Meet Our Team
Nawal Qarooni – Founder
Nawal Qarooni is a Jersey City-based educator, writer and adjunct professor who supports a holistic approach to literacy instruction and family experiences in schools across the country. Drawing on her work as an inquiry-based leader, mother, and proud daughter of immigrants, Nawal’s pedagogy is centered in the rich and authentic learning all families gift their children every day. She and her team of coaches at NQC Literacy work with schools and districts to collectively grow teacher practice and children’s literacy lives. She is the author of Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Elevating Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care (Stenhouse/ Routledge 2024). She has worked for the last two decades as a classroom teacher, instructional coach, staff developer, researcher, and professor.
In addition, Nawal serves on the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Advisory Board, which funds powerful literacy programming across the country and worldwide. She sits on the National Council for English Build Your Stack Committee as a dedicated nurturer of diverse literature. Nawal was a member of the National Council for Teachers of English Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English (2021-2024). She evaluates manuscripts for Reese Witherspoon’s LitUp program, which platforms historically underrepresented voices in publishing.
Nawal holds a Bachelor of English from the University of Michigan, a Master of Teaching from Brooklyn College, and a Master of Journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. She won a New Jersey Press Association Award for her international reporting and transitioned into education as a New York City Teaching Fellow. She currently teaches at New York University in the Teacher Residency program.
Elana Porat
Integrating deep thinking, reflection, and joy into the learning process is what guides Elana’s teaching and coaching practices. Her desire to teach was sparked from summers spent as a camp counselor in Michigan, a childhood spent performing on stage, and growing up the daughter of an art teacher. Elana spent over a decade as a classroom teacher, and has held positions as a reading interventionist and co-author of University of Chicago’s Everyday Mathematics curriculum. She also led numerous seasons of Tinkergarten classes in Humboldt Park to engage young children and caregivers in outdoor education. Elana holds a Master of Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an endorsement in Teacher Leadership. She currently serves as the Chair of the Local School Council where her kids attend. Elana lives in Chicago, where you can likely find her towing her three kids around town on her cargo bike.
A coaching focus for Elana is working with teachers and administration in growing their capacity, both in individual classrooms and as a school, to best support learners as they progress through the different stages of building reading comprehension. One of her long-term projects includes supporting CPS teachers in implementing the Skyline Foundational Skills and ELA curriculum.
Sarah Skoda
Jeannie Kim
As an educator, Jeannie is passionate about authentic and culturally sustaining curriculum and instruction that affirms students’ identities and promotes critical thinking. Over the past nineteen years, she has taught 5th, 6th, and 7th grades and has also worked as an interventionist and instructional coach. Jeannie joins the NQC Literacy team with a commitment to collaborate and support other educators in creating or adapting curricular units for their students and engaging in transformative coaching cycles around a literacy goal. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two children and can often be found reading or dabbling in water painting.
Jeannie is also a trained circle keeper and committed to restorative practices and ways of being in schools and beyond. Her projects include facilitating professional learning around literacy curriculum, coaching teachers at all points of their journey, keeping restorative circles for educators, leading collaborative workshops and classes around interdisciplinary units and social justice pedagogy, and hosting teacher book clubs.