The Pattern I Kept Seeing for Thirty-Five Years

“What are you going to do now that you’re retiring?”

I heard that question a lot towards the end of my last school year. It was often paired with a look or a tone that asks one (or often, both) of these questions, “Aren’t you glad to be getting away from everything going on in schools today?” and “How will you keep yourself occupied?”

I could, if I chose, take the easy way out. I accomplished a lot in my 35 years as a professional educator. I taught thousands of students. I wrote dozens of curriculum documents. I collaborated with hundreds of other educators. Retirement is supposed to be a time to slow down, spend time with the family, read a book or five, travel, and enjoy life. And I do plan to do all of those.

But even though I’m done with full time teaching, I’m not done being a teacher. Not yet. I still have ideas to share and work to do, and retirement is giving me the freedom to do it. The reason why has a lot to do with the things I learned along the way since I began this journey in 1991.

My teaching career almost didn’t happen. I was a terrible first-year teacher. And I had more than one setback in my years in the classroom. But I dedicated myself to figuring out what I was doing poorly and making it better. In the process, I started noticing a few things about the system in which I was working. At first, I just wondered if I wasn’t cut out for this work, but eventually I realized that it was a misalignment between how schools were set up and what I believed instinctively about students and learning.

Here are five key things I’ve learned in the course of three and a half decades as a teacher that led me to the work I am doing now. None of these arrived fully formed. They came from repeated moments like the ones I describe here. I also don’t claim to be the first person to identify these—in fact, many others contributed over the years to my awareness and understanding. But these are the reasons I’m not ready to stop yet.

1. Learning opportunities are not equally accessible to all learners

For more than fifteen years I taught gifted students, and in that role I felt like I’d finally found the freedom to teach the way I always wanted to, using creative projects and allowing students to explore their passions. I eventually became the gifted supervisor in another district, and started to understand the cost of that freedom. I remember one conversation with a parent whose son hadn’t met the district gifted criteria. She was adamant we give him the gifted label anyway. “I don’t want my kid in class with those kids.” Though she danced around it, it became clear she did not just mean the non-gifted students, she meant the Black students who were overrepresented in those classes. Conversations like that one, again and again, made it clear that gifted education was not entirely about meeting needs. It was about deciding who got access to the best opportunities, the best resources, and the best experiences. Once I noticed that, I began seeing the same pattern across the whole education system.

2. Schools are designed for compliance, not engagement

I knew from the start of my career that I wanted to engage my students, though at the time I did not have the vocabulary to explain that or the skill to accomplish that. My very first day of teaching, I had spent hours planning a set of individual puzzles to get them thinking and working right away. I was eager to try it out, but the activity collapsed almost immediately into chaos. I struggled for weeks to figure it out. My principal could see the disorder the moment he walked into my room. Rather than helping me develop my skill at engaging learners, he misdiagnosed it as a lack of compliance. His solution was to hand me a copy of the book Assertive Discipline in which I learned that marbles in a jar and names on the chalkboard were the path to an orderly classroom. The clear message: compliance is the main precondition for learning.

3. Curriculum is built to be measured, not to be effective

For several years I worked with my district to align our curriculum to the new Common Core standards, using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge levels to evaluate the quality of student tasks. No matter how much we talked about adding depth and complexity, we kept finding our way back to things that were easy to count, easy to script for teachers, easy to reduce to exercises and worksheets. Even while striving for depth, our assessments rewarded recall, and the curriculum regressed toward mechanical and superficial processes to match. It wasn’t any single decision. It was subtle, and so ingrained that most teachers never even noticed it, because it was just how things were built. Steve Hargadon’s words a few years later crystallized this idea for me:

“Not everything worthwhile can be measured, and not everything that can be measured is worthwhile.”

This struck me as a powerful articulation of an idea that had been simmering at the back of my mind for a long time. So many things in the curriculum are built entirely around what we can measure: acquisition and retrieval of facts, demonstration of discrete and isolated skills, observable behaviors. True learning is difficult—if not impossible—to measure cleanly. True assimilation and transfer of concepts can take months, years, or even decades. Some of the seeds we plant in elementary school may not sprout, let alone bear fruit, until students are long gone from the building.

4. The obstacles are structural, not personal.

I spent the last ten years of my career developing the STEM and makerspace program in my school. A district realignment in 2025 brought both significant changes to the program and an administrator who was not present during its development. I remember a meeting over the summer where we were working out some issues with the schedule for the new program. “I’m excited about this STEM program,” she said as we sat down. I was happy to hear that, since I’d had a lot of support and positive input from other administrators for several years. “This is going to be a real boost to our PSSA scores.” A knot of dread formed. I’d had similar conversations many times before. For the next hour I tried to explain that this STEM program was focusing on the technology and engineering parts of STEM. Her frame of reference, and the lens through which she saw elementary school, could only conceive of test-driven instruction. This wasn’t her failure though--it’s how the system is built. Standardized tests are for sure not the only structural obstacles in the way of student-centered learning, but they are one of the most visible.

5. Cultural relevance must be central

My entire career has been spent in schools with a diverse population, but it wasn’t until about 2016 when I first encountered the idea of cultural competence and culturally responsive pedagogy in education. For a long time I struggled with my own lack of competence and lack of awareness. It felt overwhelming to think about the lessons and plans that I had built and then figure out how to make them more relevant to the students in front of me. Through my doctoral research, I began to realize that cultural relevance isn’t an adjustment you can make to a project. It has to be one of the core ideas you start with when you’re designing an experience for learners. If it’s not in the structure, it’s not going to work well, and that actually showed up in my dissertation data. Due to a collection of constraints I had to work with, the culturally relevant treatment I designed ended up being an add-on instead of the central principle, and the results showed that not only did it not work as expected, it had a somewhat negative impact. My work now is focused on finding ways to help teachers put their students at the center of learning, including how to build experiences that are culturally relevant.

Here’s the thing, though. Even when all of these challenges are addressed, even when schools are truly and deeply student centered, the work is still hard. It always will be. It’s hard because it’s complex, because it involves diverse human beings, and because learning is not transactional. I believe learning is always happening, and that it is not a direct result of having been taught. At its best, teaching is about creating the experiences and conditions in which learning can occur.

It took me thirty-five years to see all of that. I see my work now as creating the conditions for other educators to learn this earlier so they can put it to work for schools and students. I will keep doing this work as long as I can, and keep helping teachers do it as well as possible, because it matters.