Meranda Sierra currently is a full-time consultant for TPI-US. Previously, she was a site coordinator and instructor in the Teacher Education Department in the College of Education at Texas Tech University (TTU).
As a site coordinator, Meranda’s role is to prepare highly effective teachers, provide hands on support and development that result in student achievement gains, and to work as a liaison to foster positive relationships between placement schools and the university. In addition, she also facilitates ongoing professional development and support to mentor teachers and teacher candidates.
As an instructor, Meranda has taught various courses in the Teacher Education Department at TTU. These include courses in which teacher candidates learn various strategies that help scaffold the learning of second language learners, social studies, and elementary mathematics methods courses where teacher candidates are provided with mathematics content knowledge for teaching at the elementary level, and capstone courses where teacher candidates are coached and given professional development. In the math methods course, she was part of a team that did research on “Characteristics of Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Knowledge of Fractions for Teaching: A video analysis” and “Relationship Between Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching and Teaching Practices: A Video Analysis of Elementary Preservice Teachers.”
By being both a site coordinator and instructor Meranda has had the rewarding opportunity to support teacher candidates as they connect and apply the knowledge and skills that they learned in their coursework to real world classroom settings with children.
Prior to joining Texas Tech University, Meranda spent time in the classroom working in grades 1st, 2nd, and 4th grade. During this time, she had the opportunity to lead professional development in writing for the school and district and was elected to be a representative for multiple district curriculum committees. While in the classroom, she had to opportunity to conduct research and write curriculum for fourth grade writing students that taught them how to use and manipulate their writing by using a genre-based approach and researched based strategies to understand the bigger concept of language. Meranda received Teacher of the Year award in 2012. She received her Master’s Degree in Curriculum & Instruction with an emphasis in ESL from Texas Tech University.
Meranda is TAP certified by National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) and is a TPI-US certified inspector of teacher preparation programs.