Despite being a new Special Education English teacher at Pascack Valley this year, Michelle Chakansky is no stranger to the school.

Chakansky was a student teacher in English Teacher Matthew Morone’s Honors English II classes during the 2020-2021 school year.

“She came in very, very prepared and competent, and [I saw] that increased confidence [over the course of the year],” Morone said. “It’s so hard to come into student teaching without having any experience in the classroom before. But it was something that she really took to immediately, and there was this constant enthusiasm.” 

Chakansky did not originally plan to go into teaching. While she was a student at River Dell High School, she took a marketing class, “fell in love with business and marketing,” and planned to pursue it in college. She was an English Rhetoric Major at Binghamton University and entered the Public Relations field right after college, but she did not think it was for her. 

“In high school, I was a camp counselor for many years. So I loved working with kids,” Chakansky said. “I wanted to take that passion and make an impact in people’s lives and pursue a career in teaching.”

She left Public Relations and enrolled in a graduate program at Montclair State University, where she got her Master’s Degree and her teaching certifications.

“I wanted to [be a high school teacher so I could] have more intellectually stimulating conversations with my students,” Chakansky said. “I wanted to be able to share with my kids my love of reading, and [have students] analyze the text and think at higher-level thought processes that you don’t really get with the younger age because their toolset isn’t there yet.”

After doing her student teaching at PV, Chakansky taught English III to juniors at Hawthorne High School for a year, and she helped pilot the Study Skills program at the school. 

“[Starting Study Skills] was a risk for me because I’d never taught that in school before,” Chakansky said. “They didn’t even have a curriculum for Study Skills. So I took that on, and I loved it so much, and it gave me a whole different outlook on teaching.”

In the Study Skills program, Chakansky wanted students to know what types of learners they are.

“Teaching students first how they best learn—like if you’re a visual learner or if you’re a kinesthetic learner or an auditory learner—I don’t think that’s discussed enough in the classroom,” Chakansky said. “I focused a lot of my lessons around having these discussions with my students [about] how [they would] best learn this information.”

While at Hawthorne, Chakansky worked under interim principal Tom DeMaio, who is a former PV Principal. DeMaio “was very integral in helping shape who [Chakansky is] today along with Mr. Morone because they have a lot of similar instructional techniques,” Chakansky said. 

Morone introduced Chakansky to the standards-based grading system, which emphasizes mastery of skills rather than just grades. This system was supported by DeMaio, who invited Chakansky to workshops that taught her how to incorporate standards-based grading into her classroom. 

Morone also taught Chakansky a lesson about pivoting when your lesson isn’t going as planned.

“Most of the time, your lesson is not going to go to plan, [and] it might fail,” Chakansky said. “In fact, it will usually fail, and you need to be able to see that your students aren’t picking up what you’re putting out there. And you need to completely throw away that beautiful lesson that you had planned and go in a different direction.”

This year, Chakansky is teaching English I, II, and III.

“[I’m looking forward to] building relationships with my students. I am so excited to meet my new classes and meet a new group of kids and get to know them,” Chakansky said. “I’m really looking forward to honing in on my instructional technique. I’m excited to take those risks to [teach] lessons that are innovative and do that in a community that supports it.”