Emily Rinkema (USA) is a proficiency-based learning coordinator in the Champlain Valley School District in Vermont, supporting standards-based instruction and learning in grades 5-12. She also co-designed and co-taught Think Tank, a class that puts high school students at the center of the educational transformation happening around them. Emily began teaching English and humanities at Champlain Valley Union HS twenty years ago, and was inspired by the progressive philosophy of the school and community from the start. While teaming in a heterogeneous tenth grade humanities class, she became obsessed with differentiated instruction and standards-based learning, applied for a sabbatical, and began down the path that would lead to where she is today. Emily has organized, led, and participated in an annual symposium sponsored by the VTSBL Collective, and has presented about SBL at schools around the world, at the 2018 ASCD Empower18 Conference, at AMLE and Learning Forward Conferences, and at multiple Mastery Transcript Consortium workshops. In 2018, she and her teaching partner Stan Williams published the Corwin bestseller The Standards-Based Classroom: Make Learning the Goal. Emily has a Masters in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, loves to write short fiction , and along with Stan is active professionally on social media through @sbclassroom. She lives in Westford, Vermont with her amazing husband Bill Rich, dogs Frankie and Chet, and Jack Reacher the Cat.
