Never able to choose just one path, I'm juggling life as an author, educator, and researcher. As a novelist and PhD student at UT Austin, my days are spent doing my two favorite things: reading and writing.
Am I Brave Enough to Die for My Students? I postponed writing this essay, wishful it would no longer be relevant. How wrong I was.
If this essay feels familiar, you can read the first three chapters of my novel-in-progress, A School Like Yours.
Teacher Observations Shouldn't Feel Like Babysitting Read about my embarrassing mistake as a new assistant principal, and how I learned to make teacher observations more about support and less about surveillance.
Gut a fish. Rewire a truck. Survive the collapse of the US government. All lessons fifteen-year-old Lark has learned during "homeschool" with her conspiracy-theorist-Doomsday-prepping parents. If only she'd also learned the fundamentals of human biology or even how to read.
When Lark gets her first period and realizes how much she doesn't know, she ignores her fears of everything outside their rural Montana farm and secretly attends school for the first time.
At high school, Lark discovers the world is very different than she has been told, from the basics of the internet to government takeovers that never happened. Lark uncovers the holes in her parents' beliefs and realizes that she must decide her own truth. But it won't come without sacrifices.
My K-12 experience guides my research interest in the impact of state and local policy on school quality, particularly the student outcomes of state accountability systems and the pressure for district boundary changes in response to declining enrollment.
Implementing Restorative Justice in an Urban Elementary School: A Principal's Commitment and Experiences Eliminating Exclusionary Discipline, Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership (2020), with Mackenzie Gandomi and David E. DeMatthews.