Elizabeth Solis, 30, is an assistant principal and history teacher at Arise, a charter high school in East Oakland, Calif.

Q. You teach high school students from non-English-speaking homes. What got you interested in that?

A. For starters, I was one of them. I was born in San Jose, Calif.; my parents were immigrants — Dad from Nicaragua, Mom from Guatemala.

My mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, taught me the alphabet early, using biblical texts. Yet I did poorly in school since there was no expectation at home to achieve academically, mainly because Jehovah’s Witnesses in my congregation at the time discouraged pursuing secular higher education. Ironically, though, the teacher-student evangelical style of Jehovah’s Witnesses was the foundation of my teaching ability later in life. Through first-person narrative writing and interviewing family members, I came to know and better appreciate myself and my heritage. It gave me a voice that had been only a whisper till then. That’s when I got engaged with learning, and it sparked my desire to teach.

How do you try to engage your students?

I use strategies I developed from my own experience and added many new ones I picked up as a summer fellow of the Bay Area Writing Project at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea is for teachers to share their in-class successes with one another, rather than follow the traditional textbook approach.