As a high school mathematics teacher, I often heard the same refrain from students and educators: “I thought math does not need language.” Mathematics, after all, is a universal language of its own – a realm of absolutes...
Every year I work to get my students to meet the standards for 4th grade. This year, I focused on working with my students on writing with evidence. Their writing would let me know how well they understood...
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...
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...
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 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...
The first day of school last year and the screen was a mess! Parents were writing to the principal, students were complaining, and there was no order to the class. And worst of all, my internet was glitching...
