Meet Conference Scholar
Ron Klemp
Biography
Ron Klemp is an administrator in Culver City, Calif.
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In His Own Words: A Leadership Reflection
What has led to your development as a leader?
My role throughout my career has revolved around the topics of literacy and the promotion of social growth. During my college years, I worked in youth recreation and playground supervision in high-risk environments and continued this work during my summers once I started teaching. My career in teaching has always had the focus of at-risk youth with an emphasis on building literacy across the curriculum. This specialization allowed me to assume leadership positions, because this curricular area is rarely seen in the world of secondary education.
My university teaching has also emphasized working with at-risk youth. I have taught courses in methodology and literacy across multiethnic classrooms, among others, in over thirty years of college instruction. I find these areas to be essential and have encouraged varying degrees of interest in working with students who are challenged by the complexity of academic literacy. I have been pleased by many of my university students who have been enlightened by the fact that through my work with them, they are no longer content rich but process poor. The use of instructional sequences along with a focus on organizing literacy-based instruction across the curriculum can be empowering.
Now that I have been able to merge social and cognitive aspects of literacy, I can provide my teachers more resources from which to draw as they engage their students in content-based, literacy-based behavior. I have coauthored three books on literacy and have a new book as a sole author, and these have been learning experiences that I can share with teachers in my classes and workshops.
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