Licensed MN Teacher | Science of Reading Specialist

Andrew U.

I'm a licensed Minnesota teacher. Five years in the classroom, and over a decade total working with students from elementary school through high school in teaching, coaching, and curriculum roles. I hold a Master of Arts in Education from Concordia University, St. Paul and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. For the past five years, I've taught fifth grade in St. Paul, working primarily with English language learners.

If your child has struggled with reading or writing — tutoring, school intervention, none of it sticking — there's a good chance no one has taught them how written English actually works. That's what I do. And I teach it in a way that clicks. My reading instruction is built on the science of reading, and I'm trained in Reading Simplified, a structured phonics intervention that teaches decoding systematically and explicitly. It works for early readers and for older students who slipped through the cracks.

For writing, I use thinkSRSD, an evidence-based framework that gives students a concrete process for planning and drafting. For reading comprehension, I use the KAT framework. The through-line: everything I do has solid research behind it.

The same logic applies to math. Many struggling math students haven't failed to learn — they've been taught in ways that skip steps or assume too much. I use a structured, cumulative approach grounded in Direct Instruction, with materials I've developed and refined over years of classroom teaching. In my current classroom, I brought cohort math proficiency from 28% to 67% in a single year.

I work best with students who need more than encouragement — kids who need a clear, structured path forward and a teacher who knows how to build it. I do in-home tutoring in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metro area and keep my caseload intentionally small so every student gets my full attention.