Beliefs about Teaching and Learning

Between 2001 and 2022, I composed a number of educational philosophy statements as part of my applications for teaching positions, fellowships, and graduate study. Each piece of writing captures my thinking about education and my own practice at a different stage of my professional evolution. They are presented here in reverse chronological order.

I was excited to learn of this opportunity to support iCivics, whose materials I use plentifully in my eighth grade U.S. history and government class and my middle school elective courses on election campaigns. As my school’s social studies curriculum coach, I work with colleagues to make their lessons more relevant to their students’ lives and reflective of the dilemmas inherent in living in a diverse society. The biggest challenge is to find or create materials simple enough to be digestible by kids and complex enough to offer a variety of perspectives and pathways. iCivics is exceptional in this regard.

As a civics educator, I start with the premise that everyone is the protagonist of their own story —everyone believes they are doing good and are in it for the right reasons, even as their antagonists view them as wrong-headed and morally suspect. From there, I try to help my students understand and appreciate the competing philosophies and values that cause political disagreement, and how the intricacies of the American system (indeed, any system) can either incentivize negotiation and compromise or exacerbate divisions. I focus on empowering my students to create or re-create parts of the system, with the goal of improving the health of our democracy.

Arguably the best way to do this work is by nurturing an active classroom where students are negotiating, building, legislating, role-playing, and prototyping, rather than primarily reading informational texts and writing out answers to questions that adults have posed. In recent years, for example, my students have devised different approaches to voting and tested them out as a class to resolve a real-life problem; convened a constitutional convention to fix “glitches” in the current federal system; gerrymandered imaginary congressional districts to maximize Republican or Democratic chances; and researched countries they subsequently represented in formal United Nations proceedings to address the student-selected issues of climate change, global hunger, and gender equality.

I also have found that middle school students are sophisticated enough to learn and apply tools from the field of political science. For example, my students analyze social justice movements through the lens of the “Overton window,” for which I have created a simple interactive tool in Google Slides to visualize how the acceptable boundaries of policy debate have shifted on an issue as a result of pressure from activist groups. Pairs of students then create their own Overton window models to illustrate their advice to activists on a range of issues, from racial justice and LGBTQ rights to closer-to-home topics like school facilities and the dress code.

I find myself unsatisfied with the ongoing eorts to create “unbiased” classrooms. I believe it is in our human nature to have biases; instead of trying to pretend we don’t have them, we should do the hard work of noticing, acknowledging, and managing our biases, and help our students do the same. Since there is no neutral way to examine our country, we serve our students well by ensuring they encounter a variety of perspectives, philosophies, and narratives, and then encouraging them to appreciate, critique, and evaluate each of them in order to arrive at their own conclusions.

I’m a teacher because I love working with kids. Yet I also have enjoyed connecting and conferring with other educators about the work we do. For a number of years, I collaborated with fellow former students of the Harvard professor Eleanor Duckworth to provide summer workshops for teachers hoping to make their exploratory lessons more student-driven. More recently, I joined the leadership committee of Yale Alumni Educators, working to build a network committed to strengthening the voice of teachers in public policy, among other areas. And I have presented my curricular work at a number of conferences, both for teachers and for education researchers, always benefiting from the collective wisdom in the room. I see the iCivics Teacher Facilitator Fellowship as an opportunity to broaden my contributions to the field and to learn from others with similar interests.

Thank you for considering me for this fellowship.

In one sense, school provides kids with an opportunity to act as “apprentice adults.” In another sense, it provides a space for kids to be kids. As an educator, I try to value these two components of school simultaneously.

The apprenticeship approach is useful for curriculum design, in that it reminds us to craft what David Perkins calls “junior versions” of what adults in real fields actually do, as opposed to piecemeal tasks aimed at isolated skill-building. Project-based learning is one way to do this, especially when there is an authentic audience for the students’ writings, research, creations, etc. Students certainly need to practice skills, and well-designed projects incorporate such practice, but I believe it is best to focus on a larger, more meaningful mission that helps kids feel, justifiably, that they are doing real work for a real reason like real people.

Additionally, as “mentors” to apprentice adults, we are always aware that we are modeling for them how to be a person, with all its complications and vulnerabilities. When we compose and create alongside our students, sharing our own struggles and cool ideas along the way . . . when we open ourselves up to critique and then respond to it non-defensively . . . when we collaborate with colleagues and manage conflict productively . . . when we apologize to a class for a mediocre lesson and then reflect with them on what we learned from the experience . . . When we do things like this, we help them build their character by revealing to them our own.

Yet school can go too far in emphasizing students’ impending adulthoods, at the expense of their childhoods. When we view our students primarily as kids, we remember to maintain a focus on exploration rather than achievement. I believe in curriculum and standards that are flexible enough to accommodate the emerging passions and curiosities of individual kids and groups of kids as they learn and then generate new questions. Whenever I can, I try to adapt curriculum in real time to harness the intellectual energies of the kids in the room. As we teach within a school structure, we must never allow school to become an impediment to organic learning — the learning that will ultimately matter most.

Focusing on our kids as kids also can inform how we think about discipline and assessment. Kids mess up and make mistakes constantly; that’s how they learn. (In fact, it’s how everyone learns.) So we serve them best by assisting and supporting them as they reflect and improve, rather than by reflexively punishing them. Similarly, if we are to use grades and rubrics, they should be in service of reflection, celebration, and resilience rather than as a way to quantify a kid’s deficiencies or set them up to feel like a failure. In short, the more we prioritize natural consequences over artificial ones from on high, the more our kids can be kids and learn from their experiences as kids.

Some of these thoughts are ones I’ve held for years. Others are ideas I’ve been thinking about more recently, as I’ve taught in a comprehensive project-based school. Overall, this is the philosophy I will start with as I transition to my next school, and as I await even more opportunities to expand my thinking as an educator.

Give an example of student work that you are proud of and include a link to the work (if possible).

These two student opinion essays grew out of a course I designed called Frameworks of Identity and came to fruition within the student newspaper I sponsored. After studying introversion in the course, Sarah, an extremely quiet introvert who shines on the page, began questioning the way some of her teachers had been assessing class participation, so she decided to propose a new approach through an op-ed. Sarah’s friend Rohit, also an introvert but a vocal intellectual in the classroom, vehemently disagreed with Sarah’s perspective and decided to respond with his own counter-essay. I asked Sarah and Rohit to be the official editors for each other’s pieces, and over a number of weeks, in person and through conversations in the margins of their Google Docs, I helped them critique each other’s points respectfully and productively, resulting in substantial revisions and more coherent arguments. Upon publication, the twin op-eds got a lot of buzz at school, so much so that our division head soon convened a faculty meeting dedicated to processing the students’ ideas.

Within an academic discipline, what are you passionate about?

Within the discipline of literature, I am most passionate about using “mentor texts” to encourage students to experiment with different styles, approaches, and subject matter in their own writing. At my most recent middle school, the writing curriculum initially consisted almost exclusively of expository essays about literature. Over a number of years, I worked with my colleagues to incorporate (and ultimately to focus much of the curriculum on) students’ own creative work, inspired by particular authors’ uses of narrative techniques and structures. This matters to me both because I love coaching students on the intricacies of their writing and because I want students to feel they are doing something worthwhile — not just for me as their teacher but for themselves and their community. To demonstrate my passion for these projects, I often compose my own piece alongside the students, incorporating their feedback and publishing it within the class collection. Three examples of such projects remain published online at the URLs below: a “parallel story” project modeled on the structural symbolism of Francisco Jimenez; an interdisciplinary historical fiction project modeled on the character studies and research methods of Deborah Wiles; and a personal vignette project (still ongoing after my departure) modeled on the wit and poignancy of Sandra Cisneros.

If we walked into your classroom, what would we likely see?

I am notorious for rearranging the desks in my classroom every day, and sometimes many times a day, to prepare for a new activity. The colleague in the classroom directly below mine once gifted me with tennis balls to attach to the bottoms of each desk leg in order to soften the frequent scraping noises that had been distracting his French classes! With that said, you’d most often see small groups of students working together to compose or revise writing, prepare a presentation, or complete a “challenge” of some sort. I would be circulating slowly around the room, conferring with each group and sometimes “freezing” the room to share a snippet of conversation that might benefit everyone. You’d also often see the entire class seated in a circle with copies of an unfamiliar text or image, taking turns sharing observations about it and jotting down notes about each other’s questions and theories. Not infrequently, you’d see a high-energy classroom in complete silence, with students wandering the room adding their written thoughts to large sheets of Post-It paper containing various prompts about a project, text, or essential question, engaging in silent conversation with each other (and me) prior to a lesson or activity.

What opportunities have you had working and collaborating in diverse, multicultural and inclusive settings?

I have spent the first fifteen years of my career working and leading on issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity within private schools. Specifically, I have facilitated numerous multicultural alliance groups; created and taught curriculum on identity development and cultures of power; served as a faculty advocate on behalf of students with learning differences and socioeconomic disadvantages; worked to open the humanities curriculum to narratives beyond the perspectives of white males; and sponsored a thriving middle school Gay-Straight Alliance back when most such groups existed only in high schools. My participation in the White Privilege Conference and NAIS’s Diversity Leadership Institute helped me better understand both the unearned influence and the blindspots inherent in my white male identity as I teach, advise, and work to improve school policy and culture. At the same time, as an openly gay teacher, I am accustomed to being a “token” and have helped numerous students navigate the complex intersections of their sexual, cultural, and religious identities. Being from the selective private school world, it’s important for me to acknowledge that I have less experience with inclusion as it relates to language, disability, and income; I look forward to strengthening my skills in these areas as I have with other aspects of diversity work.

Why are you a good fit for High Tech High?

My background is in progressive, experiential, and authentic education. I began my career at progressive schools, solidified my philosophy while at Harvard, and then spent nearly a decade pioneering a number of student-driven, multidisciplinary projects at a more conventional school. Elements of these initiatives that reflect High Tech High’s design principles include exhibition nights for student projects, interactive digital publication of student writing, and original student theater productions aimed at influencing the community’s conversations. I have also collaborated with colleagues from other disciplines on major endeavors, most notably a psychology and sociology course on identity that I created with a science teacher, and I have designed and led many professional development sessions. Yet beyond what I’ve done in the past, I hope I’m a good fit for High Tech High because I thrive on the new. I’m constantly working to revise existing programs and create new projects that will make school more meaningful for my students and that will better align my own work with my educational values. I seek a school at which I can continue to grow, change, and hold myself accountable to what matters most, alongside colleagues who are there to do the same.

Summarize any other special skills or qualifications.

In addition to what I’ve listed on my resume and in my responses above, I am a singer, guitarist, and songwriter who has worked on occasion with groups of students and colleagues on their musical creations. I love to organize and manage logistics, which has led me to a number of roles coordinating school-wide programs, initiatives, and trips, as well as training colleagues to use digital organizing tools. I also enjoy copyediting and have consulted on school publications with an eye for language use, style, and clarity. I was a political science major in college and enjoy incorporating studies of elections, lawmaking, partisanship, and current events into my history teaching.

Note: My family ended up not relocating to New Jersey, so I never taught at the amazing Princeton Friends School, though I later developed an association with PFS as a consultant. Nevertheless, I include my philosophy statement here because it captures my thinking at a particularly fruitful moment in my career.

The overarching mantra of The Park School, where I spent the first four years of my career, is “Positive expectations lead to positive outcomes.” From my earliest months of teaching, I observed how treating kids as full partners in their learning translates into a better education for them and a more fulfilling experience for their teachers. I also came to realize how difficult this approach is to maintain, particularly in light of our culture’s “Shut up and listen to your teacher talk at you” tradition and the spontaneity and flexibility required to be truly responsive to the needs and interests of a classroom full of learners. But the hard work is surely worth it.

My approach to curriculum design is rooted in two philosophies I encountered during my graduate studies at Harvard: the critical exploration methodology of Eleanor Duckworth and the social responsibility focus of Facing History and Ourselves. Critical exploration challenges the teacher to listen carefully to how learners are making sense of the material and then to design subsequent lessons to help them recognize their misconceptions and pose ever-deeper questions about the subject matter. Facing History and Ourselves harnesses primary-source materials and literature to guide learners as they confront difficult truths about human behavior and relate the lessons to their own lives and environments. These approaches require an ever-present, intellectually vigorous teacher who is tracking not only the students’ “progress” but also their curiosity, their emotional responses, and their ethical development.

This is why I think I might be a good fit for Princeton Friends. Many schools insist they value curiosity, social-emotional learning, and diversity of thought, but their policies, structures, incentives, and cultures — both in the classroom and within the institution as a whole — often run counter to these values. I’m not so naïve as to think that any school can completely live up to these expectations, but I particularly admire schools that make an effort to focus on the right priorities and constantly seek to balance the push for academic achievement with pushes for equally worthy aspirations.

I get a thrill from helping a student figure out the rationale for a nit-picky grammar rule, from mentoring a group of students as they compose historical fiction based on their original research, from conferencing with a student about how a piece of textual evidence might support the thesis more effectively. But I get even more of a thrill from orchestrating cognitive dissonance in a classroom so that everyone gets excited about rethinking their earlier assumptions, from watching kids take action on an important social issue based on their conclusions about a book we’ve just read, from helping a student grapple with her whiteness, from supporting an advisee as he designs a plan for resolving a conflict with another teacher.

These are the types of opportunities that make teaching worthwhile for me. My collaborations with students, not just my efforts to fill their brains with curricular content, are what keeps me in the profession. I suspect that Princeton Friends may be a place where I can become the teacher I most want to be and where I can contribute to and benefit from a robust, progressive community of learners and doers.

I love to teach because I love to learn.

I work to build a community in my classroom, in which all students feel safe sharing their ideas and perspectives, even if their ideas might be unpopular or not yet fully formed. I must know my students well enough for them to trust me, so that they feel they are in an environment where they can trust each other. Such a community requires that I, as the teacher, demonstrate my eagerness to learn.

I love to learn along with my students. Although I enter our topics of study with more information than they have, information is only the beginning. What I really enjoy doing is learning how my students understand the topics we explore, and how they engage with the information they confront. Do they discover connections to other topics they have studied, books they have read, or their own experiences? Do they wonder how or when the information might be used? Do they question the validity of the information, if it conflicts with something else they think they know? When I am learning about how my students are learning, I can use this knowledge to construct the next lesson or activity.

Along the same lines, I love to learn from my students. I do not subscribe to the idea that students are blank slates that teachers fill up with knowledge. Rather, each student comes to school with a unique perspective, and the sharing of these perspectives enhances our learning. I frequently enter my classroom thinking I know everything yet leave the classroom realizing how many new ideas I have heard from my students. (And I try to let my students know this!)

In addition to learning with and from my students, I love to learn with and from my colleagues. I do not approach teaching as a solitary profession, but rather as a collaborative one. I spent my first year after college as a teaching intern, with mentors who seemed as interested in my ideas as I was in theirs (perhaps the most important quality they modeled for me). As a faculty member at The Park School of Baltimore, I participated in three summer professional development group projects and helped organize a series of “Faculty Forums,” opportunities to share our perspectives on issues at Park and in education generally. And currently, at Shady Hill School, I have enjoyed collaborating closely with colleagues to revise our curriculum.

Finally, I love to learn about the world, about the teaching profession, and about myself. This is one reason that I decided, after four years of teaching, to attend graduate school in education and then return to the classroom. I like to think I have developed a healthy degree of confidence in who I am and what I know, along with the humility to recognize that I cannot be and cannot know everything. Similarly, I hope that the classroom community I build helps my students develop both confidence and humility.

In my next school, I hope to encounter students who are excited about learning, colleagues who thrive on collaboration and discussion, and curriculum that builds on students’ natural curiosities and inspires them to participate in the larger society. I am also eager to participate in the intellectual and artistic life of the school community beyond the structure of my classroom schedule. My eagerness is rooted not solely in my belief that I have much to teach, but also in my certainty that I have much to learn.

I look forward to joining my next school community as both as teacher and a learner.

Note: I was nominated for this fellowship by a former student, William.

I receive satisfaction from teaching because I receive satisfaction from learning. To me, teaching is not filling little heads with knowledge that you happen to have, or with information that you read in a textbook the night before. Rather, teaching is the process of finding a topic to explore (or eliciting such topics from students), figuring out an engaging way to introduce the topic, and helping students grapple with the topic together. In this process of teaching, you learn along with the students, and often from them.

I was excited to read William’s recollection, in his nomination essay, of our Samuel Morton activity. Here, we were actually exploring two topics: on one level, the history of how Americans have perceived the concept of race, and on another level, how personal beliefs and values can influence the way you write about something. In Morton’s case, his supposedly scientific descriptions of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, and Africans betrayed his prejudice in favor of his own racial group in a manner obvious to twenty-first century seventh graders.

In the class discussions that followed, my students and I grappled with whether we can truly write without bias and whether it is appropriate to sort people into categories. My students also raised the question of whether Morton understood that he was prejudiced, and if not, whether that should excuse him from blame. Raising questions together and sharing ideas with each other, my students and I learned together and, in a way, all taught each other.

Another thing I love about teaching social studies in particular is the extent to which I can model learning and exploration. William mentions at the close of his essay that I was the first openly gay person he had known. Because our seventh grade thematic focus was identity — and the processes by which we understand our identities and those of others — I made it a point to be open with my students about some of my own struggles to understand my identity. Our class conversations about gay identity, designed in response to the students' own questions, provided a safe space for many of my students to share their own struggles with identity, including being biracial, dyslexic, and atheist.

Each moment that I teach, I learn. Once I finish graduate school this year, I look forward to returning to the classroom.

For the last four years I have immersed myself in curriculum development, yet my experiences have been confined to the philosophy and practice of one institution. I wish to attend Harvard Graduate School of Education so that I may participate in dialogues with creative minds and broaden my view of what is possible in the art of teaching and learning.

I arrived at The Park School of Baltimore fresh out of Yale, a political science major with a single child development course on my résumé. For my first year, as one of four lower school intern teachers, I studied alongside two master teachers and participated in weekly intern seminars. I was then given the opportunity to create and teach my own seventh grade social studies and language arts curriculum, a craft that I have been honing for the past three years.

Park School prides itself on its progressivism. The seventh grade thematic focus is “the individual and society,” intended to connect with the early adolescent’s struggle to craft an identity as an individual and as a member of the community. Each teacher selects the specific content of the course based on his or her academic passions and on what will excite the students about learning. One colleague used the theme to teach about the Holocaust, another to teach about the Middle Passage. With their guidance, I created a curriculum of social justice struggles in American history and selected novels and case studies to supplement the program. I included units on how societies deal with difference, the consequences of being a bystander, and strategies of political activism. My students responded enthusiastically to the course, and by the spring I had become comfortable enough with my own identity as a teacher to close the year with a case study of the gay rights movement and to come out to my seventh graders as an openly gay man. (Please see my published article, “I Started Out by Not Talking to Anyone,” for more about this episode.)

Encouraged by my department, I have participated in many professional development activities related to structuring curriculum and nurturing community. Chief among these are two small-group summer projects, funded by Park, for which I helped reevaluate our social studies program and suggest to the faculty strategies to address the latest cognitive research of adolescents as learners. I have also become a leader in incorporating issues of gender and sexual identity into both curriculum and discussion outside the classroom, through my sponsorship of a middle school Gay-Straight Alliance (one of approximately 60 nationwide), my work with GLSEN in organizing events for LGBT youth in Baltimore, and my numerous visits to area religious schools to lead discussions about sexuality and religion. My work in this area has sparked my interest in wider diversity issues, and I have become part of a multiracial group of Park faculty exploring how best to understand and address the topic of race in independent schools.

In fact, my desire to more fully understand each of these topics — race, sexuality, gender, social studies, and the role of community — as it pertains to education leads me to apply for a Master of Education in Learning and Teaching. In my four years at Park I have experienced one curricular approach, one institutional philosophy, one set of community challenges. The program at HGSE will enable me to build on my Park background — a Dewey-inspired philosophy, a commitment to interdisciplinary learning and sexuality education, a suburban setting with a growing population of culturally diverse students — in order to explore the wider range of possibilities and obligations related to teaching and learning, specifically regarding the social studies. I wish to learn about what others are doing, both in theory and in practice, to build a future of education that expands the perspectives of all students, and I am eager to contribute to the discussion.

My short-term goal is to use my graduate work to become a stronger and more knowledgeable classroom teacher. For the longer term, I believe I have potential for leadership and innovation in the teaching of social studies. The experiences offered through graduate study at HGSE will help me develop this potential.

As I prepare to graduate from college, many conversations with friends, acquaintances, and professors eventually turn to my plans for next year. Some of my fellow seniors are applying to law or medical school; others are moving to New York to make money on Wall Street or at high-profile consulting firms. When I mention that I am applying for a teaching internship, my statement is often greeted with momentary shock and then a “Wow” or an “I didn’t know you wanted to be a teacher!”

It is true that few political science majors from Yale decide to enter the teaching profession. When I accepted a position at the Holton-Arms Creative Summer program four years ago, I saw it as a one-time summer job, not the beginning of the rest of my life. Yet I found that I possessed a set of skills that enabled me to work effectively with children both in and outside the classroom, and I drove to school every morning excited about the day ahead. It became clear to me that the most rewarding way I could serve my community would be as a teacher.

Teaching my guitar classes was a challenge. Each class included five to ten students, from ages six to thirteen, who each exhibited a different level of talent, patience, and commitment. From the very beginning, I laid out two goals for the class: to learn in order to perform together at the end of the three-week session and, more important, to have fun doing it. For each group of children (after three summers a total of fourteen different groups), I quickly identified the proper balance between curriculum and enjoyment, and frequently checked in with the students to make sure that they were comfortable with the pace. At the school-wide carnival that closed each session, many parents thanked me for adding an exciting new dimension to their child’s life, remarking that their child talked about me frequently and asking if I was available to give private instruction during the year.

I had not expected this response to my work, nor had I anticipated the joy it gave me. I had made a conscious attempt to interact with my students on their level, in a mature fashion yet not in an authoritarian way. Consequently, on the rare occasion in which I felt the need to assume a stricter persona, the children noticed the shift immediately and were impressively responsive when I asked them to calm down or to increase their concentration. During this past summer, a few children would seek me out in private for advice about problems with other teachers, dealing with girls, and the tough transition to middle school.

As a teacher, I felt that I had become a strong, positive presence in the lives of many of my students and that I was making a constructive impact on the society at large, one student at a time. My family has always valued a commitment to public service, devoting their careers and their volunteer time to national and community issues that they deem important. These are the values that inspired me to major in political science in college. After now having had experiences in many fields of service, I have concluded that my skills and passion are most suited to the field of teaching. The rewards of teaching for me have vastly outweighed the frustrations, and I look forward to having the opportunity to spend time in the classroom and learn how to be an effective and inspiring role model.