KATIE ANDERSON – IRONWOOD RIDGE HIGH SCHOOL
Katie Anderson received her bachelor’s degree in Extended English Education from UArizona in 2006. In 2022, she earned her master’s in Rhetoric, Writing, and Digital Media Studies from NAU.
She currently teaches English to sophomores and dual enrollment seniors at Ironwood Ridge, where she makes learning more fun by providing daily opportunities for student collaboration, building connections with students and designing lessons around their interests, and empowering them to display their knowledge through a variety of choices for learning tasks and assessments. Her students say she makes learning easier by encouraging them to process and learn in the way that makes the most sense for their brains and by creating “calm, respectful vibes” in her classroom.
Outside her classroom, she is the founder of IDEALS, Instructors of Dual Enrollment Advancing Learning for Students, a professional development program supporting 180+ instructors who work with almost 8,000 dual enrollment students at Pima Community College. And after nine years as a participant, she is now on the executive board for Wildcat Writers, a community writing program that fosters creative and critical literacies while engaging in meaningful community-based action beyond the classroom by partnering high school and UArizona writing classrooms in collaborative learning.
