Dr. Anna Alaniz will replace Allegra Villarreal as CTN’s Director of Professional Development. Villarreal has been with Catch the Next since 2012 serving as an English instructor at South Texas College before moving to Austin Community College as an English instructor for the program. She officially became the CTN Director of Professional Development in 2016 and has guided the training of more than 200 instructors in both the TTT and Ascender seminars. She will remain as a peer mentor for CTN. Villarreal has taken a position as an Associate Director of Programs with the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR). NCTR partners with school districts, charter management organizations, institutions of higher education, not-for-profits, and states to launch and grow teacher residency programs to recruit and develop effective and diverse new teachers, schools and districts. Their residency partners provide rigorous classroom-based training programs under the guidance of experienced, mentor teachers.
Dr. Alaniz has been involved with the CTN Program since 2012 as a mentor recruiter, student recruiter, instructor and advisor. Dr. Alaniz currently serves as the Ascender Coordinator at South Texas College and teaches all components of the program. She is currently a full time Developmental Reading Instructor, and adjuncts for the Education department and the English department. She adjuncts in the Teacher Bilingual Program at Texas A&M University-Kingsville where she teaches Foundation of Literacy and Assessment and Remediation in Reading. Dr. Alaniz taught in public education at Roma ISD. She has also taught adult literacy courses.
Alaniz earned a doctorate from Texas A&M University-Kingsville, a master’s degree in Education with an emphasis in Reading from the University of Texas Pan-American (now University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), and her bachelor’s in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis on Bilingual/Bicultural Education from the University of Texas Pan-American (now University of Texas Rio Grande Valley).