Dr. Shelonda Tillman
Ed.D., Organizational Leadership · Founder, SchoolScan
Dr. Tillman has spent more than 25 years inside classrooms, curriculum offices, and instructional leadership systems across Washington, DC. She began her career as a Biology and Chemistry teacher at Eastern and Crossland High Schools, became a department chair and instructional coach at Cesar Chavez Public Charter School, and has spent the past decade as a Science Instructional Systems Specialist at a DC charter network, where her work centers on one question: why do some instructional problems persist even when schools are doing everything right?
Her doctoral research examined the relationship between teacher turnover, certification, and student achievement in charter schools. That research shaped the diagnostic lens SchoolScan is built on. Outcomes are rarely random. They follow patterns. And those patterns are usually visible in the evaluation and walkthrough evidence schools already have.
Over a 25-year career Dr. Tillman has read thousands of classroom observations across DC public and charter schools, across grade levels from kindergarten through eighth grade, and across every major instructional framework used in urban education today. That volume of pattern recognition is what SchoolScan is built on.
The work of SchoolScan began when Dr. Tillman stopped asking why scores were low, and started asking what type of instruction would produce results like this, and what the evaluation evidence had been trying to tell us all along.
Education
Ed.D., Organizational Leadership
M.Ed., Curriculum and Instruction
B.S., Biology
Background
25+ years in DC public and charter schools
Teacher, coach, department chair,
instructional systems specialist