning. She also co-designed and co-teaches Think Tank, a class that puts high school students at the center of the educational transformation happening around them. Emily began teaching English and humanities at Champlain Valley Union HS twenty years ago, and was inspired by the progressive philosophy of the school and community from the start. While teaming with Stan Williams in a heterogeneous tenth grade humanities class, they became obsessed with differentiated instruction and standards-based learning, applied for a sabbatical, and began down the path that would lead them to where they are today. Emily has organized, led, and participated in an annual symposium sponsored by the VTSBL Collective, and has presented about SBL at schools around New England, at the 2018 ASCD Empower18 Conference, and will be presenting at the upcoming AMLE and Learning Forward Conferences this fall. Emily has a Masters in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, loves to write short fiction (check out her story in the 2019 Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology), and along with Stan is very active professionally on social media through @sbclassroom. She lives in Westford, Vermont with her husband Bill Rich, dog Frankie, and Jack Reacher the Cat (named after the book, not the movie...).