Dr. Donna Thomas

• Fostered a positive learning environment by promoting open communication among staff, students, and parents.
• Led school improvement efforts by setting clear expectations for staff performance and providing regular feedback on progress towards goals.
• Developed strong relationships with stakeholders to foster trust, collaboration, and commitment to shared goals.
• Performed classroom evaluations to assess teacher strategies and effectiveness.

• Supervise and evaluate 41 teaching and support staff through instructional leadership and professional development.
• Oversaw schedule management and protocols for open house, registration and related activities. Recruited 13 community support agencies to open house to serve as bridge for parent/school/community.
• Facilitated continued education for 41 teaching staff through implementation of quality curriculum training and appropriation of necessary resources.
• Administered standardized tests for 490 students to evaluate teacher and student performance and progress. Biology scores rose from 21% in 2020 to 68% in 2021 using high leverage instructional strategies and mentoring.
• In conjunction with building Principal, responsible for recruiting, hiring, and retaining new teachers. Have bi-weekly meetings with new teachers to offset instructional and classroom management challenges encountered.
• Coach teachers on frequent collection of data to support continuous student progress toward mastery.
• Lead professional development sessions on use of best practices, explain why they are high leverage, and offer continuous support and feedback with implementation efforts. Secures resources needed to implement best practices.
• Launched AVID school-wide and serve as school coordinator and professional learning for AVID.
• Created and maintains professional development calendar for our school.

• Gathered and organized coursework guides to support 60 students through their internship program.
• Networked with professionals in our community and beyond to orchestrate smooth and efficient internship program development by collaborating across college and community.
• Organized and managed and led program development from research idea through successful execution with culminating product as public presentation of paper and internship.
• Managed web content updates and ongoing site maintenance to provide students with easy information access.

• Conducted program evaluation to appraise for overlaps and make recommendations to reduce overruns among departmental responsibilities and workload.
• Transcribed, and coded qualitative interview data to analyze.
• Presented findings to panel within DST department.
• Delivered science best practices professional development to Comprehensive Support and Intervention school that sits in lowest 5% of schools for proficiency.
• Led Lesson Tuning Protocol to tweak lessons for rigor, engagement, and focus on standards-based objectives.

• District Coordinator for 9-12 social studies and science curriculum.
• Maintains trusting and collaborative relationships with teachers.
• Provides critical lens to district-wide Learning Walks at elementary and middle school level.
• Collaborates with other coaches to create and facilitate district-wide K-12 vertical Plc's in English, social studies, math, and science.
• Conducts English 2 high school/English 1 middle school vertical Plc's to support English 1 instruction in 8th grade.
• Generated curriculum, pacing guide, and teaching strategies for first-semester biology teacher to earn 93% proficiency on biology EOC.
• Plans, implements, monitors and assess effectiveness of district benchmarking program.
• Strategically reconfigured district biology instruction to embrace spiraling curriculum and inquiry practices.
• Vets honors portfolios to ensure courses met rigor of honors-level and assists teachers to make adjustments to level of rigor if needed utilizing the AP curriculum framework for science, foreign language, history, and mathematics.
• Utilizes teacher EVAAS data to evaluate strengths and needs of instructional programs for all curriculums based on subgroups.
• Facilitates teacher analysis of their personal Educator Effectiveness data to identify areas of needed change and facilitated making those changes.
• Promotes teacher use of EVAAS predictor scores to effectively plan instruction tailored to student accessibility.
• Facilitates teacher implementation of student-centered teaching strategies to promote equitable education for all students.
• Facilitates bi-weekly teacher review of district and classroom information from diagnostic tests to evaluate program instructional quality and adjust program to meet needs of all learners.
• Simplifies teacher analysis of testing data to reflect on current instructional framework and make changes to program for improved results.
• Accelerates teachers' strategic implementation of research-based instructional strategies by analyzing student data and diagnosing instructional needs.
• Plans and executes ongoing professional development to promote inquiry based student-centered instruction and collaborative skills in students.
• Developed data tracking system and strategic review framework for all subject areas.
• Increased teacher capacity in developing distributive practice and standards based review on high-stakes standardized assessment.
• Coaches teachers to improve practices through modeling instructional strategies.

• High-performance instruction of 90-120 students yearly through Canvas Learning Management Systems.
• Utilizes research-based best practices to pull students into class community.
• Utilizes announcements to celebrate student interests, inform of upcoming due dates, and hook curiosity.
• Establish pacing of course and created daily resources to help students independently understand content if they are ahead of pace.
• Creates personalized relationship with online students and parents through frequent communication.
• Maintains ongoing records of communication between learning advisors, parents, and students.

• Explored stages of educational process through entire span of K-12.
• Involved with scheduling, testing, professional development, vertical and horizontal alignment within and between grade spans.
• Developed collaborative working relationships with both teachers and administration at all levels of organization.
• Created professional development resources for book study on grading practices and policies.

Increased capacity of 35-45 teacher's process thinking to facilitate teachers live implementation of the following:

• Structuring High-Impact Lessons and Labs
• Managing student behavior
• Managing classroom environment
• Differentiating instruction to meet students needs
• Engaging students with STEM and Engineering
• Effective Laboratory Investigations
• Facilitator in Cyber Lounge which would house participants questions that were not directly related to specific exploration

• Leader of biology, AP biology, chemistry and physical science. Earned highest county EOC scores and rivaled more affluent districts in NC.
• AVID elective teacher. Supported students in becoming first-generation college students and outperform honors students in AP classes.
• Worked as district lead to evaluate and revise county biology pacing, curriculum, and honors-level classes.
• Served as mentor for our novice teachers in years 1-3.
• Sat as SIT chair and wrote SIP in 2013.
• Worked collaboratively with other teachers to review data and develop instructional strategies to address student learning objectives.

• Identify pathogenic microbes including bacteria and fungi using microscopic identification and other mechanisms of identification to ensure proper identification.
• Cultured antibiotic sensitivity testing to identify proper course of treatment for livestock growers within Eastern NC.
• Managed Turkey Coronavirus testing for North Carolina. Identified positive and negative houses to reduce spread of TCV in our livestock supply.
• Effective communication with both growers and veterinarians that oversees animal production and health maintenance.