It was mid-afternoon, about 15 minutes into our Instructional Leadership Team meeting at one of our partner schools. When it was the next teacher leader’s turn to be our Public Learner, about one...
This summer Oakland Unified School District’s Expanded Learning Office brought together Site Coordinators and Agency Directors for their annual Summer Institute. This year’s theme is “Tending our Roots: Cultivating Joy.” Lead by Learning supported the OUSD Expanded Learning...
As a high school assistant principal, I work to understand student issues I am working on through Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez’s notion of windows and mirrors. Dr. Gutierrez defines a window as students being...
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...
