San José Unified Stephanie Palmeri Farías, Principal

School District Washington Elementary

“Inspiring and Preparing for Success”

April 3, 2017

To Whom It May Concern:

I am pleased to give my recommendation for Amber Lincoln. Miss Lincoln was hired as a kindergarten
teacher here at Washington Elementary in November of 2015 under the previous principal. This school
year, I have had the pleasure of supervising, evaluating, and working with her.

Miss Lincoln is a kindergarten teacher who plans collaboratively with her grade level partners and
delivers common core standards to a diverse population of students. Most of Miss Lincoln’s students
are English learners, and several receive counseling, speech, and/or other special education services.
Miss Lincoln implements our adopted curriculum and delivers it though our district instructional
framework. I have observed Miss Lincoln teaching our designated ELD units while integrating
interactive structures that allow her students to build their language schools. I have also observed her
teaching foundational literacy, Writer’s Workshop, and mathematics lessons aligned to our district scope
and sequence.

Miss Lincoln establishes routines to meet group and individual needs and to maximize student
engagement and learning time. This year, I have observed Miss Lincoln add a variety of classroom
management techniques to her repertoire, including the use of praise, group motivation techniques, and
the use of Class Dojo, a computer application that allows her to track student behavior and communicate
with parents. She also employs varying instructional strategies that meet the needs of her diverse
learners, including the effective use of technology and scaffolding techniques, like providing students
with sentence frames.

Finally, Miss Lincoln has been a very active participant in both required and optional site and district
trainings. She has attended workshops on early literacy, the newly adopted Stepping Stones math
curriculum, as well as other diverse training opportunities like “Understanding Crisis and Trauma,” Arts
in Education, and the integrating of coding into the curriculum.

Again, I have no reservations in giving my recommendation of Miss Lincoln. Please feel free to contact
me if you would like more information.

Sincerely,

Stephanie Palmeri Farías

Principal, Washington Elementary
spalmerifarias@sjusd.org

100 Oak Street● San Jose, California 95110 ● (408) 535-6261 ● FAX (408) 535-2369