Welcome!! I am JanaLeigh M. Olszyk, and this is my 23rd year teaching social studies at CHS. I am looking forward to an exciting 2022-2023 school year. In May of 1997, I graduated from Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, NJ with a B.A. in history, social studies, and teacher education. In May of 2003, I received my masters degree in Special Education from The College of New Jersey. I have had the honor to have been a student of the James Madison Program at Princeton University for the summers of 2006 and 2008 as well as the Spring of 2009. In May of 2015, I earned my certificate as a Master Teacher of Holocaust Studies from the Master Teacher Institute in Holocaust Education at Rutgers University. In 2022, I earned my second masters degree in Global and Comparative History from Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
In the summer of 2016, I participated in the Exeter Humanities Institute at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. My interest in attending this institute stemmed from my department's commitment to better develop speaking and listening skills in the classroom and coincided with a grant my department received in that same year from the Hopewell Valley Education Foundation for collaborative flex- tables which replaced individual student desks. Both the teaching philosophy I explored at PEA and the new classroom furniture help to employ a progressive pedagogy that focuses on problem-solving, critical thinking, social responsibility, and democracy in my classroom, "sitting at the table, all members of the class must question, contribute, and contemplate in order to learn and succeed. Of the many different arguments in favor of the method, the most important may be that it goes beyond the mechanistic transmitting of information by experientially teaching students how to learn." In 2017, the English and Social Studies departments at CHS collaborated on an application and were awarded a grant from the HVEF for a set of collaborative flex-tables in the English wing and an interdisciplinary professional development training for creating a classroom environment that is supportive of dialogic learning.
During the 2022-2023 school year I will be teaching both 10th Grade Advanced Placement United States History I as well as the first year of the AP Capstone program: Advanced Placement Seminar. If you ever have any questions about the courses that I am currently instructing, feel free to email me at: [email protected] or leave a message on my voicemail: 609.737.4000 x1337