UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

BERKELEY DAVIS IRVINE LOS ANGELES MERCED RIVERSIDE SAN DIEGO SAN FRANCISCO SANTA BARBARA SANTA CRUZ

School of Education 3200 Education

Irvine, CA 92697-5500
(949) 824-4172
(949) 824-9103 FAX
tomas@uci.edu

April 4, 2017

To whom it may concern;

It is a great pleasure to recommend Stephanie Reza to you as an elementary school teacher. I was Stephanies
UCI university supervisor for her first quarter of student teaching (winter 2017). During this quarter, her
placement was in a diverse second grade classroom. Throughout this experience, her enthusiasm, positive and
genuinely caring attitude, and initiative were always evident.

Each time I entered Stephanies classroom, she greeted me with a smile and quickly focused again on her
students. She had such a calm, caring manner, and yet she was very much in charge of the learning
environment. It is clear that she respected and liked her students, and they respected and loved her. Stephanies
lessons were crafted with well aligned standards, objectives, content and assessments. Her delivery highlighted
a growing repertoire of teaching strategies. Ells were supported by many visuals, vocabulary charts, sentence
frames to scaffold writing and discussion activities, ample wait time, and think-pair-share groupings to support
their learning. A strength for Stephanie was her ability to help her students connect with the lesson. She knows
her students strengths, weaknesses and interests and has a good handle on their prior knowledge and assets. She
uses this knowledge throughout her lessons to thoughtfully engage all of her students in the learning. Another
strength is her ability to use questioning strategies and technology to increase student participation and
engagement. Stephanie is very analytical and with each lesson she would carefully reflect on learning behavior
and results, so she could improve her instruction as well as student results.

As a retired elementary school teacher and principal, I have had the opportunity to observe many young
teachers. Stephanie has that combination of intelligence, work ethic, ability to analyze, ability to work with staff
and most importantly the ability to really connect with students that makes her an outstanding young teacher.

Sincerely,

Jane Holm
Student Teacher Supervisor
University of California, Irvine
holmj@uci.edu