Clyde is a career educator who has dedicated his life to improving the lives of children and families in communities all around the country. He is a co-founder of both a Catholic middle school for boys in Harlem, NY, and a charter middle school in New Haven, CT. In 2005, Clyde made history as the founding principal of the first all-boys public school serving grades 6-12 in the United States, located in Brooklyn, NY.

Clyde has trained and coached teacher-leaders, aspiring principals, principals, and principal supervisors in urban school systems around the country. He also worked as an assistant superintendent in both Syracuse, NY, and New York City, leading the Syracuse principal evaluation system and both districts’ teacher evaluation systems.

Clyde has a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and a master's degree from New York University. He has a Fellow in the Urban School Leaders Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the School District Leader Program at Bank Street School of Education. He is an active member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., has Panamanian and Jamaican roots, and is a proud native and resident of Brooklyn, NY.

Ask me about:

• DEI

• CRSE

• SEL

• How competency-based education is like being on a school sports team

• Technical vs. adaptive leadership

• School startups / school design / school redesign

• 6-12 Math

• English grammar

• All things Batman

• On- and off-road cycling

• NY sports

• Not watching the NFL

Kate Gardoqui is a senior associate with the Great Schools Partnership. She has worked in public middle and high schools in New Mexico, Philadelphia, New Hampshire and most recently at Noble High School in North Berwick, Maine. During her years at Noble, Kate served as a teacher leader and helped lead the transition to a standards and proficiency-based system. She was awarded the 2007 Bob Costas Grant for the Teaching of Writing, was a state finalist for the 2011 Maine Teacher of the Year Award, and was named the University of New Hampshire Teacher Mentor of the Year in 2014. Kate also taught for over a decade in the University of New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, offering graduate-level training in nature-based learning and literacy. She is never happier than when working with teachers and students to make schools more equitable, engaging and connective.

Ask me about:

• Project-based Learning

• Grading for Educational Equity 

• Nature-based Learning 

• Mastery-based Learning

• Equitable Community Engagement

• teaching complex texts in the context of authentic inquiry

• the time my nature-writing class got lost in the woods and almost missed the bus.

Joy is founder of New Learning Collaborative, LLC, a partner that supports schools with youth-/child-centered, competency-based, culturally responsive-sustaining approaches to academics and school culture. 

Joy co-founded and served as longtime Director of Competency Collaborative (CC), an active and growing community of 80+ New York City public K-12 schools and districts that use competency-based and culturally responsive-sustaining education, involving learner-centered approaches to academics and school culture. The CC, now in its 8th year, is a program of NYC Department of Education's Office of Teacher Development. Before starting CC with a valued colleague, Joy worked in NYC DOE Office of Postsecondary Readiness, working with teachers to design and teach gamified, micro-credentialed, standards-aligned core and elective courses for high school students. She was a Common Core Fellow/Senior Common Core Fellow 2011-2015, and was an Executive Editor at Scholastic Education Group before joining NYC Public Schools. Joy is a longtime mentor to high school students through iMentor and SEO Scholars, and learns a bunch about school, educational innovation, and justice from her mentees and from other young people.

Ask me about:

• Educational Equity as a Guiding Value

• Competency-based Education (CBE/MBL) Principles & Practices

• Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CRSE) Principles & Practices

• CRSE/CBE as Strategies for Educational Equity

• Youth-/Child-Centered Learning

• Grading for Accuracy, Equity, and Wellbeing

• Human-first School Change Processes & Professional Learning

• NYC Competency Collaborative, a large community of K-12 schools using CRSE/CBE/MBL

• Dogs, Coffee, Why I Love Teenagers, Long Walks

Amanda Nguyen has been an educator in a variety of contexts, and in each role, has kept a focus on helping everyone use their strengths and talents to reach their highest potential. She has designed and facilitated learning for students taking courses in high school math and science, early college design thinking, pre-service educator preparation, college-level career readiness, and adult education literacy, math, and computer skills. She also has led in-service educator professional learning since 2016. 

She enjoys the opportunity to connect with other educators through professional organizations such as the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), where she is an ISTE Certified Educator and ISTE Community Leader, and the Association for Computer Technology Educators of Maine (ACTEM), where is is a member of the board and supports the organization's professional learning offerings by co-chairing the conference committee. She has recently won several awards in recognition for the innovative teaching and learning environments she has created, as well as her ability to support other educators as they grow their skills and capacity to do the same: ISTE 20 to Watch, Making IT Happen, and the ACTEM ACHIEVE Award.

Amanda has a bachelor's degree in Biology from Bowdoin College and a masters degree focused on technology, innovation, and education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She also maintains her certification as an Assistant Superintendent in Maine.

Ask me about:

• Designing professional learning for educators

• Project-based learning

• Education and industry partnerships to support authentic learning opportunities

• Universal Design for Learning 

• Design thinking (and all the career and life readiness skills students can learn by using it)

• Planning for and supporting systems-level changes (in particular, how you might achieve impact, at scale, over time)

• The photos I've captured from various hiking/snowshoeing adventures

• Playing golf with fellow educators

Katie has coached educators and school leaders across New England in efforts to improve practice and achieve equitable outcomes for students. She has led school improvement efforts in small, rural schools in Maine and Vermont, in charter schools in Maine and Connecticut, and in large urban school districts in Florida. Prior to her work at GSP, Katie was a science teacher and field hockey coach at a high school in Maine where she served as district subject area leader, professional learning group facilitator, advisory program chair, and school data coordinator. As a classroom teacher, Katie was committed to providing a hands-on, project-based STEM curriculum. Katie received her PhD in education at the University of Maine in spring of 2022 where her research focused on coaching support for educators implementing school-wide proficiency-based learning practices. 

Ask me about:

• Developing interdisciplinary projects

• professional learning groups 

• school-wide systems and structures to support mastery-based learning 

• developing clear learning outcomes and success criteria 

• my dog

• national park road trips

• how my fantasy football team is doing

Chris is best known for launching CompetencyWorks, the go-to source about competency education, with co-founder Susan Patrick. As the lead researcher and writer, she developed a deep understanding of competency-based education by visiting over 100 schools that are leading the way in the U.S. and New Zealand. In 2018, she received the Outstanding Individual Contribution to Personalized Learning Award by iNACOL (Aurora Institute). 

Previous to her efforts at CompetencyWorks, Chris worked in philanthropy for over a decade as a consultant, at the Omidyar Network, and at the Mott Foundation. Her leadership as co-chair of the Youth Transition Funders Group, a philanthropic network, helped guide the development of multiple pathways to graduation policies that shifted responsibilities to districts to ensure students graduate. She has also worked in state government, human service organizations, and political campaigns. Chris earned a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. When not working, Chris can be found reading about topics she knows nothing about, traveling the world, trying to get her huge labrador retriever tired, or watching the birds in her backyard in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Ask me about:

• The different ways schools are approaching mastery-based learning; 

• what schools you might want to visit; 

• how states have designed their strategies and 

• how to organize a trip to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. 

Alissa Muller is the Director of the Mastery-based Learning Collaborative at the State Board of Education. Through her decade in K-12 education and role as a Communities in Schools of Peninsula board member, Alissa is constantly inspired by watching students experience the joy of education through engagement in personalized learning. Alissa is motivated by a desire to ensure every student enjoys their time at school, while receiving an equitable education. 

Prior to joining the SBE, she worked for several Texas nonprofits. Alissa holds her B.S. degree in Public Relations from the University of Texas and her Master of Public Administration degree from the Evans School at the University of Washington.  

Alissa enjoys reading, traveling, and spending time outdoors with her husband and two young children.  

Ask me about:

• School-wide shifts to mastery-based learning (MBL) 

• How to adopt a district mastery-based crediting (MBC) policy 

• Culturally responsive sustaining education (CRSE) 

• Washington policies and how they impact MBL, MBC, and CRSE 

• Washington’s graduation requirements  

• Why you should use both “y’all” and the Oxford comma (yes, I’m a grammar nerd) 

• How many library books I have checked out at a time 

Seema Bahl joined SBE in 2021 as a Senior Policy Analyst to support the advancement of mastery-based learning in Washington State. Prior to this, she served as an Associate Education Ombuds at the Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds and worked with families, educators, schools, and community groups across Washington State to advance educational equity and support student learning. Seema also has several years of experience in higher education as a lecturer at Bellevue College and the University of Washington, teaching courses on race, gender, and disability. Seema has a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Sociology from New School University. Seema enjoys international travel, singing, and parenting.  

Ask me about:

• Educational equity

• Social justice

• West Coast vs. East Coast

• My wildest travel story

• How not to be a helicopter parent