Kendra Totman Padilla ’05

There are so many Ephs working in education that some, like Kendra Totman Padilla and Erika Brockman, have crossed paths without even intending to. Kendra’s first job after moving to Baltimore was as an assistant teacher at Southwest Baltimore Charter School, where Erika happens to be Executive Director. It was there that Kendra dove into classroom teaching, attaining her certification and teaching third grade for a total of four years. “I worked at that school for a year at the third grade level, and I knew wanted to teach there, but my master’s degree didn’t have a teaching certification for Maryland,” she said. “I ended up doing the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, which is similar to Teach For America, knowing that the charter school was going to hire me to teach third grade.”

Kendra said she found the school’s pedagogical philosophy especially appealing. “What I loved about the charter school was that it was an expeditionary learning (EL) school, which is based off of Outward Bound principles,” she said. “It was a lot of project-based, hands-on learning, very community-based, with real-world applications. We did some adventure learning and outdoor learning as well. I designed a lot of my own curriculum, and really loved it.”

She discovered her affinity for outdoor education early in her career. After her first job in teaching, at a Montessori school in California, she decided to get a graduate degree. “I did the AmeriCorps program for two years in Massachusetts and got my master’s in education,” she said. “When I was doing the AmeriCorps program I took some students camping, loved it, and thought it would be great to do that all the time.”

She taught outdoor education at the middle school level for a year in New Hampshire, and from there tried to pursue further opportunities in that area of education. “I wanted to continue in environmental education in particular, and knew I wanted to do classroom teaching eventually, and the environmental ed. component of what I had done in New Hampshire felt the closest to what I wanted to do in the classroom,” she said. “So I moved to Aspen, Colorado for a year and worked for a nature center, teaching environmental education in the local school.” There, she worked with children from kindergarten through fifth grade, and did field trips at the nature center for a year before moving to Baltimore, where she has lived since.

After getting certified, Kendra taught at Southwest Baltimore Charter School for several years with a focus on literacy programs. Though she said she enjoyed her job, fear of burnout primed her for a change of pace. “I was at that school for five years total, and ultimately was just starting to feel like I might burn out,” she said. “I didn’t want to burn out because I loved working with kids too much.”

The opportunity to shift gears came when she was introduced to Reading Partners, a volunteer-based literacy nonprofit. “As a literacy teacher at the charter school for third grade, I was asked to interview an organization called Reading Partners to see if we wanted the program at our school,” she recalled. “Reading Partners is a national nonprofit based out of California. They tutor students in kindergarten through fourth grade during the school day and use community volunteers to deliver their curriculum, and they place AmeriCorps members in the school sites to run the logistics of the program. Basically, students are getting one-on-one support during the school day in reading.”

Reading Partners impressed her, to say the least. “I interviewed them, read their curriculum, and said, ‘Yes, absolutely we want them at our school, they sound like a great program, and also, I’d like to work for them,’” she said. “Conveniently, they had an opening, so I took a job as a program manager.”

Kendra is in her fifth year at Reading Partners, where she splits her time between a school environment and their office, where she works on training and “big-picture thinking and support.” Her role gives her a direct connection back to AmeriCorps, the federal civil society program she participated in early in her career: “I supervise and support the AmeriCorps members at five of our schools here in Baltimore,” she said. “I both train them in the program, literacy, and how to run the logistics and everything, but then also act as a literacy expert support in creating instructional learning plans for students, making sure that they’re getting the most out of the tutoring sessions, and also training the tutors in the curriculum.”

Kendra said she misses being able to work closely with students on a daily basis, but is working to specialize further in literacy education with tentative plans to one day go back to the classroom full-time. “Right now, I’m taking classes to get certified as a reading specialist, with the thought that eventually I may want to go back to a more school-based role, really working with students directly,” she said. “I haven’t quite figured out what comes next, but these classes are directly relevant to my role at Reading Partners and will also hopefully set me up for when the right school-based job comes along.”

For now, though, Kendra said she is very happy at Reading Partners, and is in no rush to change things up. “I love my job,” she said. “I really love it. I am here until I find the next job that I think will be that perfect fit. My hope is that taking these classes will give me the certification and the skill set to really get that next job.”

Looking back, Kendra said she was always drawn to teaching, but didn’t fully commit to that path until getting involved with the Program in Teaching at Williams. “I always knew I wanted to work with kids,” she said. “I never had a part-time job in high school because I was always a babysitter. I considered a psychology major along the mental health and public health avenues, but ultimately, the Program in Teaching was amazing. Susan [Engel] was a wonderfully inspiring professor.”

When it comes to advice for current students, Kendra said experience in a classroom setting is a crucial tool for figuring out whether a career in teaching is the right fit. “Any opportunity to get into the classroom is worth doing before you commit to either a teaching training program like Teach For America or an expensive graduate degree,” she said. “I think the biggest thing that I took away from the Program in Teaching was that if I was going to be a classroom teacher, I wanted it to be a career that I was going to commit to.”

On the other hand, she also spoke highly of the value of experience in education outside the classroom. “After college I went to do a bunch of different things in education; I definitely didn’t have a perfect plan coming out of college, but I’m really grateful that I explored all the different avenues that I did,” she said. “If you know what you want to do, set yourself up. Get the training, get the master’s degree, etc.”

In line with that, she said the prior roles she had held in educational settings set her up well to face some of the challenges of being a new teacher. “When I started teaching, I had six years of experience working with students, including being an assistant teacher for an entire year in the class I was taking over, and it was still the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “I mean, teaching is hard. It’s amazing, it’s rewarding, it’s incredible, but it’s also really hard. And so I’m really glad that I had all those experiences beforehand.”

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By Nigel Jaffe