April 10, 2014 To Whom It May Concern: I have been fortunate to work with Katherine Kalmes during her student teaching experience at Valley High School. She assumed full responsibility for two of my sections of Creative Writing, a middle level elective class for students in grades 10-12. During her student teaching experience, I have been impressed with her professionalism, commitment, and work ethic. Miss Kalmes has been a consummate professional throughout her time at Valley. She is mature far beyond her years in how she approaches student teaching. I can always rely on Miss Kalmes to perform all expected duties in a responsible and dependable manner. This professionalism serves her well in the classroom, as her students respect her and the boundaries she establishes. In addition, I am thoroughly impressed with how effectively Miss Kalmes has assumed responsibility of all classroom tasks. She seems to have an innate sense of time management, consistently designing lessons that perfectly filled the allotted time. Though Miss Kalmes has natural skill in lesson planning and design, she works hard to design lessons to best meet the needs of her students. She conscientiously creates lessons that are geared towards mastery of the Iowa Common Core and include a variety of instructional strategies. Miss Kalmes keeps students engaged by varying the activities and making the material applicable to students’ own lives. She finds ways to connect with students based on shared interests and popular culture. During her short story unit, Miss Kalmes illustrated various elements of literature through video clips including a TED talk and an episode of The Twilight Zone. She provides students with modality changes in class each day which benefits multiple learning styles. Miss Kalmes is committed not only to lesson design, but to her students as well. During her student teaching experience, she has spent countless hours striving to help struggling students. She keeps lines of communication open with parents, has individual conferences with students, and utilizes academic contracts to try to reduce student failures. Miss Kalmes’s commitment to her students is also reflected in her flexibility. She demonstrates an excellent ability to think on her feet and change plans mid-stride when she feels a lesson isn’t going as well as she had intended or doesn’t meet the needs of her students. I am also impressed with her ability to accept feedback, both positive and negative, and to use it for growth. There is no question that teaching writing is a full time job, with exhausting hours outside of class spent grading papers, but Miss Kalmes has cheerfully taken on all the demands, and more. In addition to all her student teaching responsibilities, she has simultaneously taken a class at Drake and worked fifteen hours each week. This work ethic will serve her well throughout her teaching career. Throughout her student teaching experience, Miss Kalmes has demonstrated characteristics of a veteran teacher. She has a firm grasp of the subject matter and is able to articulate this knowledge to students through active and engaging lessons. She is thoughtful, reflective, and committed to her continued development as a teacher. I’m confident she will make a positive addition to your school’s community. Sincerely, Sandra Abbott Language Arts Instructor Valley High School

To Whom It May Concern: I am writing this letter in recommendation of Ms. Katherine Kalmes, an applicant for position of secondary English Language Arts instructor in your school district. I first met Ms. Kalmes when she became my advisee as an English and Secondary Education major at Drake University. Since that time, I have come to respect her abilities, both as a student and as a future teacher. Katherine is an intelligent, young woman who possesses many of the skills and characteristics of a natural born teacher. She is open-minded, flexible, innovative, and highly creative. These attributes have allowed her to succeed in the Teacher Education Program, and I have no doubt that they will allow her to excel as a teacher in your district. It is her passion for her content-area, and her ability to design engaging and rigorous curriculum; however, that separates Katherine from her peers. As a student in my Methods of Teaching English Language Arts course, Katherine was asked to develop a unit of instruction using the Understanding By Design (UbD) framework of curriculum development. This approach to curriculum design emphasizes higher-order thinking, and it encourages teachers to engage students in performance-based assessment. Katherine embraced the UbD framework and created a concept-based unit on dystopian literature where students were asked to explore the relationship between authorship and society. In the final performance assessment, students were then asked to write a fictional narrative using dystopian themes. Her unit was, by far, one of the best that I received—with respect to both its level of rigor and concern for authentic student learning. Please accept my highest recommendation of Ms. Katherine Kalmes. She will make a fine addition to your faculty. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by email at todd.hodgkinson@drake.edu or by phone 515-271-4565 . Sincerely, Mr. Todd Hodgkinson Assistant Professor of Secondary Education Drake University

School of Education, 3206 University Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa 50311

Molly House 4601 Kingman Blvd.! Des Moines, Iowa 50311

Reading/Writing Consultant (H) 515-255-9565 ! (C) 515-975-7076 molly@netins.net April 3, 2014 To Whom It May Concern: I am honored to write a letter of recommendation for Katie Kalmes for a teaching position in the your district. Her resume clearly shows her experiences aligned to the educational field. I have recently been her college professor at Drake University in Secondary Reading and Interdisciplinary Curriculum. This class prepares content area teachers to understand the key literacy instructional strategies that support the learning of all students in their content area. She has a strong understanding of the Gradual Release of Responsibility model in comprehension, writing, fluency, and vocabulary. She has implemented these lessons in her practicum and while substituting in classrooms. She has learned multiple Writing To Learn strategies that engage students, help them process their learning, and then be able to demonstrate understanding with a final writing project. She embeds them systemically in her English classroom teaching. Her reflections around these implementation opportunities clearly show her ability to excel in teaching and learning. She is able to use the daily writing of students to get formative data to help plan next steps. She is an excellent candidate to teach your students. What really makes me very willing and eager to write this letter is Katie’s approach to learning, questioning for clarity and her collaborative skills. My class is based on learning together and teaching peers through collaboration. Katie is an expert at initiating questions, including all people in the group, and organizing the work for reporting out. She understands that professional educators don’t go to a Professional Learning Community. They are a Professional Learning Community every minute of every day. Having been the Secondary Literacy Coordinator for Des Moines Public Schools, I would hire Katie immediately as she understands that the “what” she teaches is English and the “how” she teaches is literacy based. Please feel free to call me with any questions. Sincerely, Molly House Reading/Writing Consultant

April 14th, 2014 To Whom It May Concern: I am writing to extend my strong recommendation to Katherine Kalmes for employment as a Language Arts teacher at the secondary level. Because I have been able to witness first hand Ms. Kalmes’s strong work ethic, creative and rigorous lesson planning, and professional attitude, I’m able to say with confidence that she would be an excellent addition to any Language Arts staff. Since the first day she stepped into my classroom at Valley High School, Ms. Kalmes demonstrated an unwavering commitment to expanding her teaching experience at every level. Because I “shared” her with Sandra Abbott, another Language Arts teacher, Ms. Kalmes continually had to work for both of us, which was not an easy task. She immediately took to handling the sometimes overwhelming day-to-day tasks of teaching (keeping a schedule, attendance, parent phone calls and emails, updating the gradebook, etc.) competently and without complaint. Ms. Kalmes met the challenge of juggling several courses and two supervising teachers, and flourished in her teaching. As part of her student-teaching experience, she had to teach three Creative Writing sections, which incorporated dozens of writings and projects with over eighty students, and while this could have seemed even to the experienced teacher like an overload of work, especially in grading, Ms. Kalmes never skipped a beat. I’m very proud of the way her work ethic showed in every part of her teaching experience with me. Ms. Kalmes proved herself to be capable of creative and rigorous lesson planning as well. She consistently used essential questions and common core standards to forge lesson plans that were simultaneously challenging and interesting to students. For example, she designed a Creative Writing lesson plan that began with a Ted Talk about storytelling from a Pixar creator, and moved students into generating ideas themselves for a short story unit. She also used differentiation and opportunities for student-driven choices in reading involving literature circles in Modern British Literature. I intend to use many of her lessons myself in the coming semesters. As a teacher of thirteen years, I’ve learned the value and importance of professionalism and good professional development. Ms. Kalmes seemed to pick up on these things innately. From the very first email she sent me introducing herself, to her involvement in our department meetings, to her attendance of all of our professional development in-service days, she exhibited the utmost professionalism. Ms. Kalmes dressed nicely and relayed a calm and austere demeanor for her students. She worked tremendously well with others in collaboration, and was an excellent listener. Like all teachers, there were days when she wasn’t feeling well, but she showed to work and gave her best effort in any case. I know that she looks forward to joining various professional organizations. So I believe that she exhibits the utmost professionalism in her work. Because of her strong work ethic, creative and rigorous lesson planning, and professionalism, I highly recommend Ms. Kate Kalmes for a position as a secondary Language Arts teacher. I think she will be an excellent teacher, and will bring wonderful talent and ideas to whichever district is lucky enough to get her. Please feel free to contact me at schebelr@wdmcs.org or 515-333-9763 if you have any questions or would like further input related to my recommendation. Sincerely, Rob Schebel English Teacher West Des Moines Valley High School