Many teachers talk of playing school in their childhood basements as kids.
Dana Freedlund did that, too. A chalkboard. A magnetic board. Desks. Worksheets that she handed out to her friends. She had it all.
That’s not what drove her to a career in the classroom, however, or how she knew from a young age of her professional destiny.
“Back in my early years – first grade, kindergarten – I struggled in school. School never came easy,” Freedlund says.
“Reading was definitely something that I struggled with, and so my parents had programming that I went to outside of school,” she adds of mom and dad, Geri and Jim Froning. “I saw reading teachers on the side and really had some great role models of teaching growing up who were supportive and who made me who I am today.”
Who she is today is a Top 20 finalist for a Rockford-area Golden Apple award.
Created in 1997, the mission of the Golden Apple Foundation is to inspire, celebrate and support excellence in education in more than 150 schools, both public and non-public, spanning Winnebago and Boone counties.
“I’m so honored,” says Freedlund, an English Language Arts/Reading Intervention specialist at Roscoe Middle School. “I told my students that this whole Golden Apple process isn’t just about me – it’s about us, and it’s about them. I said, ‘My award, if I were to win, is our award. You guys are winning this because I couldn’t do this job without you.’ ”
Freedlund, who grew up in neighboring Rockton, earned her M.S.Ed. in Literacy Education-Reading from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in 2003. She’s taught for 31 years, the last 29 in her current building.
She took “any and every” course in reading that she could during her undergraduate years, foreshadowing her master’s pursuit at NIU.
Literacy education and reading support “look different at the middle school and high school level,” she says, “and middle school is its own place in the education world.”
“Kids in middle school – it’s hard when they struggle in reading, but I get it, and my heart is there for sure,” Freedlund says. “When I went to NIU, reading support was one of those things that I really wanted to get going in the middle school, and once I got my master’s, I had lots of conversations with admin to get some reading support classes going.”
Her daily schedule contains three, 84-minute blocks of “Language Live” with current enrollments of 11, eight and five students who need her intervention and who have taught her the power of flexibility and adaptation in lesson plans.
“I have different rotations each day, so I’m responsible for teaching the English, the grammar, the writing, the reading, the fluency,” she says.
“I’m really able to work one-on-one and really build those relationships and build that trust,” she adds. “The first part of my time with these students is building that trust. I’ve shared my story. They know. They know I struggled. They know that I get it. They know it’s real – the struggle is real – and that I get the frustration, wanting to give up, and that I just kept coming back. ‘This isn’t about giving up, guys. We’ve got to keep going when things are hard.’ ”
Call it “perseverance,” she says.
“I have tried to ingrain in my students that it’s not always about a right answer. It’s not always about 100%. It’s not just the ‘A.’ It’s not just the sticker on the paper. It’s that, ‘Man, I stuck with this, and I finally got that,’ ” she says. “That’s what I hope my students learn.”
NIU’s graduate program “was pretty rigorous,” says Freedlund, who appreciated its cohort structure and the resulting “tight-knit collaboration that I remember being so important when we were working on projects, practicing those assessment and diagnosis pieces.”
Her classmates “had that love of literacy and teaching struggling readers,” she adds, “and I remember looking at that role model and thinking, ‘That’s what I want to be.’ ”
Part of the curriculum included visits to buildings within her own Kinnikinnick Community Consolidated School District 131 as well as in the nearby Rockford Public Schools to not only practice the application of those techniques but also to see different populations of students.
“Looking back, I felt very prepared,” she says. “I always had the love of reading, and I always had to love of supporting literacy, but NIU really helped me to build the confidence that I needed and to give me that skill set. There are certain strategies that I think about, remembering that all kids can learn: We just have to find that piece that makes them successful.”
Freedlund says her reward is “that joy of seeing student growth and being able to celebrate that with the kids here at the middle school,” especially those who spend three years of her roster.
“The kids want to do better. They want to learn. They want to set goals, achieve those and have those successes,” she says, “and it’s so cool. I still get goosebumps when I see certain students who have been working so hard – so hard – and they finally get one piece of success. Seeing their reaction when they see a score go up or they do really well on something? There’s nothing like it.”
All teachers work for those outcomes, she adds.
“Some days are tougher in education – we know that in education – but at the end of the day, what teachers do, and I’m not talking just me, is that we make a difference,” Freedlund says. “Seeing those aha moments for kids keeps me coming back.”
