Rainbow Mountain First Grade
Rachel Hagen, 1st Grade Teacher
Before joining our permanent staff, Rachel was a favorite substitute teacher with all our students in preschool through eighth grade.
Rachel is highly trained, with an undergraduate degree from George Washington University in Psychology (Concentration in Early Childhood Development) and a Masters Degree in Early Childhood Education (Certification for P-3rd Grade.) She has been a teacher for seven years, including three years as the director-on-duty at a Unitarian preschool.
Rachel enjoys creating learning experiences that make the subject matter both exciting and meaningful for her students. She employs a variety of instructional strategies to encourage her students development of critical thinking, problem solving and performance skills.
Her teaching style displays creativity, smooth behavior management skills, appropriate academic expectations, and kindness. Quickly earning the respect of her students, Rachel is able to help them grow and develop intellectually, socially, spiritually and physically.
When not immersed in creative lesson planning, Rachel enjoys time with her young daughter.
Joy Black, 1st Grade Assistant Teacher
Having grown up in a family of educators, teaching has always come naturally to Joy Black. She studied social psychology and dance at Wesleyan University and spent her college summers in an early intervention classroom with three- to five-year-old children with special needs. Working beside a gifted, loving and enlightened teacher laid the foundation for Joy’s later work with children.
Prior to joining Rainbow Mountain’s faculty, Joy has worked in outdoor education, taught movement classes to preschoolers, become a certified yoga instructor, taught Kindermusik classes and co-founded a Waldorf methods preschool. Joy believes that Rainbow’s experiential, thematic approach to education fits well with her prior experience.
Joy appreciates the amount of freedom she has as a Rainbow Mountain teacher, as well as the open-minded environment she has found here, where teachers continually seek to grow and improve. She feels the school’s culture provides her the opportunity to use her individual gifts well and to join her co-workers in taking responsibility to help the school run well.
After school, Joy can be found gardening, swimming, dancing, knitting, sewing or sharing family activities with her husband and two young children. She is also currently working on her Masters Degree in Waldorf Education through Antioch University of New England.
