Founder &
Instructor
At Principal Powered Reading, every workshop is personally taught by the company’s founder Zeke Vanderhoek.
A long-time school Principal, Zeke has extensive leadership experience and deep expertise in school-wide implementation of evidence-based literacy practices.
Learn more about Zeke below.
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Zeke founded and served for 12 years as the first Principal of a nationally recognized K-8 school, serving 1080 low-income students in New York City and featured on the front page of The New York Times and on 60 Minutes.
Zeke also has deep expertise in adult learning, having founded and served as the CEO of Manhattan Prep, a leading national educational company that redefined teaching excellence.
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As Principal, Zeke led his school’s comprehensive evaluation of national literacy curricula for K-8 and oversaw all aspects of curricular implementation.
Zeke has conducted hundreds of hours of evidence-based literacy trainings including: The Science of Reading Comprehension, Text Complexity Metrics, Foundational Reading Skills, and Close Reading Pedagogy.
Zeke regularly presents guest lectures for the course “Neuroscience Applications to Education” at Columbia University’s Teacher College.
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Zeke began his career teaching middle school and still identifies first as a teacher. While serving as Principal, he taught at least one course every year.
He has taught reading and language to students at every grade level from Kindergarten through 8th grade.
Zeke continues teaching literacy. He spends over 250 minutes each week volunteering as a one-to-one tutor with struggling K-8 readers.
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Zeke is passionate about continuing to deepen his own knowledge and learns the most from his students.
He loves both sharing his knowledge with you AND learning from you and other educational leaders in Principal Powered Reading’s workshops.
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