Oakland, California, is known for being one of the tougher environments for school-aged children and their teachers, but Ifeoma Obodozie has overcome these obstacles to bring quality instruction to her students.

Just one example of Ifeoma Obodozie’s commitment and skill is the program she instituted when she became principal of Joaquin Miller Elementary School in the Oakland Unified School District. In this role, she was responsible for a school that was doing well according to the test scores, but those scores had not changed very much in the last few years. Ifeoma Obodozie was also concerned by a slowly widening achievement gap. After conferring with her staff, she decided to address this problem with a long term plan.

This plan took a collaborative approach to improving student performance. Ifeoma Obodozie had the staff form professional learning communities, aka PLCs, to share information and revise the curriculum. One important change was to make the learning more culturally relevant with students’ cultural and demographic norms. Another improvement created by Ifeoma Obodozie was to focus more on student needs and employ a concept known as a “spiraling curriculum.” A spiral curriculum tries to expose students to a wide variety of ideas and review them multiple times, therefore allowing students of all levels and learning types to absorb the information. Ifeoma Obodozie not only met frequently with the new teacher committees, she also met individually with each student that had low test scores.

This innovative approach produced positive results by the following year, with Joaquin Miller’s Academic Performance Index improving by 12 points. Ifeoma Obodozie’s reforms also reduced the school’s achievement gap by 27%. Additionally, 75% of student scores showed significant improvement thanks to Ifeoma Obodozie’s new programs and 82% achieved “proficient” or “advanced” ratings in Math.

In recognition of Ifeoma Obodozie’s contribution to these improvements, she was later honored with an Academic Excellence Award presented by the Superintendent at the district’s Expect Success Awards Ceremony.

Ifeoma Obodozie holds a Master’s degree in Teacher Education and Educational Leadership from California State University, Hayward. She is a member of several professional organizations dedicated to teaching excellence, including the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), and the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA).