As an English Language Development teacher, I want to empower students to understand how English works. In service of this goal, my students and I embarked on a year-long prefix-based vocabulary study to increase their Tier...
It was a cycle I had been through before; choose focal students and watch them slip like water through my fingers. In a school district that has become predominantly White in recent years, I felt it...
In the fall of 2021, I was appointed to my first district-level position as a Director of Secondary Education. After fourteen years of experience as a site administrator; seven years as a high school assistant principal and seven...
Several years ago, I was walking down the primary grade hallway and popped my head into a kindergarten classroom. A group of about 5 kindergartners was actively moving around gathering materials while the rest of their classmates were...
This school year, I learned something even *more* valuable than excellent organizational skills or awe-inspiring unit plans. This year I learned something new about data. Up until the 2021-22 school year, I...
Our relationship with writing can color our entire experience as a student. It can give us the confidence to tell our story and to use the depth of language to express what we know. But if we never...
After the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school year it was REALLY easy to find yourself and your team in a reactive stance – after all we had spent almost two years having to constantly pivot and respond to new...
An Uncertain Return Summer readings for professional development always appear exciting at first — there is so much hope and promise for change and innovation in that nascent stage of planning. And throughout our extended year of distance...
When the 2021-2022 school year began, there seemed a palpable sense of cautious optimism that the new school year would remain challenging yet it would be “better” and more “normal” than the previous one disrupted by a global...
“When the math is getting more difficult, what happens internally?” I asked one of my 8th grade focal students. “Yeah… I get annoyed and stressed, and kind of angry, because I don’t understand it. I hate...
