Marianne Wood Justus, EdD

Dr. Marianne Wood Justus is a literacy consultant and systems improvement specialist with more than two decades of experience helping educators, schools, districts, and state agencies put evidence-based literacy practices into place. She is the founder and Executive Director of Novellus Group, a systems improvement collective based in Davis, California, and serves as Director of Novellus Literacy. In that role she advises curriculum companies, e-learning organizations, school districts, and county offices on curriculum development, systems coaching, and high-quality standards-aligned literacy programs. Her work grounds instruction in the science of reading while keeping it joyful, culturally sustaining, and responsive to multilingual learners.

Before founding Novellus, Dr. Justus spent more than a decade at WestEd in roles spanning assessment, systems improvement, and applied research. As Senior Researcher and Project Director, she supported the California Department of Education’s co-directors of literacy in developing a statewide Literacy Roadmap and coached senior literacy leaders on systems-level implementation. Earlier, she contributed to the California Comprehensive State Literacy Plan and supported districts and county offices across the state in implementing the California ELA/ELD Framework and English Language Development Standards. She also co-facilitated development of the California English Learner Roadmap with the California Department of Education and the Sobrato Family Foundation, and partnered with Stanford’s Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity to design and lead national professional learning on formative, interim, and summative assessment in English Language Arts.

Her expertise is rooted in the classroom. Dr. Justus began her career teaching English as a foreign language in French primary schools through a program sponsored by Georgetown University and the French Ministry of Education, then taught middle grades ESL and English Language Arts in Brooklyn as a New York City Teaching Fellow. She went on to direct the English Language Development program across a network of charter high schools, where she designed curriculum, built assessment tools, and led network-wide professional learning on instruction for multilingual learners. That progression from teacher to program director to statewide adviser shapes how she works today, with an emphasis on practices educators can actually sustain.

Dr. Justus holds an EdD in Educational Leadership from the University of California, Davis, an MS in Education with a focus on applied linguistics from Long Island University, and a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Collaborative Classroom is grateful to Dr. Justus for her expert guidance during the development of the Designed English Language Development (D-ELD) component in the Collaborative Literacy curriculum.