I am obsessed with both the craft of teaching and the teaching profession within its broader social and political context. Across three schools, four grade levels, and seven years of teaching so far, the question that has animated my career is: What does it actually take to become not just a good teacher, but a truly great one? 

The longer I teach, the more convinced I become that great teaching depends on a body of expertise that is far more complex — and far less visible — than most people understand. That conviction has made me increasingly curious about the conditions that allow teachers to develop that expertise over time: What are the invisible skills great teachers use every day? What kinds of training, coaching, and support help teachers actually develop those skills? And if great teaching is this complex, what kinds of systems do we need to build so that more teachers are not left to figure it out alone?

My own path has given me a unique insight into these questions. I have taught in three very different school contexts, and each one has sharpened a different dimension of my understanding of teaching.

Campbell School of Innovation | Campbell, California

I began my career as a founding teacher at Campbell School of Innovation, a new public school created to rethink traditional models of schooling through project-based learning, design thinking, and interdisciplinary work. I was a first-year teacher in a first-year school, which meant I was learning the fundamentals of teaching while also watching an institution try to build itself in real time. That experience gave me an unusually early view into both classroom practice and school design: how routines are built, how culture forms, how teachers respond to new models, and how ambitious ideas translate — or fail to translate — into the daily life of a classroom.

CSI was my first exposure to the promise and difficulty of educational innovation. I saw what it looks like when a school community is genuinely trying to do something different: to move beyond inherited structures, create more active and meaningful learning experiences, and ask bigger questions about what school can be. But I also saw that innovation cannot live in slogans, frameworks, or professional development sessions alone. It has to work for actual children, in actual classrooms, with actual teachers, inside systems that are still shaped by traditional funding models, accountability pressures, district expectations, and uneven levels of buy-in.

Being part of a new school taught me that meaningful change in education is not just a matter of having a bold model, a compelling vision, a new theme, or a fresh instructional framework. It requires deep respect for the craft of teaching, careful attention to implementation, and a clear understanding of what teachers need in order to bring ambitious ideas to life with students. It also requires the humility to listen closely to teachers — not because teachers are always right or because schools should never change, but because teachers are the ones most directly confronted by the daily reality of the classroom: 24+ buzzing bodies and brains, each with urgent needs, and limited time, supplies, support, and capacity to meet them.

At times, I saw ideas about “innovation” presented in ways that seemed disconnected from the realities of child development, classroom management, curriculum, assessment, and the emotional labor of teaching. I saw how professional development can backfire when it frames teachers as obstacles to change rather than as the people whose expertise determines whether change actually reaches students. When teachers feel blamed, dismissed, or talked down to, even promising ideas can lose credibility. CSI made me more committed to innovation, but it also made me more discerning: I became convinced that reform efforts are strongest when they treat teacher expertise not as a barrier to work around, but as a central resource to build from.

The Primary School | East Palo Alto, California

My next school, The Primary School in East Palo Alto, changed me more than any other place I have worked.

If CSI taught me to look critically at school design, The Primary School taught me to look much more honestly at children’s lives — and at the conditions children need before academic learning is even possible. The school served families in East Palo Alto, a community whose present-day realities are inseparable from California’s history of segregation, redlining, exclusionary housing, disinvestment, and gentrification. East Palo Alto sits in the shadow of extraordinary wealth, but many of our families were living in poverty. Our students were Latino, Pacific Islander, and Black children growing up in a community that had inherited the consequences of systems built to exclude families like theirs from wealth, housing, political power, and educational opportunity.

That context mattered every day. It mattered when children came to school dysregulated, exhausted, anxious, angry, hungry for attention, or carrying stories no child should have had to carry. It mattered when a student had the intellectual capacity to be on grade level, but chronic absenteeism meant she was two or three grade levels behind. It mattered when a child’s behavior made no sense if you looked only at the moment in front of you, but made much more sense if you understood what his nervous system had learned from the world around him. 

Teaching at The Primary School forced me to understand educational equity not as an abstract commitment, but as something embodied in the daily lives of children and families navigating systems that had not been built with their thriving in mind. It’s where I learned what trauma feels like in a classroom — not as a theoretical concept, but as something you can feel in your own body. I know the quickening in your chest when you sense a child’s anger is about to explode. I know what it feels like to look up and see a Chromebook flung across the room in frustration, missing another child’s head by inches. I know what it feels like to try to pry a student’s fingers out of a sobbing classmate’s hair while she pulls and pulls, not because she is “bad,” but because something in her has been triggered: anger, fear, shame, a wound of not belonging. I know how hard it is to keep your voice steady in those moments; how much discipline it takes not to respond to dysregulation with your own dysregulation; how much delicacy it takes to protect the child whose pain is erupting as harm while also tending to the scared children trying to understand why their classmate has become unsafe.

My incredible mentors at The Primary School taught me to stop asking, “What's wrong with this child?” and instead ask, “What skill, support, or condition does this child need in order to feel safe, connected, and ready to learn?” That question rewired my teaching. I learned to see behavior as communication. I learned to look for the skill underneath the behavior: Does this child know how to ask for help? Does she know how to tolerate embarrassment? Does he know how to recover after a mistake? Does this student know how to enter play, handle exclusion, repair harm, wait, lose, apologize, trust an adult, or stay present when his body is telling him he is not safe?

I learned that physical and emotional safety are not extras. They are prerequisites. A child cannot do complex thinking if her body is scanning for threat. A child cannot take academic risks if he is consumed by shame. A child cannot fully learn in a community where she does not believe she belongs. The foundation of learning is not just curriculum – it’s regulation, attachment, dignity, and connection.

And The Primary School understood this to be true not only for children, but also for adults. One of the most truly innovative things I have ever seen in education was its Parent Coach model. These were not traditional school counselors who stepped in only when a child was in crisis, and they weren’t there to tell parents why they weren’t good enough and how they could do better. Rather, these coaches were Latino, Black, and Pacific Islander women from the East Palo Alto community — often with backgrounds in social work, counseling, family advocacy, and community care — who were attached to families, not grade levels. They stayed with families over time, across children and across years. They met with parents regularly. They led support groups. They helped caregivers name their goals — financial goals, health goals, parenting goals, spiritual goals, personal goals — and then helped connect them to the support structures and resources that might help those goals become real.

The radical idea was this: when a child’s caregivers are cared for, the child can thrive. That shouldn’t feel radical, but the broader architecture of American life — from schools to housing to healthcare to criminal justice — often seems designed as if children can thrive apart from the wellbeing of the adults who care for them. And so much of schooling treats parents as peripheral: people to inform, manage, blame, or call when something goes wrong. At The Primary School, I saw a model that treated caregivers as whole human beings whose flourishing was directly connected to their children’s flourishing.

The Parent Coaches also challenged us teachers — many of us white women, many of us not from the community — to look more honestly at our own biases. They pushed us away from pity, which can look compassionate but is often dehumanizing. They pushed us toward an asset-based view of families. They reminded us that a parent who did not finish middle school, or who did not speak English, or who was struggling financially, was not a lesser parent. He might be the father who advocated with extraordinary clarity and fierce love when his child was misunderstood, underestimated, or not receiving the support he needed. She might be the mother who learned to navigate healthcare appointments, special education systems, translation barriers, and school meetings more strategically than the professionals around her because she had to. That changed how I understood family partnership. It’s not a warm slogan. It’s a discipline. It requires humility. It requires teachers to give up the fantasy that our professional training makes us the sole experts on a child. It requires us to honor parents as people with knowledge we do not have.

The Primary School taught me never to reduce children to their trauma. My students carried real hardship, yes, and some days were genuinely hard. But more than that, they were funny, brilliant, curious, affectionate, mischievous, and full of joy. Together, we laughed every day. We played chaos tag at recess with total abandon. We dissected chicken wings to see how bones, muscles, and tendons fit together. My students made jokes, formed alliances, got annoyed with each other, forgave each other, asked wild, insightful questions, and showed astonishing resilience by finding  joy even in the middle of difficult seasons. If I learned to take trauma seriously there, I also learned to take children’s joy, agency, and intellectual capacity just as seriously.

The practices I developed at The Primary School have made me a better teacher for every child I have taught since. Everything I learned there has stayed with me. I carry the question: What does this child need in order to feel safe, connected, and ready to learn? I carry the conviction that children’s caregivers deserve dignity and support. I carry the knowledge that behavior is communication. I carry the joy of children who are unfairly asked to hold so much, and yet still laugh, play, wonder, and learn. And I carry the belief that any serious vision of educational equity has to begin there: with the child, the family, the teacher, the classroom community, and the conditions that make learning possible.

The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools | Chicago, Illinois

Now, at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, I teach in a context that is almost the opposite of The Primary School. Lab is a private school connected to one of the world’s great research universities. My students are the children of professors, physicians, lawyers, engineers, executives. They come to school with near-limitless access to stability, enrichment, background knowledge, academic support, travel, books, conversation, and cultural experiences. They are racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, but not especially socioeconomically diverse. In many ways, they arrive at school with the conditions for learning already well established: they are fed, rested, safe, supported, and surrounded by adults who have the time, education, energy, and resources to cultivate their curiosity.

That contrast has been impossible to ignore, and it’s made the relationship between equity, background knowledge, and academic access even more visible to me. At The Primary School, so much of my energy went toward helping children feel physically safe, emotionally regulated, and connected enough to learn. At Lab, those needs still matter, because all children need safety, belonging, and emotional support. But those foundational needs are not usually the dominant barrier to learning – my students are not coming to school in survival mode. This context has allowed me to focus more deeply on another dimension of teaching: how to design curriculum and instruction that help children reach for their highest levels of thinking — analyzing deeply, synthesizing ideas, making meaning, and expressing themselves with creativity and precision.

I was originally drawn to Lab because of Vivian Gussin Paley. I had read her books in multiple education courses at Stanford, and I had felt her influence at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, where my earliest teaching experiences profoundly shaped my understanding of how to scaffold children’s social-emotional development. Paley was a beloved preschool and kindergarten teacher at Lab whose close observations of children’s play, storytelling, friendships, and moral worlds became serious contributions to the field — work that ultimately earned her a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Her career helped me imagine a version of teaching in which teachers are not merely implementers of curriculum, but observers, thinkers, researchers, and writers whose daily work with children can deepen the profession’s understanding of learning and development. I wanted to understand what it felt like to teach in a school that had made room for that kind of teacher expertise.

When I arrived, I encountered more teacher autonomy than I had ever seen. With the exception of math, there was no provided curriculum. It was both exhilarating…and overwhelming. Like most teachers, I craved autonomy more than almost anything else: the trust to use my intellect, care, and judgment in service of the children in front of me. But I also discovered that autonomy can sometimes feel less like freedom and more like being thrown into the deep end and told to sink or swim. Without a curriculum to anchor me, I had no choice but to learn how to swim: how to build learning arcs from the ground up through trial, error, and necessity. Over time, after tapping into the support of colleagues and many, many, many rounds of revision, I have designed a curriculum that pushes students beyond surface-level learning and into higher–order thinking skills:

Now, my students explore art museums and neighborhood murals across Chicago, walking through Pilsen to search for Sentrock’s signature bird-masked figures and reflect on how he expresses identity through color and symbolism.

They read Marcus Vega Doesn’t Speak Spanish and trace how names, families, languages, cultures, communities, and experiences shape a person’s sense of self – especially their own.

They critically analyze “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” with the seriousness of college poetry students, debating whether Langston Hughes’s rivers might represent a thread connecting Black history — and perhaps all of humanity — across time and space. 

They write free verse poems of their own, learning to play in the sandbox of language and give themselves permission to write “bad poems,” trusting that sometimes there’s a diamond in the rough waiting to be shaped into something beautiful through layers of revision. 

They research topics of passion, take detailed paraphrased notes, and transform their learning into beautifully designed nonfiction books, complete with chapters, captions, glossaries, and other text features. 

They examine how inflation, World War I, propaganda, and fear contributed to the Nazi scapegoating of Jews, while also considering why a free press matters for keeping democracies healthy and accountable.

They engage in mathematical debates, share conjectures, respectfully disagree, prove their thinking with visual models, and revise their ideas when a classmate presents convincing new evidence. 

Lab has taught me that when children come to school with safety, stability, enrichment, and background knowledge, the possibilities for academic learning expand dramatically. It has given me space to ask: How do you teach children to infer, synthesize, interpret, reason, question, and create? How do you design curriculum that is rigorous without being joyless, emotionally meaningful without being unbounded, and intellectually ambitious without losing sight of the child? It has taught me that higher-order thinking skills do not simply emerge because students are bright, curious, or motivated; they have to be taught explicitly, practiced repeatedly, and supported through well-designed tasks. 

To be sure, my students at The Primary School were absolutely capable of deep, critical, creative thinking; they showed me that every day. Children carrying trauma are not less capable. But the uncomfortable truth is that trauma takes up space — in the body, in attention, in working memory, in relationships, in the classroom community. When many children in the same room are carrying that much, the teacher has to spend more time building safety, repairing ruptures, regulating emotions, and restoring the conditions that make rigorous thinking possible. 

At Lab, because those conditions are more often already intact, I’ve been able to spend more of my teaching energy studying how to extend students’ thinking once the foundation is secure. If my work at The Primary School taught me how foundational safety and belonging are, my work at Lab has taught me what becomes possible once those foundations are in place: children can do astonishingly deep, nuanced, joyful intellectual work when teachers know how to design the conditions for it.

The Uneven Conditions of Teaching

Across these settings, I have learned how profoundly the conditions around teachers shape the work itself. Teaching is demanding everywhere, but it is not experienced evenly. The same profession can make a teacher feel deeply seen, supported, protected, and fairly valued — or utterly alone, overwhelmed, exploited, and invisible.

I know what it feels like to stand in front of children feeling lost, confused, and deeply incompetent, with the horrible sinking realization that I have no idea what I’m doing. 

I also know what it feels like to be deeply seen and supported by an instructional coach who helps me untangle the parts of my teaching that still feel messy or unresolved, who pinpoints the next move to try with a student who is just beyond my reach, who steps in to watch my class when I need a moment to gather myself, and above all, who cheers me on day-in, day-out with unwavering belief in my capacity to rise to occasion of this difficult work.

I know what it feels like to sit in professional development that is dull, disconnected, and leaves me thinking, I'd rather be chipping away at the mountain of emails waiting in my inbox — or worse, demeaning to the work my colleagues and I actually do, compelling me to push back on a facilitator who has clearly spent no more than a few token minutes at the front of a classroom.

I also know what it feels like to sit in professional development that respects teachers’ time and intelligence, the kind where I'm so absorbed in meaningful conversation with my colleagues that I barely notice the hours slipping by, and I leave giddy with anticipation to try a new strategy with my students on Monday.

I know what it feels like to be undercompensated for doing the work of two homeroom teachers — remotely teaching all 54 fifth graders during the first ten weeks of the pandemic — and what it feels like when union representation steps in, prevents exploitation, and wins me even more compensation than I had originally asked for. 

I also know what it feels like to work 60-hour weeks, staying late into the evening and working through weekends to perfect the last few slides of the lesson, write one more parent email, create one more behavior-tracking tool, or modify one more worksheet for my neurodiverse students — only to be asked to absorb additional unpaid before-school supervisory duties without a union to push back, organize us, or name the demand as unsustainable.

I know what it feels like to find a school whose mission excites me, whose teachers inspire me, whose families make me eager to become part of the community — only to read the salary schedule with a sinking feeling in my stomach as I confront the uncomfortable reality that justice work too often asks teachers to martyr themselves financially. 

I also know what it feels like to have a six-figure salary within reach by my eighth year of teaching, extraordinary health benefits that allow me to address physical and mental health needs I had previously put off, and enough prep time during the day to make work-life balance more attainable and my work more sustainable — all of which helps me show up as a better teacher for my students the next day.

I know what it feels like to look at the faces of the children and teachers murdered in Uvalde, Texas, and see my own classroom reflected back at me: the same brown children, the same exact grade level, the smiling teacher and her special education colleague. I know what it feels like to glance over and over again at the classroom door, flung wide open so spring air could move through the room and lower the risk of COVID spread, and wish we had enclosed hallways like the schools in my hometown of Chicago — as if one more layer of architecture could shield us from the kind of violence teachers and children are now asked to imagine as part of ordinary school life. 

I also know what it feels like to teach in a classroom tucked into the far corner of the fourth floor of an enclosed building with three separate security checkpoints, to look into the wide-eyed faces of my nine- and ten-year-olds before a lockdown drill and feel a sinking kind of relief when one student calmly points out, “We’d probably be one of the last classrooms a shooter would reach. We’re probably safe up here.”

Above all, I know what it feels like to love children deeply and still wish I could give them more; to make mistakes and offer sincere apologies; to feel both beloved and taken for granted; to break into tears during a quiet moment of recess supervision because the exhaustion has finally caught up with me — and to still have days when I feel, unmistakably, that I'm exactly where I'm meant to be.

Across my teaching career, I have come to understand teaching as one of the most intellectually, emotionally, and morally demanding forms of work there is. My experiences across three very different school contexts have shaped the way I understand educational equity. Equity is not only about access to schools, programs, or opportunities in the abstract. It's about the conditions that make learning possible: the child’s nervous system, the classroom community, the family support structure, the curriculum, the teacher’s judgment, the resources available, the quality of adult collaboration, and the systems surrounding all of it. My time at Lab has not pulled me away from equity work; it has sharpened my understanding of what all children deserve. Every child deserves to feel safe enough to take risks, known enough to belong, supported enough to persist, and challenged enough to do serious intellectual work.

That is why I am increasingly drawn to work that supports teachers and schools beyond my own classroom. I don't see my classroom experience as separate from education reform; I see it as the foundation of my contribution to it. If we want more children to experience powerful, humane, intellectually ambitious schooling, then we have to get much more serious about how teachers develop expertise — and about the conditions teachers need in order to sustain that expertise over time. We have to make the invisible work of great teaching more visible, more teachable, and more supported. My career has convinced me that the future of educational equity depends not on bypassing teachers, blaming teachers, or scripting teachers into compliance, but on building systems that help teachers grow into the full complexity, creativity, and responsibility of the work.