Our Teachers
Our teachers are the heart of Cottage and the base of our success. Passion, inspiration, empathy, creativity, understanding and generosity of time & spirit define these wonderful teachers.
TEACHER JOCELYN
DIRECTOR
Jocelyn Robertson brings a meaningful and multi-layered perspective to Cottage, drawing on her educational background, experience in the classroom and years of participation in the Cottage community as a parent. She attended Cottage as a child, returned as a parent with her son and daughter, and worked as a substitute teacher before joining the Cottage teaching team. Her journey at Cottage continues as the director as she shares the Cottage Way with the next generation of families. Jocelyn’s understanding of the Cottage philosophy stems from her deep and abiding trust in children as natural born learners.
She has a Bachelor's degree in Gender Studies and Studio Art from Occidental College and a Master's degree in Human Development from Pacific Oaks College.
Jocelyn is passionate about parent education and has founded a blog addressing topics of parenting and understanding child development with thoughtful and eloquent posts. She has been an advocate of the belief that that the Cottage community extends far outside the classroom.
Jocelyn is equally at home ankle-deep in a puddle of mud while wearing a cape with the children, leading parent education discussions and reaching out to support struggling parents. She is warm and engaging with an innate ability to connect with children. She has a clear and exciting vision for Cottage, grounded in developmentally appropriate best practice and anti-bias education.
Read Ms Robertson's Statement of Educational Philosophy
Jocelyn is a major contributor to our blog - Cottage Parenting:
Cottage Parenting
TEACHER JASON, Rainforest class
Jason Ballard was introduced to Cottage as a parent in 2012 when his daughter attended. Cottage was a perfect fit for his family's parenting beliefs. From that time he has worked with and been mentored by teachers at Cottage to fully understand "the Cottage way."
Jason worked as a substitute teacher in both the small yard and big yard since 2015 before joining the Cottage teaching staff in 2017. Jason is a great believer in the philosophy that a child learns best through play. He creates a fun and creative environment for his students to explore and learn through interaction with their peers and environment.
Endlessly inventive, he creates new and exciting opportunities in the yard and blends new and the familiar to create different settings for engagement. A pile of donated cardboard boxes may lead to a construction site with hammers and pegs, then become a city of tunnels, followed by a boat and then a house to be enthusiastically painted by the children.
When he is not working in the class, Jason works as a professional photographer.
TEACHER WALLACE, Oak and Rainforest classes
Wallace Yovetich is our on-staff Neurodivergence Support Coordinator as well as being a class teacher.
In addition to working on the yards, Teacher Wallace helps families navigate learning about their child’s specific needs and how they impact their development. She also helps set up evaluations of all kinds (speech, OT, neuropsych, etc), and helps families find state support on the financial and therapeutic level with IHSS, Regional Centers, and district IEPs.
Wallace entered the world of teaching in 2002. After teaching elementary and middle school for the first several years of her career, she became a Lead Teacher at an early intervention preschool where she worked in a general education classroom with both neurotypical and neurodivergent children. Wallace then transitioned from teaching to the literary world where she was a founding contributor at Book Riot - working her way up to Contributing Editor not long before she became pregnant with her son, Smith, and remained there, able to work from
home, during her son’s early years. (If you know Wallace, you’ll catch her giving reading recommendations whenever she gets the chance.) Once her son started Kindergarten in the fall of 2021, she returned to teaching; joining us here at Cottage.
Wallace is the parent of a neurodivergent son, and, as such, also has experience on the personal level of navigating the world of different needs with Developmental Pediatricians, Regional Centers, school districts, speech therapists, behavioral therapists, occupational therapists, and lawyers in the California legal system. Along with almost a decade of learning closely from these individuals, she has also learned from other parents of neurodivergent children as she is part of several parenting groups for parents of special needs children. In the summer of 2023, Wallace and a fellow parent founded the Eastside Parents of Neurodivergent Kids.
Wallace holds a BA in Communications from the University of the Pacific, and a CA Multiple-Subject Teaching Credential from Azusa Pacific University. Her Early Childhood Education units are from Santa Monica College. She is qualified by the state of California as an in home support services provider, and is a member of SEIU 2015, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), National Association of Special Education Teachers (NASET), and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). She has also been an advisor in special needs legal cases.
Teacher Wallace is particularly excited about observing what each child’s individual work is at the early childhood level, and coming alongside them to scaffold their social/emotional learning; helping to give them the tools that will best support them as they head into the world of elementary school and beyond.
TEACHER ALYSSA, Oak and Rainforest classes
Teacher Alyssa joined our teaching team in the Spring of 2021, during our first jump back into classes after Stay-at-Home, and immediately won the hearts of Cottage kids and parents alike. She has been dreaming of becoming a teacher since she was a child herself, and has worked with kids since she was 15, in school and home settings.
Working with older kids, she was particularly valued for her help with English assignments, but she has always had a special fondness for little kids. She is loved by our kids for her calm patience, her ease and grace, and her listening ear. Alyssa holds a BA in Child Development from Cal State LA.
Teacher Katie, mulberry and Olive classes
Teacher Katie was born and raised in Los Angeles. As a baby, she was in a RIE parent infant class with Magda Gerber. She started working with children herself as a babysitter in high school. She studied coastal ecology in Mexico and taught environmental science to middle schoolers. She completed the RIE foundations training twice, and worked at the RIE center. In 2009, Katie completed the Feldenkrais training and began her practice working with infants and children. In 2017 she completed a BA in Human Development with a concentration in Early Childhood Education at Pacific Oaks College. Most recently, she completed an MS in Early Childhood Education with a STEM concentration from Erikson Institute. She loves observing children and seeing how their interests lead to investigations and discoveries.
Although Katie had always dreamed of being a science teacher, she fell in love with the world of preschoolers and realized that those wonderful scientific and mathematical habits of mind can be fostered in early childhood when adults nurture a child's natural curiosity. She loves reading with children, and has a special love for nature and animals, handed down from her parents. When not at Cottage, Katie can be found at a nearby mountain or beach looking at rocks and plants or catching reptiles and insects, or moonlighting as a photo archivist for the late great jazz photographer Herman Leonard.
Teacher Gaby, Olive and Rainforest Classes
Gabriela Martinez, known to us as Teacher Gaby, is a Los Angeles native. Gaby is a graduate of California State University, Northridge, with a bachelors degree in Child and Adolescent Development. She joined the Cottage staff in 2022.
Gaby is a gifted and intuitive teacher, using a soft voice and a wonderful sense of humor to earn kids' trust. She is thoughtful and disciplined, helping the kids find a feeling of safety while getting to work out their big ideas. Gaby is bilingual, and has years of experience caring for a child with special needs. When Gaby isn’t at Cottage, she's often out trying new brunch restaurants.
Teacher Ana, mulberry and Oak classes
Ana Chaidez was born and raised in Tongvaland in the North East Los Angeles area. Teacher Ana was inspired to become an educator during years of participating in movements to create change in the realms of environmental and food justice, human rights, and community engagement. A tireless advocate for children, Ana is known by the families who have worked with her for her careful attunement with children and her uncanny knack for understanding things from their point of view. She has been involved in education for 20 years, working in preschool environments, K- 6th grade, and has taught art classes and provided critical social-emotional support for homeschool communities across the LA area. Ana first came to Cottage in 2008, returning after a brief hiatus in 2022.
Teacher Ana has a strong theoretical background, citing Constructivism, Reggio Emilia, RIE, and Forest School -inspired philosophies as major inspirations. She views Cottage’s child-led, free play, guided and supported by caring, observant adults as ideal for nourishing children’s innate curiosity.
Ana is also a mixed- media artist and has shown her work throughout Los Angeles. She has collaborated with other artists and writers and has provided the cover art to four books of poetry as well as provided illustrations for chapbooks. In her free time, Ana enjoys surfing, skateboarding, films, listening to and making music. Whether it’s in the forest, the desert or the beach, she appreciates being in nature and learning about plants and wildlife.
In revisiting our mission statement this week, as we move into a new era, I read something new that had never occurred to me before. In the past I had emphasized the terms, “child-directed”, “social emotional development”, and “conflict resolution”, and that has served me well in recreating the mission on the ground in our classrooms each day. But this time, as I read, there was a different part that stood out, as if in bold print, for the first time.