PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

FOR EDUCATORS OF MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS

Daria Witt, partner and co-founder of ElevatED Learning Services, has worked in the field of immigrant education for almost 30 years.

Most recently, Daria was the Director of Professional Development for the Internationals Network for Public Schools, a non-profit organization whose mission is to create, network and improve schools for recent immigrant students. Serving in that position for 11 years, Daria created Internationals’ professional development program from the ground up, developing and facilitating several dozen workshops every year, writing and compiling multiple professional development resource guides, documenting and collecting exemplary curriculum, running the network’s professional development conferences, and documenting the successful model in serving immigrant students that Internationals is known for. Daria also helped to start and run the consulting practice within Internationals that serves schools and districts around the country who are interested in improving and rethinking their curriculum and instruction for Multilingual Learners.  Prior to working at Internationals, Daria was a History and ESL teacher at both the middle and high school levels. Before teaching, Daria worked as a Research Associate for Professor Kenji Hakuta at Stanford University and for the Stanford Center for the Study on Race and Ethnicity on a variety of projects related to the educational needs of language and racial minority students.  

Daria received her BA in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and an MA in Education from Stanford University. She is fluent in French and Spanish and conversant in Italian.

Michael Soet, partner and co-founder of ElevatED Learning Services, has worked in education for almost 30 years. 

Michael began his career teaching English as a Foreign Language in two different high schools in Poland.  He joined the faculty of The Manhattan International High School (MIHS), a school for recent immigrant MLLs, as a social studies teacher in 1999 and later became the assistant principal of that school.  In 2005, Michael and a small group of educators founded the International High School at Lafayette, a replica of MIHS and a member of the Internationals Network for Public Schools.  He served as the principal of the school for six years before joining the Internationals Network for Public Schools as an educational consultant. While at INPS, Michael designed and conducted workshops for teachers and administrators, both within and outside of the network on such topics as language development, project-based learning, collaborative learning, reading, scaffolding, interdisciplinary planning, assessment, and SLIFE.  He also supported new principals at various high schools within the Internationals Network for Public Schools. 

Michael received an MA in Teaching from Columbia University-Teachers College and a BA from Northwestern University, where he double-majored in history and art history.  He is fluent in Spanish and Polish and conversant in French.