Argiro Vranas

With fifteen years of teaching experience, I have taught in multiple classroom settings and at various levels. The majority of my teaching has been at the 8th grade level, teaching regular English, co-taught English for students with special learning needs, and presently, Honors English. I am also specialized in English as a Second Language and previously taught students of all levels of English acquisition -- from entering to reaching -- with up to eight different languages in one EL classroom. In all my roles, my profound love for reading and learning has always been the core of why I do what I do.

Nothing excites me more than passing on this passion for reading and learning to my students and helping them sharpen their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. I love helping students discover their own enthusiasm for reading and watching them expand their scope to new genres and literary forms -- teaching them to do more than just read but to explore and analyze what they read. I teach, model, and explore various strategies with my students that help them more clearly understand, interpret, and think about what they read, write, say, and hear, ultimately leading them to be more effective communicators. My students therefore leave me not only with their own passion for reading but with strengthened critical thinking, reasoning, inferential, and analytical skills that are applicable outside of the English classroom.

Naturally, my love for writing developed from my love for reading, and thus I emphasize the importance of reading as the more we read, the better writers we become. In addition to increasing students exposure to social and academic vocabulary, I work with students to hone their understanding of the written rules of English so they can effectively apply those rules in their own work. We then explore strategies to improve craft, structure, clarity, and organization, leading to strong, fully developed final products and clearer, stronger, more effective writers.