Meet the Workshop Leader

Carleen daCruz Payne is currently a reading/language arts and Reading Recovery teacher at Centre Ridge Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia. She has been a primary classroom teacher, teacher researcher, curriculum developer, adjunct professor at George Mason University, and a language arts consultant for several school districts. She has presented inservices and workshops on a variety of language arts topics at the state, national and international levels and has received Teacher of the Year awards from the Greater Washington Reading Council and the Virginia State Reading Association. She is the author, with Mary Browning Schulman, of the Scholastic Professional Books, Getting the Most Out of Morning Message and Other Shared Writing Lessons and Guided Reading: Making It Work. Carleen, the mother of two children, resides in Clifton, Virginia, with her husband, Dick.