Cindy has over 30 years of teaching, coaching, and professional development experience. An inner-city elementary and middle-school teacher for 9 years, Cindy has a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with an emphasis in curriculum and urban schooling. In addition, Cindy has over 20 years of experience in 1-on-1 instructional coaching and large- and small-group professional development sessions. A former district literacy coordinator at the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (Santa Monica, CA), Cindy's professional development expertise includes: early literacy, reading comprehension instruction, data-driven instruction, research-based instructional strategies, facilitation and mentoring training, lesson study, school culture, and conducting classroom observations for teacher evaluation. She is the co-developer of the professional development structure Lesson Link &tm;, as well as the metacognitive reading strategies entitled Student Onramp Strategies (SOS)&tm;. For the past 15 years, Cindy has also worked as a professor of qualitative research methods at UCLA, where she has guided hundreds of doctoral students through the dissertation process.