Claire Hagen-Alvarado

Claire Hagen Alvarado’s first teaching position was in Houston where her 3rd grade classroom community included eight different language backgrounds with students from across the world. That experience taught her the importance of creating collaborative, safe spaces for language learning with purposeful bridges between English and other languages. She went on to become a literacy specialist who has taught reading and writing to multilingual learners at the elementary, middle, and high school levels at both traditional public schools and public charter schools. Most recently, she served as the Language Arts Supervisor for the Austin Independent School District where she led a preK-12 comprehensive literacy initiative to provide meaningful literacy instruction inside language arts class, throughout the school day, and beyond. Claire is interested in the power of multilingual learning and how current assessment and intervention systems may misrepresent notions of literacy achievement.

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