Mona Lisa Tello - Teacher
An accomplished individual whose enthusiasm for teaching brings out her students’ best qualities and creative gifts, Mona Lisa Tello continually strives to expand young minds through highly engaging experiential learning. Maintaining a firm belief in the power of positive reinforcement and constructive supervision, Tello carefully designs her lesson plans to encourage maximum classroom participation, an actionable approach to scholastic instruction that provides students with the self confidence that they need to excel in both academic and social settings.
Acutely aware that each child possesses a distinct set of intellectual gifts, Mona Lisa Tello goes to great lengths to proactively facilitate mental and emotional growth, accomplishing this goal through a unique combination of multidisciplinary activities. To this end, she draws on an extensive background in arts education to complement her array of mathematic, scientific, and language-based lesson plans, capably guiding students as they navigate the challenges associated with scholastic and personal maturation.
Always interested in identifying new tactics for hands-on instruction, Tello regularly employs computers and science lab technology in her daily curriculum offerings, interweaving video, music, photography, dance, drawing, and sculpting to cultivate her students’ innate curiosity.
One particularly inspiring lesson that she enjoys sharing with her students involves cross-pollinating flowers in the windowsills of her New York City school, an undertaking that beautifully illuminates the complex mechanisms that sustain the natural world. Providing other unique biology projects, she oversaw the fertilization of sea urchin eggs in an aquarium, brought fish into the classroom for her students to care for, and crafted a barbecue to demonstrate the basics of cellular respiration.
With responsibility for a diverse range of students, Mona Lisa Tello often implements bilingual teaching in her work, benefiting English and Spanish-speaking students alike. She fosters the utmost levels of creative problem solving and independent thinking among her students, imparting strong educational values to the next generation of scholars. Additionally, she is training for helping adults with ADHD.