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Alyssa has been professionally teaching/tutoring the SAT® exam since 2006 and the ACT® since 2008. She has worked in both teaching and curriculum design and is currently active in both dimensions as Executive Director of both Socratic Summer Academy and the Yleana Leadership Foundation. She has spent over 10,000 hours teaching - and taking! - the SAT®, and has helped over 1000 students become more competitive college applicants.
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Alyssa is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Yleana Leadership Foundation, which operates Socratic Summer Academy/SSA Online College Prep. She is a college readiness/admissions expert, known on YouTube as Alyssa the College Expert.
Alyssa worked as an IEP tutor in the Bronx for K-8 students from 2006-2011, specializing in basic skills acquisition and development, where she acquired extensive experience working with students with diverse learning challenges. She has also been professionally teaching/tutoring the SAT® and ACT since 2006. She has helped over 1000 kids get into college since then, from low-SES to high-end boutique tutoring through a myriad of tutoring and teaching gigs in NYC and Long Island. She has spent over 10,000 hours teaching - and taking! - the SAT. Her current SAT superscore is a 40 Reading, 40 Writing, 800 math - all perfect, because why would you prep with someone who can’t get a perfect score herself during a College Board administration?
In her teaching, training, and curriculum design for her students, she focuses on building critical thinking skills, identifying and inculcating the “hidden curriculum of success” necessitated in college and beyond, retention practices, Harkness/Socratic teaching practices, and strengths-based learning - “listening for the kernel of truth in a student’s utterance” and finding ways to strengthen and build upon what students already know.
When working with schools to help with teacher coaching/observations, lesson design and delivery, training new teachers, and creating departmental structures, she is passionate about reaching the standard of rigorous instruction by starting with the CC standards as a fundament and deconstructing them, using Bloom’s and DOK as a measure of how rigorous instruction is. In many situations, going back to those basics can mean the difference between challenging, grade-level, student-centered rigorous instruction that truly moves the needle - and not.
She has worked in teaching/tutoring, training and curriculum design, and is currently active in all dimensions. She holds an undergraduate degree, which she received magna cum laude with Departmental High Honors, from Haverford College (Phi Beta Kappa). She earned her masters degree in Voice and Opera Performance at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where she was Pi Kappa Lambda. She was a professional opera singer for 13 years before she co-founded Yleana.
