Marissa Berman

She/Her/Hers

Marissa’s enthusiasm and leadership around CWC’s core values has been truly contagious since the start of the organization, as the network’s first Founding Principal of its flagship school, CWC Hollywood, where she served in this role from 2010-2018. Since 2018, Marissa has served as a regional leader first as the Senior Director of Curriculum and Learning and, more recently, as the organization’s Head of Instruction and Learning.  In her role, Marissa’s aim is to work with  Principals, instructional leaders and teachers at all CWC LA schools, specifically around key instructional priorities.  She supports all campuses with the goal that all CWCLA schools can become proof points in their respective communities that a diverse group of students can thrive when engaged in innovative, thought-provoking and rigorous educational experiences.

Marissa Berman received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Master’s in Education from UC Berkeley. Before moving to Los Angeles to start CWC Hollywood in 2010 as its Founding Principal, she was an administrator and teacher at the North Oakland Community Charter School (NOCCS), which included a three year stint on their Board of Directors. Given her time at NOCCS as a K/1 and 2/3 teacher, Marissa is a hands-on instructional leader who is closely connected to her own experience as a classroom teacher and developer of project-based curriculum. In her administrative functions at NOCCS, she helped lead fundraising efforts, while also redesigning their after-school program, creating a school-wide service-learning curriculum and developing an after-school math intervention program.  Similar to her role at CWC, Marissa participated in teacher mentoring and professional development.

Previous to her time at NOCCS, Marissa worked at various public and independent elementary schools in San Francisco and Oakland. She has been a Project Zero Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, which led her to developing teacher training workshops and study groups on the Teaching for Understanding curriculum development framework, which CWC uses to structure thematic and interdisciplinary project-based units at each grade level.

In her spare time, she spends time with her daughter, son and husband, and their big furry dog, Zeus, in and around Los Angeles.