Inspired Teaching Welcomes Mary Kadera as Interim Executive Director
We are thrilled to announce that Mary Kadera will be joining the Inspired Teaching team as the Interim Executive Director. Mary has more than 25 years of experience in the education field, working in a variety of capacities to support educators and students and to transform K-12 teaching and learning so that it is more engaging, effective, relevant, and joyful. She has most recently worked as a consultant with nonprofits including The George Lucas Educational Foundation, Learning Forward, TED, PBS, and others, where she’s led strategic planning, audience needs assessments and market research, program and product development, financial modeling, operations planning, and grant proposal development. Prior to her consulting work, Mary was the vice president for education at PBS, where she managed PBS’s portfolio of national digital education services and coordinated the educational initiatives of PBS and its local member stations. She began her career as a high school teacher of English and Biology in Virginia’s public schools.
Mary joins Inspired Teaching at a very exciting time, as we continue to provide authentically engaging learning opportunities for students and teachers around Washington, DC. Last year, our work reached more than 350 teachers and 11,000 students. In addition to continuing our signature programs, we introduced Speak Truth: Student-Led Civic Discourse, a free program open to all high school students in DC, where students lead discussions on topics related to social justice. We also launched Humanities Hub, a program that utilized Inspired Teaching’s Real World History course, to train English and Social Studies teachers in engagement-based teaching.
Mary succeeds Jane Dimyan-Ehrenfeld in this role. Jane began her tenure at Inspired Teaching as a board member in 2014, and soon transitioned to become a full time staff member. Jane became Executive Director in 2016, after Founder & President, Aleta Margolis, stepped down from the role. We will miss Jane’s leadership, enormous energy, and contributions to Inspired Teaching as our Executive Director. But we look forward to continuing to keep her close in the Inspired Teaching family. Her ambition for us to grow our reach and our programs will continue and accelerate as she planned.
We know Mary will be a strong leader for Inspired Teaching, as we continue to transform school systems by cultivating changemaking educators who authentically engage their students as active learners and empathetic critical thinkers.