Theme
The unwritten agreements that outlast any initiative.
Journal entries
Oct 20, 2026 · Work focus · LEC workshop
My main focus at work right now is executive function skills — the foundational skills underneath all of life's activities, not just schoolwork. I study systems, and EF is a system we have to scaffold for our students in LEC workshop — until they can build systems of their own.
Oct 20, 2026 · Dissertation · Research direction
I have a name for what I want the dissertation to leave behind: a blueprint of belonging — a buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized students, including neurodivergent students and students pushed outside the bubble of normalcy for gender identity or any other reason.
Oct 7, 2026 · Reading · Research direction
I love Gloria Ladson-Billings, and the Dreamkeepers chapter of her culturally relevant teaching work most of all. She found the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children and studied what they did. That is the standard I want my research measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry is the right method for it.
Oct 7, 2026 · Chapel reflection · Belonging
What I said about belonging is, for me, a chapel truth before it is a research finding: belonging is a quality of God. Living the quality of welcoming others is what makes others feel they belong — and that is expressing Love the way God expresses love. Love is a living verb.
Oct 6, 2026 · Educational equity · Career reflection
My whole career has been about growing in my understanding of fairness versus equity. Fair treatment is not necessarily equitable treatment — students need scaffolds that help them reach their best potential — and I want to understand what that requires in the elite school where I teach.
Oct 5, 2026 · Teaching practice · Classroom dialogue
Teaching can be messy and should be, because life is. The planning is not there to prevent the mess — it is what makes the mess worth paying attention to when it shows up.
Sep 25, 2026 · Research idea · school demographic data
In 2018 our girls basketball team was predominantly white — I don't think there was a single Black player. For the past three to five years the team has been mainly Black, more highly skilled, and last year we won state for the first time in school history. I want to study the data behind that change.
Sep 16, 2026 · Dissertation thinking · a term I am trying to coin
A microaggression is something a student hears. A micro-assumption is the thing I believed a half-second before I opened my mouth. This entry is about well-meaning white adults — me included — and the daily arithmetic of small guesses that adds up to a mountain a student has to climb alone.
Sep 5, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 35–36, closing reflection
The prompt I gave the room at the end of the presentation, and the norms question I want every adult in a school to sit with.
Sep 4, 2026 · Field thinking · public and private school settings
The demand is heavier, the grace is thinner, and the whole arrangement is delivered as care. I am trying to describe how racialized rigor actually shows up in a building — because until it is describable, it is deniable.
Aug 29, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 18
A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.
Aug 29, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, closing activity
I asked the room to name two or three norms at their workplace that might exclude someone with a different neurocognitive style. Then I had to answer it myself.
Aug 28, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, decolonizing neurodiversity
Two constructs at odds: a Global North paradigm that medicalized difference as defect, and Global South paradigms that had already integrated it.
Aug 24, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Global Histories and Politics in Education, Week 6
Neurodivergence and neurodiversity are not two names for the same thing. One asks what is wrong with this person. The other asks what is wrong with the room.
Feb 18, 2026 · Group Work & Belonging
We keep asking why students disengage in the hall between classes. But the hallway is where the real sorting happens — and we've never once designed it.
Feb 7, 2026 · Leading in Schools
After a whole week of observation I realized the office is the busiest room in the building, and the only one with no doors to open. Leadership here is mostly listening.
Milestones
Winter 2026 · Presentation
Ten minutes on how one school's "rigor" was really comfortable distance. A stranger asked the question I hadn't answered.
Winter 2026 · Field experience
A week of observation turned "school culture" from a chapter title into a hallway I actually walk now.
Fall 2025 · Course
Read culture theory against a building I already knew — two very different pictures of the same school.
Fall 2025 · Semester
Walked in with a list of problems. Left with a list of questions, which felt like the first real progress.
Open questions
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Research ideas
developing
The constructive goal of the dissertation: a study-derived, buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized populations — including neurodivergent students and students marginalized for gender identity or any other way they are placed outside the bubble of normalcy.
emerging
A proposal to build something like ESSA's disaggregated reporting for a school that is not required to produce any — starting with the four levers Barth names (funding, curriculum, teachers, discipline) and adding the discretionary ones my own study is about: extensions, retakes, referrals, and who is offered a scaffold.
exploring
Ladson-Billings's Dreamkeepers teachers saw themselves as members of the community they taught in, and teaching as giving back to it. I want to think about what it would mean to incorporate culturally relevant teaching into the community around my school — and to use narrative inquiry, the method her book is built from, to do it.
emerging
A structured review of the first names, images, questions, and verbs in my Civil Rights Movement unit — testing whether the curriculum presents people as organizers with agency or as icons and suffering bodies.
emerging
A descriptive study of my own school's changing demographics since 2018 — enrollment, rosters, courses, clubs, discipline — sparked by watching the girls basketball team go from predominantly white in 2018 to mainly Black and state champions for the first time in school history.
emerging
Racialized rigor: when white teachers and administrators place heavier demands on students of the global majority, believing they are preparing them for college and career, while white students in the same building are held to a lighter standard.
exploring
If neurotypical is a norm a society constructed and then called neutral, then every deficit measured against it is measuring distance from power.
emerging
Lawrence Fung's strengths-based model and the LEANS curriculum both exist. The gap is institutional: what a building would have to stop doing to adopt them.
developing
A framework treating belonging as the product of maintained structures — schedule, ritual, space, interruption rights — rather than of individual warmth.
emerging
An intellectual rabbit hole: how the language of rigor gets used to justify withholding support.
Projects
Organizational Culture & Change · Fall 2025
A semester-long audit mapping the stated values of one building against its observable routines, using documents, schedules, and three staff interviews.
Reading & influences
Book · Morgane Michael · Solution Tree Press
The prior use I owed my own phrase: Michael published A Blueprint for Belonging in 2024, a research-based guide for K-12 teachers and administrators on building school cultures of belonging, organized around her BUILD acronym — boundaries, understanding, integrity, listening, dependability. Her blueprint is a general school-culture framework; mine is a study-derived plan for a specific setting — predominantly white private schools — at the intersection of race, neurodivergence, and the other ways students are placed outside the bubble of normalcy. I can no longer claim the phrase as a coinage, and I should not. What I can claim is the construct: welcome, support, scaffold, retain, drawn from counterstories and growth evidence at one school, checkable against that school's actual hallways.
Website · Teaching Empathy Institute
A Pre-K-12 self-study course translating belonging research into classroom culture: emotional safety, naming the world of learning (with an explicit Freire thread), community meetings, and emotional mapping. Useful to me as evidence that the blueprint metaphor already lives in professional development — and as a contrast, because its unit of change is the individual classroom, while my question is what the whole school would have to build.
Book · Aldon D. Morris
Morris's Indigenous Perspective explains collective action through the institutions, leadership, relationships, and resources developed within Black communities. Here indigenous means internally generated, not Indigenous or Native identity. This helps me read digital organizing as strategy and infrastructure rather than spontaneous crowd behavior.
Article · Rita Kohli & Daniel Solórzano
A whole article on the mispronounced name, and it is devastating. The teacher means nothing by it; the student carries it for years. This is the cleanest example of a micro-assumption I have found — the assumption that a name is too hard to be worth learning — and it is squarely in K-12, not higher ed.
Article · Jackson A. Collins & Howard C. Stevenson
593 students of color in predominantly white independent schools — my exact setting, with numbers. It measures their confidence in noticing microaggressions, reframing them, and confronting them, and links school-climate perception to belonging through racial stress. The phrase "bracketed commitment to diversity" describes more independent schools than will admit it.
Article · Ashley-Marie Hanna Daftary, Debora Ortega, Ceema Samimi, & Annahita Ball
Interviews faculty and staff who consider themselves anti-oppressive — and still documents the pathologizing of students' cultural and communication styles. That is the whole argument for micro-assumptions in one study: good intentions are not a control variable.
Dissertation · Asako Kurosaka-Jost
Thirty alumni of color from predominantly white independent schools describing hyper-visibility during race conversations and invisibility otherwise, inside a colorblind school culture that thinks of itself as kind. The title is the finding: neutral is a position, and students can feel it.
Person · Cheryl Poe
Grassroots advocacy training for Black families navigating school systems. Her work shows what support looks like when it is built by the community that needs it rather than delivered to them.
Article · Dr. Sue Fletcher-Watson, Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre, Edinburgh
A curriculum that teaches neurodiversity to all students rather than about some of them. The clearest existing answer to "what would you actually do on Monday?"
Article · Seminar reading set, Fall 2025
Gave me permission to stop treating culture as a survey score. Culture is what people repeatedly do, and repeated doing can be observed.
Book · Amanda E. Lewis & John B. Diamond
The book that gave me the words opportunity hoarding in a school building rather than an economics paper. Well-resourced, self-consciously progressive school; white parents work the system for AP placements, exceptions, and second chances, and Black students meet the rules as written. The good intentions are real. So is the sorting. This is the private-school half of my question.
Book · Charles Tilly
Where opportunity hoarding comes from originally. Inequality lasts because it gets built into the ordinary categories organizations use to sort people — not because anyone renews their prejudice each morning. Useful to me because it explains how a school can change every adult in the building and keep producing the same pattern.
Article · Roy F. Baumeister & Mark R. Leary
The foundational claim underneath all belonging theory: belonging is not a preference or a school-climate nicety but a fundamental human motivation, and deprivation has real cognitive and emotional costs. If that is true, then a school that makes belonging expensive for some students is not just unkind — it is taxing the thing learning runs on.
Article · Karen F. Osterman
The review that moved belonging from social psychology into education: students who experience belonging are more engaged, more motivated, and more willing to ask for help — and the adults' behavior is a major determinant. That last part is the hook for my study: belonging is something teachers do or withhold, not something students bring.
Book · Terrell L. Strayhorn
Strayhorn defines belonging as students' perceived social support on campus — a felt sense of being cared about, accepted, and mattering — and shows it is especially consequential for marginalized students. His framework gives my interview protocol language for what to ask: not 'do you feel welcome' but 'who here would notice if you were gone.'
Article · Kelly-Ann Allen, Margaret L. Kern, Christopher S. Rozek, Dennis M. McInerney, & George M. Slavich
The meta-analytic check on my enthusiasm: belonging interventions work, but effects are modest and uneven, and teacher support is one of the strongest levers. Keeps me honest — belonging is real and measurable, not a magic variable, and the teacher's daily behavior is exactly where the effect lives.
Article · Melinda D. Anderson
The article that made me audit my own history education. Anderson follows teachers who abandoned the textbook version — a few famous heroes and a tidy ending — for the fuller story: grassroots organizers, churches, women, and nuanced portraits of figures like Parks and King. It is where I finally learned that Rosa Parks was a trained organizer, not a tired seamstress, and it sent me to Aldon Morris next. Read it as a teacher of any subject: the question is not whether your textbook is wrong but what its tidiness is protecting.
Podcast · Learning for Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center
I am listening to this little by little, and it is the sustained version of what Anderson's article started for me: scholars taking apart the cleaned-up story a season at a time — the organized, strategic history underneath the heroes-and-holidays version. What I appreciate most as a teacher is that every episode ends with classroom-ready guidance, so the fuller story does not stay a private correction; it becomes something I can actually teach. This is the audio companion to my own unlearning.
Book · Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Jeffries helps me see curriculum as a sequence of choices rather than a neutral container. If I begin with only the most recognizable leaders and the most violent photographs, students can leave knowing that injustice existed without understanding how ordinary people organized against it. This work is pushing me to rebuild the unit around agency, strategy, contested ideas, and the movement's unfinished life.
Article · John D. McCarthy & Mayer N. Zald
Resource mobilization theory gives me a direct challenge to accounts of protest as irrational crowd behavior. Movements acquire resources, build organizations, cultivate relationships, make strategic choices, and sustain action under pressure. Teaching that infrastructure restores thought and agency to people whom a cleaned-up curriculum too often presents only as victims or symbols.