Episode #7 - Carmen Zeisler

December 18, 2020

Episode #7 - Carmen Zeisler

Carmen Zeisler is the Director of the ESSDACK Learning Centers, an Educational Consultant/Coach, and a co-founding member of the ESSDACK Resilience Team. In Learning Centers, she has been instrumental in leading a Redesign process through Project-Based Learning. In schools, Carmen loves collaborating with teachers on Trauma-Informed practices and she leads The Restorative Justice in Schools effort on the ESSDACK Resilience Team. Her other passion as a Consultant and Coach is supporting teachers to build a strong reading culture in their classroom. One of her favorite ways to do this is to use picture books with science and social studies to make these content areas come alive for students! Carmen is also well versed in integrating technology tools and platforms into the elementary classroom and she has supported and coached countless teachers as they implement new tech. Some of her favorites are Seesaw, Flipgrid, and Classkick.

Carmen has traveled the world as a teacher. She spent ten years in Mexico at the American Institute of Monterrey teaching 9th and 10th grade English literature and helped build the gifted and talented program that was used as a model for all of the state of Nuevo Leon. Carmen fell in love with the Mexican culture through language, food, dance, music, and people.

She started getting antsy and wanted a new adventure so she headed off to Brasilia, Brazil where she spent three years at the American School of Brazil teaching kindergarten. During this time, she had students from 16 different countries in one classroom! Her time in Brazil left her with a passion for writing and languages.

She landed back home in McPherson, KS where she taught for 10 years prior to coming on board at ESSDACK. Carmen has been to 33 countries and loves infusing her travels into her teaching.

Carmen’s is a natural at building relationships with students and teachers so that she can then ask powerful questions that help ignite passions!