Teachers are the heart of the Long Island Writing Project!
Meet the teacher consultants who are leading the way to passionate teaching, learning, writing, and growing.
Vicki Alessi
Vicki Alessi is a seventh and eighth grade English teacher and teacher leader at Great Hollow Middle School in Nesconset. Although she has experience teaching grades seven through twelve, her heart is in middle school. Vicki, a National Board Certified Teacher with a concentration in Early Adolescent English Language Arts, holds two Master’s degrees, one from Stony Brook University and one from Columbia University, and is a recipient of the Smithtown Central School District’s Torch Award. Vicki first attended the LIWP Summer Invitational in 2008, where she fell in love with the shared readings and immediately brought them back to her students. Vicki has facilitated professional development workshops through her school district and through the LIWP. She has been featured as a guest blogger on the LIWP website and has a book review coming out in the March 2016 issue of the English Journal; she is currently researching and writing about how choice improves student writing. She has spoken about the teaching methods and strategies that she uses with her students at many conferences on the national, state, and local levels. In the summer of 2015, Vicki won a grant from the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Program and traveled to Germany and Poland to expand on her knowledge on the Holocaust. Vicki will be traveling to Amsterdam and London this summer to continue her study of the Holocaust with a focus on the children of the Kindertransport. She can be found on Twitter @alessis_more.
Nicolette James
Nicolette James has been an English teacher for fifteen years as well as the English Department chairperson for twelve years at Westbury High School. She wanted to be an English teacher for as far back as she can remember, and believes that her purpose on earth is to educate and to empower. She studied English and Psychology as an undergraduate and holds Masters degrees in English, Education and Ed Technology. She has held as an adjunct instructor position in the BEP Program for Nassau Community College and has taught the Literacy Across the Content Areas course at York College in the Department of Teaching & Learning. She has received several awards for excellence in teaching; the most recent being the Teacher of the Year award from the New York State English Council.
Nicolette first became involved in the Long Island Writing Project in 2003 and since has participated in many LIWP events over the years. She has also served in the role of Demo Coach and Co-facilitator for the annual Summer Institute for several summers. Nicolette thrives on assisting students in improving themselves academically and socially and supporting staff with enhancing their instruction. She is involved in both formal and informal professional development for local and regional teaching staff, sharing best practices in teaching and learning with teachers across Long Island.
Nicolette’s passion is teaching about the power of words, written and spoken, and the ways in which we can use words to empower ourselves, to enrich our own lives and the lives of those we love, and ultimately the power of words to shape and create the world in which we desire to live. She works tirelessly to prepare her students not only to meet challenges they will face, but to overcome those hurdles through literacy, character education, citizenship, advocacy and activism. Nicolette believes that every day that she is able to influence her students or her staff in realizing or reaching the fulfillment of their maximum potential through education is a day that she is living her dream.
Jackie Seck McBrien
Jackie Seck McBrien is delighted to have found the glorious teacher/writer heaven also known as the Long Island Writing Project. A graduate of C.W. Post Long Island University where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting and Hofstra University where she completed her Masters of Science in Secondary Education in English, Jackie discovered the LIWP the summer of 2005, after her first full year of teaching. Herricks High School is where Jackie got her first taste of teaching - as a student teacher in both the middle and high schools and then undertaking a leave replacement position. She then went on to accept a position at Sewanhaka High School in the Sewanhaka Central School District as an English teacher, and director of both the junior and senior high plays. Jackie has taught 7th, 8th, and 9th grade English, 7th and 8th grade English Enrichment, Scholastic's Read 180 program for 7th and 8th grade, as well as high school electives including Public Speaking and Dramatics. After Jackie completed the LIWP Invitational Summer Institute (led by the dream team of Melanie Hammer, Darshna Katwala, and Kathleen Neagle Sokolowski), she had the privilege of co-facilitating the LIWP Teen Writing Camp over the course of the next several summers. Jackie has continued to attend many of the enriching workshops that the LIWP offers and has also acted as facilitator in one such workshop, focusing on the connections between movement/kinesthetic learning methods/theater games and writing. She also co-facilitated a presentation at the Long Island Language Arts Council in 2008 focusing on sharing the philosophies of the LIWP. Jackie was named New York State English Council Teacher of the Year in 2008 as well as Sewanhaka High School's Teacher of the Year in 2010. She continues to feel extremely grateful to have a place, in the Long Island Writing Project, to refuel her passion for creativity both within the classroom and beyond.
Lauren McKnight
Lauren McKnight has been teaching in the Farmingdale School District since 2015. This is the same school district she grew up in, proving the district’s motto, “Once a Daler, always a Daler.” Lauren currently has the pleasure of teaching Farmingdale’s youngest students as a primary teacher. She focuses her professional development on the subjects of STEAM and growth mindset. Though Lauren is relatively new to the Long Island Writing Project, she values the time spent collaborating and learning from such talented educators! She eagerly looks forward to continued growth as a writer and educator.
Evelyn Pineiro
Evelyn Pineiro has been teaching English at Oceanside Middle School for the past ten years. Previously, she taught high school literature classes at Sacred Heart Academy and worked in the editorial department at Random House Publishing Group. Her experiences editing published texts have made her an expert at conferring with student writers and mentoring them as they develop their voices and identities.
Evelyn currently teaches in a school that was one of the first on Long Island to adopt a one-to-one iPad model. She has given presentations on using technology to speak students’ language at the National Middle School Association, Long Island Language Arts Council, and the Nassau Association of School Technologies. While recognizing that pen and paper still have a place in the classroom, Evelyn has also evolved the Writing Workshop, adding technology to the traditional workshop to differentiate instruction, expand conferencing time, encourage student independence and accountability, increase teacher feedback to students, and cut down on grading time.
Students in Evelyn’s classroom have honed their voices and found an audience for their work by designing and writing their own ongoing blogs. Evelyn detailed their experiences in NCTE’s book Continuing the Journey 2: Becoming a Better Teacher of Writing and Language by Kenneth Lindblom and Leila Christenbury.
While allowing for student freedom in topic and choice, Evelyn is also committed to enlivening grammar instruction; she has taught professional development on this topic and has written her school’s grammar curriculum.
Reading plays just as important of a role in Mrs. Pineiro’s classroom. The work of Penny Kittle, Donalyn Miller, and Nancie Atwell inspire Evelyn as she experiments with book shopping, swaps, games, talks, and conferences to instill in students a love of reading. Her students look forward to the film festivals that show their self-created book trailers. Evelyn has also taught professional development classes on the middle and high school level on teaching non-fiction reading strategies.
Evelyn has collaborated with teachers from the kindergarten to college level as part of the Long Island Writing Project’s Summer Invitational, Transition to College Think Tank as well as the College Ready Writer’s Advanced Institute on Argumentative Writing.
Barbara Suter
Barbara Suter has taught Freshman Composition as an adjunct at Suffolk Community College for over twenty years and English as a Second Language K-8 in the East Meadow School District for twenty-two years. In 2009 she received two awards for her teaching: ESL Teacher of the Year Award from Molloy College and Outstanding ESL Teacher Award from MYS TESOL. Barbara is recently retired. Barbara holds three degrees from SUNY at Stony Brook: A BA in English; an MA in Liberal Studies; and an MS in TESOL. Before teaching in East Meadow, as Program Administrator for the Continuing Education Program at SUNY Stony Brook she created and coordinated off-campus sites for graduate courses for the MALS program and produced nearly a dozen graduate courses delivered by WUSB, the campus radio station. Barbara has traveled extensively throughout Europe, and lived and worked in Paris for a year in her mid-twenties while refining her French language skills. Her passion for learning about new cultures led to her love of teaching students from around the world. Her first encounter with immigrant students took place at The Writing Center in the College of Engineering at SUNY Stony Brook where she was co-director and tutored foreign students in academic English writing skills. This experience led to her obtaining the MS in TESOL at Stony Brook.
As a K-8 ESL teacher in East Meadow, Barbara pursued her interest in teaching English to non-native speakers. To strengthen her students' writing skills, she became a member of the Long Island Writing Project where she met teachers with similar pedagogical interests. For over twenty years she has participated in LIWP workshops and conferences, and most recently the 2015 Invitational Summer Institute. Barbara has also shared her experience and expertise through teaching inservice courses in the East Meadow School District where she was an active member of the district-wide World of Difference diversity committee. She has frequently presented workshops for NYS TESOL , BETAC (BOCES) and Molloy College on teaching English Language Learners, writing poetry with ELLs, and collaborating with mainstream teachers. She recently completed a two-year stint as Chairperson of Curriculum and Standards on the Executive Board of NYS TESOL; she continues to volunteer her services to NYS TESOL.
In addition, Barbara has written several articles for Idiom, the NYS TESOL quarterly magazine, and her co-teaching experience in East Meadow was included as a case study in Honigsfeld and Dove's book, Collaboration and Co-Teaching Strategies for English Learners, Corwin 2010.
Teaching for Life, a blog she writes for the Two Writing Teachers website, is a recent passion. She is also a guest blogger for the LIWP Voices blog where she will continue to focus on ENL issues. Blogging offers her an opportunity to be a member of a nation-wide writing community; to interact with teachers about current teaching concerns; and to share her passions and interests through her writing. Barbara is very excited to be a LIWP Consultant. She says, "Learning is all about the journey we take together."
Donna Verbeck
Donna Verbeck is an elementary teacher in the Riverhead Central School District, where she has taught grades 1, 2, and 3 and served as a literacy coach. In a teaching career that spans 30 years, she points to her time studying and writing in the East End Writing Project, a National Writing Project site, as a defining moment of her career. It was there she participated in two summer institutes, concentrating on her writing instruction and personal writing. She has been attending LIWP workshops, Saturday sessions and conferences for the last few years. She is looking forward to becoming more involved in another NWP endeavor in order to share her experience and to continue to grow as a professional.
As a member of the Riverhead faculty, Donna participated in PGO, a teacher to teacher professional development and improvement program for many years. Donna has also taught a number of in-service workshops for her district and for MESTRACT, a local teacher center. She was an adjunct professor at LIU Southampton and Riverhead in the Literacy Department . Donna has presented break out sessions at NCTE, and several local teacher conferences on Long Island and in Connecticut.
Vicki Alessi is a seventh and eighth grade English teacher and teacher leader at Great Hollow Middle School in Nesconset. Although she has experience teaching grades seven through twelve, her heart is in middle school. Vicki, a National Board Certified Teacher with a concentration in Early Adolescent English Language Arts, holds two Master’s degrees, one from Stony Brook University and one from Columbia University, and is a recipient of the Smithtown Central School District’s Torch Award. Vicki first attended the LIWP Summer Invitational in 2008, where she fell in love with the shared readings and immediately brought them back to her students. Vicki has facilitated professional development workshops through her school district and through the LIWP. She has been featured as a guest blogger on the LIWP website and has a book review coming out in the March 2016 issue of the English Journal; she is currently researching and writing about how choice improves student writing. She has spoken about the teaching methods and strategies that she uses with her students at many conferences on the national, state, and local levels. In the summer of 2015, Vicki won a grant from the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Program and traveled to Germany and Poland to expand on her knowledge on the Holocaust. Vicki will be traveling to Amsterdam and London this summer to continue her study of the Holocaust with a focus on the children of the Kindertransport. She can be found on Twitter @alessis_more.
Nicolette James
Nicolette James has been an English teacher for fifteen years as well as the English Department chairperson for twelve years at Westbury High School. She wanted to be an English teacher for as far back as she can remember, and believes that her purpose on earth is to educate and to empower. She studied English and Psychology as an undergraduate and holds Masters degrees in English, Education and Ed Technology. She has held as an adjunct instructor position in the BEP Program for Nassau Community College and has taught the Literacy Across the Content Areas course at York College in the Department of Teaching & Learning. She has received several awards for excellence in teaching; the most recent being the Teacher of the Year award from the New York State English Council.
Nicolette first became involved in the Long Island Writing Project in 2003 and since has participated in many LIWP events over the years. She has also served in the role of Demo Coach and Co-facilitator for the annual Summer Institute for several summers. Nicolette thrives on assisting students in improving themselves academically and socially and supporting staff with enhancing their instruction. She is involved in both formal and informal professional development for local and regional teaching staff, sharing best practices in teaching and learning with teachers across Long Island.
Nicolette’s passion is teaching about the power of words, written and spoken, and the ways in which we can use words to empower ourselves, to enrich our own lives and the lives of those we love, and ultimately the power of words to shape and create the world in which we desire to live. She works tirelessly to prepare her students not only to meet challenges they will face, but to overcome those hurdles through literacy, character education, citizenship, advocacy and activism. Nicolette believes that every day that she is able to influence her students or her staff in realizing or reaching the fulfillment of their maximum potential through education is a day that she is living her dream.
Jackie Seck McBrien
Jackie Seck McBrien is delighted to have found the glorious teacher/writer heaven also known as the Long Island Writing Project. A graduate of C.W. Post Long Island University where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting and Hofstra University where she completed her Masters of Science in Secondary Education in English, Jackie discovered the LIWP the summer of 2005, after her first full year of teaching. Herricks High School is where Jackie got her first taste of teaching - as a student teacher in both the middle and high schools and then undertaking a leave replacement position. She then went on to accept a position at Sewanhaka High School in the Sewanhaka Central School District as an English teacher, and director of both the junior and senior high plays. Jackie has taught 7th, 8th, and 9th grade English, 7th and 8th grade English Enrichment, Scholastic's Read 180 program for 7th and 8th grade, as well as high school electives including Public Speaking and Dramatics. After Jackie completed the LIWP Invitational Summer Institute (led by the dream team of Melanie Hammer, Darshna Katwala, and Kathleen Neagle Sokolowski), she had the privilege of co-facilitating the LIWP Teen Writing Camp over the course of the next several summers. Jackie has continued to attend many of the enriching workshops that the LIWP offers and has also acted as facilitator in one such workshop, focusing on the connections between movement/kinesthetic learning methods/theater games and writing. She also co-facilitated a presentation at the Long Island Language Arts Council in 2008 focusing on sharing the philosophies of the LIWP. Jackie was named New York State English Council Teacher of the Year in 2008 as well as Sewanhaka High School's Teacher of the Year in 2010. She continues to feel extremely grateful to have a place, in the Long Island Writing Project, to refuel her passion for creativity both within the classroom and beyond.
Lauren McKnight
Lauren McKnight has been teaching in the Farmingdale School District since 2015. This is the same school district she grew up in, proving the district’s motto, “Once a Daler, always a Daler.” Lauren currently has the pleasure of teaching Farmingdale’s youngest students as a primary teacher. She focuses her professional development on the subjects of STEAM and growth mindset. Though Lauren is relatively new to the Long Island Writing Project, she values the time spent collaborating and learning from such talented educators! She eagerly looks forward to continued growth as a writer and educator.
Evelyn Pineiro
Evelyn Pineiro has been teaching English at Oceanside Middle School for the past ten years. Previously, she taught high school literature classes at Sacred Heart Academy and worked in the editorial department at Random House Publishing Group. Her experiences editing published texts have made her an expert at conferring with student writers and mentoring them as they develop their voices and identities.
Evelyn currently teaches in a school that was one of the first on Long Island to adopt a one-to-one iPad model. She has given presentations on using technology to speak students’ language at the National Middle School Association, Long Island Language Arts Council, and the Nassau Association of School Technologies. While recognizing that pen and paper still have a place in the classroom, Evelyn has also evolved the Writing Workshop, adding technology to the traditional workshop to differentiate instruction, expand conferencing time, encourage student independence and accountability, increase teacher feedback to students, and cut down on grading time.
Students in Evelyn’s classroom have honed their voices and found an audience for their work by designing and writing their own ongoing blogs. Evelyn detailed their experiences in NCTE’s book Continuing the Journey 2: Becoming a Better Teacher of Writing and Language by Kenneth Lindblom and Leila Christenbury.
While allowing for student freedom in topic and choice, Evelyn is also committed to enlivening grammar instruction; she has taught professional development on this topic and has written her school’s grammar curriculum.
Reading plays just as important of a role in Mrs. Pineiro’s classroom. The work of Penny Kittle, Donalyn Miller, and Nancie Atwell inspire Evelyn as she experiments with book shopping, swaps, games, talks, and conferences to instill in students a love of reading. Her students look forward to the film festivals that show their self-created book trailers. Evelyn has also taught professional development classes on the middle and high school level on teaching non-fiction reading strategies.
Evelyn has collaborated with teachers from the kindergarten to college level as part of the Long Island Writing Project’s Summer Invitational, Transition to College Think Tank as well as the College Ready Writer’s Advanced Institute on Argumentative Writing.
Barbara Suter
Barbara Suter has taught Freshman Composition as an adjunct at Suffolk Community College for over twenty years and English as a Second Language K-8 in the East Meadow School District for twenty-two years. In 2009 she received two awards for her teaching: ESL Teacher of the Year Award from Molloy College and Outstanding ESL Teacher Award from MYS TESOL. Barbara is recently retired. Barbara holds three degrees from SUNY at Stony Brook: A BA in English; an MA in Liberal Studies; and an MS in TESOL. Before teaching in East Meadow, as Program Administrator for the Continuing Education Program at SUNY Stony Brook she created and coordinated off-campus sites for graduate courses for the MALS program and produced nearly a dozen graduate courses delivered by WUSB, the campus radio station. Barbara has traveled extensively throughout Europe, and lived and worked in Paris for a year in her mid-twenties while refining her French language skills. Her passion for learning about new cultures led to her love of teaching students from around the world. Her first encounter with immigrant students took place at The Writing Center in the College of Engineering at SUNY Stony Brook where she was co-director and tutored foreign students in academic English writing skills. This experience led to her obtaining the MS in TESOL at Stony Brook.
As a K-8 ESL teacher in East Meadow, Barbara pursued her interest in teaching English to non-native speakers. To strengthen her students' writing skills, she became a member of the Long Island Writing Project where she met teachers with similar pedagogical interests. For over twenty years she has participated in LIWP workshops and conferences, and most recently the 2015 Invitational Summer Institute. Barbara has also shared her experience and expertise through teaching inservice courses in the East Meadow School District where she was an active member of the district-wide World of Difference diversity committee. She has frequently presented workshops for NYS TESOL , BETAC (BOCES) and Molloy College on teaching English Language Learners, writing poetry with ELLs, and collaborating with mainstream teachers. She recently completed a two-year stint as Chairperson of Curriculum and Standards on the Executive Board of NYS TESOL; she continues to volunteer her services to NYS TESOL.
In addition, Barbara has written several articles for Idiom, the NYS TESOL quarterly magazine, and her co-teaching experience in East Meadow was included as a case study in Honigsfeld and Dove's book, Collaboration and Co-Teaching Strategies for English Learners, Corwin 2010.
Teaching for Life, a blog she writes for the Two Writing Teachers website, is a recent passion. She is also a guest blogger for the LIWP Voices blog where she will continue to focus on ENL issues. Blogging offers her an opportunity to be a member of a nation-wide writing community; to interact with teachers about current teaching concerns; and to share her passions and interests through her writing. Barbara is very excited to be a LIWP Consultant. She says, "Learning is all about the journey we take together."
Donna Verbeck
Donna Verbeck is an elementary teacher in the Riverhead Central School District, where she has taught grades 1, 2, and 3 and served as a literacy coach. In a teaching career that spans 30 years, she points to her time studying and writing in the East End Writing Project, a National Writing Project site, as a defining moment of her career. It was there she participated in two summer institutes, concentrating on her writing instruction and personal writing. She has been attending LIWP workshops, Saturday sessions and conferences for the last few years. She is looking forward to becoming more involved in another NWP endeavor in order to share her experience and to continue to grow as a professional.
As a member of the Riverhead faculty, Donna participated in PGO, a teacher to teacher professional development and improvement program for many years. Donna has also taught a number of in-service workshops for her district and for MESTRACT, a local teacher center. She was an adjunct professor at LIU Southampton and Riverhead in the Literacy Department . Donna has presented break out sessions at NCTE, and several local teacher conferences on Long Island and in Connecticut.