It is my distinct pleasure to write this letter of recommendation on behalf of my colleague of five years, Brian Jaeger. During this time, I have had the opportunity to work with Brian and observe his interactions with the school environment as he developed into a strong leader and teacher.
Brian is known as one of our best teachers. As an educator, he has the unique ability to relate to students at their level. His direct approach and instant rapport reaches students who have a wide array learning styles, varying beliefs, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In his instruction, Brian excels in not only applying the content as relevant information to the students’ academic year, but his teachings give the students a sense of immediate application in their thinking processes and day-to-day lives. Brian resourcefully finds new and interesting applicable material to share with students, which keeps them highly focused and inspired. Students make it clear that they think highly of Brian as a teacher and as an individual. I appreciate the fact that students in our school not only have an outstanding English teacher in Brian, but also have someone who is a positive role model. Brian is a man of great integrity who is fair, consistent, direct, and truly interested in the development of young minds demonstrating this in the classroom as well as in his role advisor for both the school newspaper and Thassophobia, a creative writing club.
In addition, Brian is a resourceful, innovative creator of curriculum. Over the past three years, our department has undergone extensive revisions for each of our core courses, and Brian was on the ground level of planning and continues to be a key leader in developing new curriculum that aligns with the Core Standards as well as the College Readiness Standards. The process involves reviewing texts for thematic and age-appropriateness, creating specific reading and writing activities and assessments for each unit, and designing a systematic grammar approach that addresses specific skills at each band. Brian also created formative and summative assessments that reinforced the specific test-taking skills to prepare students for the ACT; this is intensive and specialized work. Meanwhile, Brian continues to document his class mission, goals, and improvement utilizing his Baldridge Training and continuous improvement strategies.
Perhaps the strongest asset pertaining to leadership from the many Brian possesses would be his ability to create on line documents that are accessible for the other English teachers for immediate use in our classes. As we developed new curriculum, Brian took the initiative to create our own English hub in Google Docs and organized all of our materials by skill, unit, assessment, and course. Brian put in many extra hours outside of the calendar school year to create ths website as well as develop innovative activities for everyone to utilize. Brian is a team player and embraces the opportunity to collaborate, problem solve, and take leadership.
There are few people I have met who have the drive and dedication for education as Brian. As much as I deeply regret losing Brian as a most respected teacher on our staff, I wholeheartedly support Brian as he pursues this change. With his exceptional technical skills and years of experience in education, I foresee Brian making a positive impact wherever he chooses to go. I highly recommend Brian Jaeger for a teaching position.
