Our Team
Jennifer Terry, M.A.
After spending over 25 years in the educational field teaching students from pre-Kindergarten through 8th grade, Jennifer Terry, M.A., co-founded Culturally Responsive Minds (CRM) with a mission to provide teachers with a culturally sustaining social emotional learning (SEL) curriculum that supports students in their development of a critical social consciousness. Jennifer also supports teachers and district staff as a curriculum instructional coach and a culturally responsive instructional coach. She has worked in educational leadership roles to support the creation of equitable structures within the district, schools, and classrooms.
Dr. Yen Verhoeven
Dr. Yen Verhoeven is a learning theorist and an award-winning speaker with over 20 years of experience teaching science and education to thousands of people from all ages. She holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction, and is a certified online instructional designer and program evaluator. Dr. Yen is also the interim co-chair for the Iowa Governor's Creativity and Innovation Task Force and serves on the Iowa Governor's STEM Regional Advisory board.
Dr. Yen's Fierce and Fearless STEAM Teacher professional development course is a 2021 Iowa STEM Scale-Up program.
Sandra Saucedo-Falagan, M.A.
Sandy is a teacher, curriculum writer, professional developer, instructional coach, educational leader, voice for historically marginalized students and founder of The Equity Lens, LLC. She holds a Specialist Degree in Education Administration, a Masters in Elementary Education, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts.
As a champion of best practice models and strategies to ensure equitable learning opportunities for all students, she has extensive experience addressing the needs of all students, including English learners and special education students through co-teaching, reading interventions, balanced literacy, multi-tiered systems of support, language acquisition development, and curriculum design.
How CRM and Qi Learning Merged
On January 1, 2022, CRM became an official division under Qi Learning Research Group. Qi
Learning was founded in April 2018 by Dr. Yen Verhoeven with a mission to revolutionize
education through transformative teaching practices, educator professional development, and
program evaluation. Over the course of her career, Yen developed a unique learning theory called
Interactive Spatial Learning (ISL; Verhoeven, 2018). ISL explains the conditions needed for
effective, self-directed learning in both online and face-to-face settings. Due to her work with ISL,
Qi Learning was awarded a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – MiSK Foundation Grand Challenges
grant in October, 2018. As a result, Qi Learning developed YouTube videos and training workshops
to help teachers incorporate effective and engaging distance learning and STEAM education into
their classroom practice.
Qi Learning’s flagship program, the Fierce and Fearless STEAM Teacher, was selected as an
Iowa Governor’s STEM Council Scale-Up program for the 2021-2022 year. This state-funded, 10-
month program provided STEAM and SEL professional development training to 52 educators across
the state of Iowa. To date, over 8000 teachers from all over the world have benefitted from Yen’s
workshops and training videos.
Under this new partnership, Qi Learning provides research-driven professional development,
instructional design frameworks, and developmental evaluation to support the CRM curriculum.
While the CRM SEL curriculum supports the intellectual competence and emotional intelligence in
students, Qi Learning provides the instructional design, community, and professional development
support for new and experienced teachers who are using the CRM curriculum.