Trust, Teaching, and Time

Sept 8, 2025

Administrators and teachers share the same instinct: we'd rather spend our energy on instruction. Reframed with a hospitality mindset, observation becomes “a shared process of respect and growth.”

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From Messy Menus to Meaningful Talk

Sept 10, 2025

People I work with know I talk about balance… a lot. Like my neighborhood third place, a classroom doesn't have to be perfect; it has to be welcoming, with talk and questions in balance.

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Cultivating Curiosity, Confidence, and Questioning

Sept 17, 2025

My son's Socratic seminar reminded me that dialogue done intentionally carries both structure and freedom. Longer turns and student questions are worth the disorder: “Messiness is not a bug; it's a feature.”

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Creating a Classroom Environment That's More than Just Flair

Sept 24, 2025

Classrooms, like great restaurants, aren't defined by checklists of flair. Classroom environment isn't window dressing; it's what makes or breaks whether students are emotionally available for learning.

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Observing Inputs, Outputs, and Everything Between

Oct 1, 2025

A text thread with a physics teacher on risk-taking, accountability, and pop-ins. My sequence: Watch. Understand. Guide. Not “watch and decide,” and grounded in what students did, not only the teacher.

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The Progress Principle

Oct 8, 2025

Progress fuels motivation, but a classroom floods us with data. As a musician who spent hours chasing perfection, I think the systems around teachers should make growth easier to see.

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Seeing the Arts Clearly

Oct 15, 2025

You don't need to know an arpeggio from a scale. In arts classrooms, students are learning out loud, and what I watch for isn't whether they sounded good, but how the teacher responds.

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Seeking the Magnificent

Oct 22, 2025

The best technology is transparent. Observation has barely changed since my first one, so I've been asking how to account for bias, stay flexible, and “automate the mundane to focus on the magnificent.”

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The Post-Conference

Oct 30, 2025

After hundreds of post-conferences, I've moved from line-by-line evidence to dialogue: “What's something you hoped I saw?” The goal isn't to diagnose, but to wonder together, and ask, “What's next?”

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The Pre-Conference

Nov 5, 2025

Pre-conferences offer context that is impossible to capture in a pop-in. Weighing Danielson against Marshall, I share how I structure a “pre,” and why it should feel inspiring, not performative.

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Is it the System or the Observer?

Nov 19, 2025

We spend so much time arguing about which rubric is best. Just about any framework works if observers understand it deeply and calibrate together, because inter-rater reliability is really about trust.

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