Language & Literacy

Practice

I have always been compelled to look at education at the level of the system, alongside the human and ecological relationships inside it. This page is meant to show where my professional writing draws from. I have written through several different lenses over the years as my roles and skill sets have changed, and many of the op-eds and essays I published on other platforms are no longer maintained there, so some of those drafts are kept here as well.

In schools

Special education teacher, South Bronx (2009–2016). Seven years in elementary and middle school classrooms, in 12:1 self-contained and Integrated Co-Teaching settings, while also serving as special education coordinator and IEP district representative. Many of the classroom columns below were written during these years, and published while they were happening.

Instructional lead for English language arts, Bronx borough office (2016–2020). Four years supporting schools across the borough — coaching teacher teams on instructional design and delivery, on the analysis of student work, and on instruction for multilingual learners and students with disabilities.

A professional learning session for new teachers, October 2018.
A professional learning session for new teachers, October 2018.

Director of Elementary ELA/ENL, Office of Multilingual Learners, New York City Public Schools (current). Literacy and language work for elementary multilingual learners across the largest public school system in the country.

Some examples of the work

Introducing Structured Literacy for Multilinguals with Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan.
Introducing Structured Literacy for Multilinguals with Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan.

Earlier

Curriculum and standards. NYC Common Core ELA Fellow (2012–13) and a member of the 2013 LearnZillion Dream Team, writing standards-aligned English language arts lessons used nationally. During the pandemic, developed English language development units and lessons for Stand-Alone ENL, made available citywide.

Policy. America Achieves Educator Voice Fellow; that fellowship's work on school desegregation became a set of policy proposals presented at the State Capitol in Albany in 2017, and the segregation columns listed below came out of the same effort, two of them published that year. Also a member of the Coro New York Leadership Collaborative, and one of a small group of New York teachers who drafted and presented findings on teacher evaluation with VIVA Teachers.

Presenting policy proposals for desegregating New York's schools. The State Capitol, Albany, May 2017.
Presenting policy proposals for desegregating New York's schools. The State Capitol, Albany, May 2017.

Credentials. M.S., Middle Childhood Special Education, City College of New York (NYC Teaching Fellows, Cohort 18). B.A., English, UCLA. New York State certification as School District Leader and School Building Leader.

Published columns

I also wrote fairly regularly in the education press from 2011 on, mostly about special education, segregation, curriculum, and literacy. Publishers redesign, change hands, and delete their archives, so where the original has become unreachable, the piece is kept here.

Archived in full on this site:

Rewritten or reconsidered as posts here:

Also published, and not archived here: "On Inclusion of Students with Disabilities" and a five-part special education series (Chalkbeat, 2013–14); "Teachers as World Growers" (Impatient Optimists, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2012); and pieces for VIVA Teachers and ASCD Express. More are in Published Columns, in the archive wing of the site.

The Schools as Ecosystems body of work

For most of a decade, from roughly 2012 to 2021, I kept a blog built on the analogy of a school as an ecosystem, written in partnership with Will Johnson. We explored how a school is best seen as a set of interdependent relationships situated in a particular place, whose physical and social conditions are not just a backdrop to learning but a fundamental part of it. The blog ran to more than five hundred posts, on complexity and school reform, on segregation and integration, on curriculum, and increasingly on the conditions themselves.

The longest pieces are the ones on acoustics, greenery and air quality — noise, trees, and the air in a classroom, none of which anybody ever thinks to write an intervention about. The Schools as Ecosystems series here carries that thread forward, and the curated essays from the blog itself are in the archive wing.

Getting in touch

For professional correspondence, LinkedIn or hello@languageandliteracy.blog. Corrections to anything written here are welcome at the same address.