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Hello, Imagine you are a first-year elementary teacher on a grade-level team, and you have a background in theater that you genuinely love. You have been doing readers’ theater with your students, and they are engaged in a way that feels different. It feels meaningful. It feels like something you could build on. So you start thinking about what might come next. A full play for all of the students in your grade level starts to feel like a natural extension of what you have alr

Hello, Imagine you and I are playing a familiar game: Two Truths and a Lie. It is simple, recognizable, and, in many ways, revealing. Here are mine. I never paint my fingernails. I hate sushi. Two of my children are named after people in my family. Take a second and decide which one is the lie. The lie is that two of my children are named after people in my family. Only one of them is. What makes that lie effective is that it is close enough to the truth to feel believable. I

Hello, I’m short. I’ve always known it. I was never the girl who shot up tall and then plateaued early. I was always the shortest in the class. Always. In fact, I was even voted “shortest” in my high school yearbook, which was odd. I am still not sure how that was something people voted on. It was not an opinion. It was simply a fact. In my family, however, I am of average height. I am taller than my older sister, one of my cousins, and my maternal grandmother. On my mom’s si

Hello, My name is Heather, and I’m a recovering perfectionist. For a long time, I believed perfectionism was a strength. It felt like a high standard, something worth striving toward. In practice, it did not give me joy. It gave me stress. It made me hesitate, question whether I should even begin something if I could not do it exactly right, and sometimes stop midway because I felt too far from where I thought I should be. Perfectionism is deceptive in that way. It does not j

Hello, When my husband and I bought our first house, a charming Cape Cod, I thought it would be our forever home. It was where we began married life and where we brought our first two children home. I loved that house and poured so much care into it, assuming it would hold all of our firsts. What I did not expect was how challenging homeownership would be. We never imagined dealing with flying carpenter ants in the nursery, ice dams in the gutters, a basement prone to floodin

Hello, I’ve been noticing something lately. I am no longer “in the know” when it comes to pop culture. My teenage children reference people, shows, and music that I have never heard of, even though they all definitely know what they're talking about. In the meantime, I'm watching reels on Instagram (which my kids tell me is like TikTok leftovers) to listen to translations of what kids are saying, so it makes sense to me. There was a time when I felt like a pop culture connois

Hello, The Gottman Institute, which studies relationships extensively, explains in their post," Managing Conflict: Solvable vs. Perpetual Problems ," that “sixty-nine percent of relationship conflict is about perpetual problems.” In other words, most conflict is not something you solve once and move on from. It is something you return to. Perennial problems are not the same as solvable problems, which are situational. They arise, you address them, and you move forward. They m

Hello, In one of the quarterly surveys I recently sent to both my Board of Education and my staff, a piece of feedback caught my attention. Both a board member and several staff members shared a similar thought: they would like to see me more. Not that they never see me, but that they would like to see more of me in schools and around the district. I did not take that as criticism. In many ways, it felt like a compliment. If people did not want to see their superintendent at

Hello, In my previous post, " Not the Problems Is Not the Solution ," I argued that the opposite of harm is not silence. The absence of wrongdoing is not the same as the presence of good. I ended by suggesting that when silence becomes predictable, it is rarely accidental. If silence is predictable, then it is patterned. And if it is patterned, then it is designed. That brings us to systems. Over the past few years, I have been thinking deeply about systems and what I mean by

Hello, We spend a great deal of time teaching students to be upstanders. We tell them to do the right thing, to stand up for others, and to say something when something is wrong. We encourage courage. We celebrate character. We write mission statements about belonging and respect. Yet, if we are honest, it is still remarkably difficult for adults to do those very things in real time. That tension has been sitting with me. We tend to imagine morality as a simple line. On one e

Hello, If I told you that I played the violin for over a decade, including in college, you might assume I was talented. We tend to equate time with quality. The more hours invested, the better the outcome. You might even reference the 10,000-hour rule. But repetition alone does not produce excellence. It is not practice makes perfect. It is refined practice that makes progress. If I repeat the same mistakes for years, I simply become good at doing them wrong. If I consistentl

Hello, Recently, three different friends shared situations they were navigating. On the surface, their stories had nothing to do with one another. Beneath them, however, was a striking similarity. The first friend, who professionally works in mediation and restoration of harm, reached out to someone she occasionally walked with. No response. She followed up. Still nothing. She was left wondering what she had done. The second friend, a school principal, experienced an accident

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called On Target . It was about schools as systems, and how easy it is for leaders to miss the mark when they forget who they actually serve. The bullseye model I shared was my way of naming a simple truth: you support the people you directly touch, and that support is what makes student success possible. More recently, I wrote another post called Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game . That post was less about the structure of a system an

Hello, On my first opening day as superintendent in the district where I work, we did the standard opening day fare. We celebrated service anniversaries. We welcomed new hires. We talked about the year ahead. Those rituals are important, and they deserve time and attention. I also wanted people to know a little bit about me, not just my role, but how I think. At one point, I said, “I’m going to hell.” Everyone laughed, which was the goal. I explained the reason I am going the

This post is the second in a two-part series. In part one, " The False Choice We Keep Repeating ," I explored how the science of reading exposed a false choice between meaning and structure. In this post, I turn to New York Inspires and examine how that same false choice is resurfacing at the system level. Hello, In last week’s post, I wrote about how the science of reading exposed a false choice between meaning and structure. That lesson has stayed with me because reading in

This post is part one of a two-part series. In it, I reflect on what the science of reading taught us about false choices in education. In the second post, " Flexibility for Students, Responsibility for the System ," I apply that lesson to New York’s current graduation reforms and the risks of getting the system-level balance wrong. Hello, I am part of the best book club ever. To be fair, we call ourselves a “book club,” but that label is somewhat generous. Sometimes we read

Hello, You know the type. The coworker who feels like the only one who is not holding up their end of the bargain. The leader who lacks a backbone. The teammate who seems to think there is an I in TEAM. Naming the person feels productive. It gives us someone to focus on. Someone to fix. But what if the behavior we are frustrated by is not a personal failing at all? What if it is exactly what the system is designed to produce? When Someone Acts Badly, a Good System Does Not Lo

Hello, If you know me, you know I'm an avid audiobook listener. Though that's not the only way I read books, it is the most common. Why? As I've said before, it's the ultimate multi-tasking. I read while driving, exercising, folding laundry, cooking, etc. Because of audiobooks, I read about ninety-eight books this year, a number that still surprises me when I see it written down. Out of those nearly one hundred titles, nineteen rose to the top as books I would genuinely recom

Hello, When I was a kid, my older sister Brooke and I sometimes got into physical fights. If I picked a fight with her, she almost never hit me back. Instead, she would say, "I'm going to go tell." That sentence terrified me more than anything else. I would immediately beg her, "Hit me! Hit me!" because that felt safer. If she hit me, we were even. Balanced. Settled. At peace. What mattered to me was the sense of matching her response to my action. One offense, one consequenc

Hello, I’ve worked my entire career in education, so I can’t say for sure whether what I’m about to describe applies to every profession. But I know this much: in education, people love tradition — and yet the system itself is always changing. Devices replace paper tests. Classroom routines evolve — from how we take attendance to how we facilitate discussions. What students are interested in changes, and so do the ways we communicate with families. You get the point. Years a