“We don’t “team teach” but we’re on each other’s team, if that makes sense.”

“In Chemistry, anytime you can get students to do chemistry themselves, it’s like magic, and then when they’re explaining and they realize they can understand why it’s happening, it leads to really great insight. I really do think of it like magic. They’ve seen the wizard behind the curtain.”

“I always want for the kids in my classes to feel like that: heard, seen, and known.”

“Every once in a while, I wander and look in other people’s classes: I’d like to see what people are doing in other disciplines. How do they handle their lessons? How are they arranging their desks and table? I just ask.”

We spoke with David McCullough, founder of the American Exchange Project, about building connections across barriers.

We spoke with Rebecca Marcus, English Teacher and Founder of Paper Paragon, whose “favorite moments aren’t even when someone says something really brilliant; it’s when you can look at a student or read their writing and see them finally making the connection, that first step that you’ve been working on for months.”

“…community matters. Teaching starts with our relationships to one another and trickles down to students.”

“…I want my students to know that I’m as much of a learner as they are. I want them to see me learning and engaging with content.”

“For me, especially as a young teacher who’s still trying to figure it out, I’ll have students who will try to take the conversation in a completely different direction than what I had planned. Then I start to get worried, and I feel I have to reel the entire class back in. My mentor, though, challenged me to let it happen and then take advantage of the tangent. I’m trying to learn to do that, instead of letting it bother me.”

“I’m working with a professor from grad school to bring authentic texts into vocabulary instruction that amplify diverse voices and expose students to issues of justice and equity. I’m interested in how we can promote a love of words as we teach students to think about their world.”