Melinda Karshner

Melinda Karshner is a veteran educator with more than two decades of classroom experience. She began teaching in 2005 in Pasadena, California, where she was named Teacher of the Year in 2009, and has spent her career helping students develop confidence as readers, writers, and thinkers. Over the years she has taught a wide range of subjects: elementary literacy, mathematics, science, and robotics. But no matter the subject, the heart of her work has always been the same. Helping students experience the moment when something that once felt impossible suddenly begins to make sense.

Through EduVenturing, she explores how we can give students the instruction they need without losing the wonder, curiosity, and joy that brought many of us to education in the first place.

Her work today focuses on literacy, particularly structured-literacy approaches that help students build strong decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. She believes deeply that skill development and a love of reading are not competing goals. When taught well, they grow together.

In classrooms and small groups, Melinda has worked extensively with students who struggle with reading, including students with dyslexia. Her approach blends explicit instruction with meaningful reading experiences — because students deserve both the tools to read and the joy that reading can bring.

EduVenturing began as a place to share ideas, resources, and tools that support real classrooms and real learners — some focused on morphology and word study, others on helping older struggling readers access rich texts and novels. All of them grounded in years of classroom practice.

Summit Spelling grew directly from that work: an interactive, structured-literacy spelling program that teaches from speech to print, built to support the kinds of thinking strong readers use naturally — breaking words apart, recognizing patterns, and understanding how meaning is constructed.

Explore her literacy tools and projects at teach-eduventuring.com

• Master of Education, University of California, Irvine (2004).
• Orton-Gillingham certified, with additional training in speech-to-print approaches for supporting students with dyslexia and diverse learning needs.
• Multi-subject credentials: Elementary Education (K–6), Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education (K–12), English (6–12), Mathematics (6–12), and Science (6–12).
• Classroom experience spanning 4th grade, 6th-grade math, pre-algebra, earth science, and robotics.

Melinda's writing and podcast work contribute to the national conversation about literacy instruction, including the debates around the Science of Reading.

• Substack author — she writes about literacy, teaching, and education systems: classroom life, the challenges educators face, and protecting meaningful reading experiences for students. Read her writing
• Podcast contributor — has appeared on programs such as the ThoughtStretchers Podcast to discuss leveled reading and student growth.
• Teacher2Teacher contributor — writes on professional development, classroom culture, and the importance of teacher camaraderie.

Everything shared through EduVenturing comes from the perspective of a classroom teacher. The goal is not polished theory or perfect answers, but practical tools that help students learn and help teachers do the work they care about.

Teaching is complicated work. Reading is complicated work. But when students discover that they can read something they once thought was out of reach, the room changes. That moment is what this work is about.