Roderick Prior is not a traditional teacher candidate. Before stepping into a classroom, he spent fifteen years in corporate loan operations and management — building the kind of systems thinking, procedural discipline, and human leadership that most educators spend careers trying to develop. That background doesn't sit separately from his teaching. It informs it at every level.
Since 2021, Roderick has worked in private-sector education, deepening his instructional practice while consistently finding ways to reach the students those structures were not designed for. He has been approved for a Nevada Substitute License and is currently completing the iTeach teacher preparation program, pursuing full Special Education licensure with an ELAD endorsement — a deliberate choice rooted in a conviction that students with exceptional needs and multilingual learners deserve educators who show up with both rigor and genuine attunement.
Layered onto this foundation is an MEd in English Language Learning, which positions Roderick at a distinctive intersection: an emerging Special Education practitioner with graduate-level expertise in language acquisition, cross-cultural communication, and the challenges facing multilingual learners in American schools.
— Teaching Philosophy, R. Prior
They are a person in motion — and my job is to understand which direction they are trying to move, and clear the path.
I did not arrive at teaching through a straight line. Before I ever stood in front of a classroom, I spent fifteen years in corporate loan operations — managing people, managing processes, and learning, over and over again, that the gap between what a system is designed to do and what a person actually needs is where most of the real work happens. That insight travels with me into every classroom I enter.
My decision to pursue full Special Education licensure through iTeach, with an ELAD endorsement pathway, is not incidental. It is a declaration. Students with exceptional needs are frequently the ones most let down by systems not designed with them as the primary consideration. My time in Nevada classrooms has confirmed what I suspected: the skills that matter most in SPED — attentiveness, flexibility, the ability to hold a student's dignity intact while adjusting the scaffolding — are exactly the skills that make any teacher worth having.
My MEd in English Language Learning adds another layer. Multilingual learners face a particular complexity: acquiring language and content simultaneously, in environments that treat them as separate problems. They are not. What I bring to a school is the convergence of organizational discipline, relational depth, and specific technical knowledge — someone who has done hard things before and understands this work is also hard, and worth doing.