Marthaa serves as a School Design Partner, working with schools in Transcend’s Rural Portfolio. Marthaa is a veteran educator with experience as a math teacher, high school principal, district leader, and teacher educator. Prior to joining Transcend, she served as the Director of K-12 Instruction for the Oakland Unified School District, where she was responsible for leading the core content area teams across all school divisions.
Marthaa’s work at the intersection of design thinking and school leadership has been featured by IDEO, The Atlantic Magazine, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and numerous other organizations. She has served as a design coach and facilitator at the Stanford d.school, and supported the development of a number of their tools and resources to help K-12 educators incorporate design principles into their work.
In addition, Marthaa served as Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU Steinhardt, as well as Director of the NYU Teacher Residency in San Francisco. In this capacity, she supported the design of the university’s national residency model, and helped to develop and teach a number of graduate-level courses for aspiring teachers.
Marthaa holds a Doctor of Education in Organizational Change and Leadership from the University of Southern California, as well as both a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy and a Master of Arts in Education from Stanford University. She lives in Virginia with her husband and three children.
Continue Your Journey
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Transcend’s Leaps for Equitable, 21st-Century Learning describes the key ways we believe the student experience must change so that schools can prepare all young people to thrive in and transform the world.
Transform Learning with Community-Based Design
Community-based design is a collaborative and local process that brings together young people, educators, administrators, caregivers, and experts to redesign learning. It goes beyond traditional school improvement initiatives by involving the entire community in reshaping...
