About Lisa
My Why
Teachers changed my life trajectory. School was my safe place and the place I felt success, so it’s no wonder that my childhood dreams included becoming a teacher. I wanted to be the source of kindness and light that my teachers were to me.
Now, after 26 years in education, I want different; I want better. I want better for our teachers, our leaders, and our students. I work with teachers and leaders to feel empowered, to operate from a place of joy and opportunity, and I support those transitions through coaching.
Not a teacher or in education? I want you better for you, too...however you define better!
While my main interest is in empowering the adults in the system, I cannot deny the easy connection I make with teenagers, and young adults; I have these same wishes around empowerment & understanding energy for teens and young adults. I wish I would have had a coach at 17 or 18 or 19 to set me up for a more balanced mind, body, and spirit heading into my young adult life!
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I joke that I cannot hold a job. While in the classroom I taught second grade, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade literacy. After earning my Masters Degree in Reading Education, I shifted into the work of literacy coaching where I provided reading interventions for striving readers, and planned and facilitated professional learning for educators. As a literacy coach, I was surrounded by learning opportunities. I became the co-director of the Fox Valley Writing Project, a National Board Certified Teacher in the area of Reading Education, and I earned my Master Teacher license. My work in the Writing Project led to opportunities to teach in the Leadership, Literacy, & Social Foundations Department at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
As I gained experience in leading and developing professional development, I began to wonder if there might be more influence and opportunity to change the system with different positional power. I wondered if that could happen by becoming a literacy coordinator. Since 2010 I have been a literacy coordinator, for a short time as a K-12 coordinator and since 2012, a middle and high school coordinator. During this time leaders in districts were reaching out to me for literacy-based consulting and professional development.
In 2019 iPEC shifted my professional interests once again. As a literacy coach, I was heavily invested in the outcome of the coaching goals, and my awareness around what that meant for me as a coach, and my teachers and principals as clients, changed everything for me. My new interest is in coaching around energy, in order for my clients to build an awareness around how their energy is working toward, and maybe even against, the lives they dream of living, personally and professionally.