Annie Smith, MS. Ed.
Founder and Director: Bright Minds Educational Consulting
Co-founder and President: The SIFE Equity Project
Consultant, MALP LLC
Description
Annie has spent the past 25 years working with recent immigrants and refugees in both New York City schools and through the International Rescue Committee. She coaches teachers of MLLs and facilitates workshops that engage teachers to integrate content, language and literacy in their instruction. For 6 years, she was part of a small team that developed a specialized curriculum and teacher training for Students with Interrupted Formal Education with Developing Literacy (SIFE) under the auspices of the New York State Education Department. She contributed to the thinking that honed an understanding of SIFE with Developing literacy and to the theoretical framework that undergirds the state’s Bridges curriculum. More recently, through her non-profit The SIFE Equity Project, she has partnered with Oakland Unified School District and Cal New to develop a newcomer curriculum.
Annie has a BA in College of Letters from Wesleyan University and an MA in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College. As an adjunct professor for the Bard Master of Arts in Teaching program, she has supervised students in the field and taught courses including Methods and Literacy and the Adolescent Learner. She is director of Bright Minds Educational Consulting, which she founded in 2008, and president of the SIFE Equity Project, a non-profit which she co-founded with Suzanna McNamara.
