Sean Costello is entering his twentieth year in the profession. He cut his teaching teeth in Busan, Korea as a second grade teacher in 2000. Subsequently, Sean has taught students ranging from Kindergarten age to the Master’s-level. Prior to arriving in Hanoi he taught high school literature in Shanghai, China. His passions lie in Socratic methodologies that blend reflexive writing with critically-focused classroom discussion. Sean believes strongly in student-centered pedagogy, having learned through research and experience that students excel when they are afforded opportunities for choice and leadership in their curriculum.
Sean graduated with a BA in Literature from Fredonia State College before obtaining a MS as a Literacy Specialist at the State University of New York at Albany. At Albany, he also completed doctoral coursework in Teaching, Language, and Learning for which he earned a Certificate of Advanced Studies. Sean is also a National Writing Project Fellow and has co-written several published academic articles and a book review. Sean has also presented research at several international conferences, including UPenn’s Ethnography Forum and NCTE. His professional interests lie in teacher research and learning theory.
Sean hails from Buffalo, New York and retains a passion for his hometown football and hockey teams. He is an avid reader of essays and literature, an active swimmer, a lover of the outdoors, and a motorcycle enthusiast.
Mentorship plays a big role here. We’re a small school and a close-knit community. We’re able to establish relationships with students that I think are are deeper and more meaningful than perhaps larger schools…
…I felt very blessed to have some really interesting students to get to know and the relationships that I’ve made with a lot of them have transcended graduation and it’s great when they come back and visit to stay in touch with them and kind of follow their careers as they leave St. Paul and move into the world. So all of those things I would say have made an incredible experience at the high school level for me here teaching.
Most of our students academically gravitate to the maths and sciences, but we do have an incredible minority of artistically inclined students. We’ve sent a lot of students to a number of world-renowned art institutions.
Overall academically, our rigor is is excellent. We challenge our students in as many ways as we can. We challenge ourselves as a faculty to grow our programs and add new offerings. AP classes are meant to be the students first exposure to university level instruction. So the AP language component of our 11th grade offering is more directly applicable to students who are pursuing a future in engineering or sciences or mathematics. The AP literature program has more of a specific appeal for students who are more interested in humanities as a as a possible career focus.
The skills that we focus on as a ELA department tend to be of course reading and writing and speaking and listening and these are all very core fundamental skills. So here at St. Paul we try to make a more holistic opportunity for students to develop those skills organically in unison with with each other.
Students are self-motivated at St. Paul. They are ambitious. When these students come to us with these dreams of top-level university admission, we have to just simply provide them all of the opportunities we can to allow them to get as far as they can go.