Top 5 Ways to Find Teacher Leadership Opportunities
Recently, I taught a professional development course on teacher leadership for my district. I shared a lot of specific opportunities that exist and shared some opportunities that I’d tried myself. I also shared these top five ways to find opportunities in hopes that participants would be able to search and find other opportunities. These are…
National Board Renewal: An Exercise of Intense Reflection
Ten years ago, I became a National Board Certified Teacher, and to this day it remains the most powerful, life-changing professional development experience of my career. The original certification process was grueling. I had only been teaching four years when I decided to pursue certification, so I was still young in the field, but not…
Investing in What it Takes to Move From Good to Great
This report, prepared by the Center for Great Teachers and Leaders at the American Institute for Research explores the perspectives of National Board Certified Teachers, asking them what experiences and supports were most important to their development over the course of their careers. This report underscores the importance of listening to great teachers and investing…
Teach Well: Who Chooses for You and Why Does that Matter?
Too often in the name of efficiency directors, coaches and other administrators choose for teachers rather than supporting the kind of collaboration and autonomy that gives educators the professional choice, voice and leadership they’ve earned through their education, experience and professional tenure. Why do professional educators allow themselves to be directed with little voice or…
Mental Health Awareness in the Classroom
Famous comedian and actor, Robin Williams, once stated, “All it takes is a beautiful fake smile to hide an injured soul, and they will never notice how broken you really are.” Sadly, these painful words mirrored Williams’s true feelings, as he succumbed to suicide after a long struggle with addiction and mental health. Unfortunately, celebrities…
Ka`ulu Gapero
Ka`ulu has been as a secondary math teacher for over 17 years, four of which were with the Hawai`i State Department of Education, the remainder at the Kamehameha Schools Hawai`i campus. He currently serves as a Director within Ho`olaukoa Educational Systems and Strategies, a division of the Kamehameha Schools, and is responsible for supporting system-wide initiatives…
4 Ways Board Certification Prepared Me For Motherhood
My journey to Board certification was the second hardest and most humbling thing I have ever completed. The first? Committing to and seeing through the international adoption process. Both took multiple years. Both required lots of steps, checklists, standards, guidelines, late night, and early morning reflection. Both involved healthy amounts of self-doubt and discernment. Both…
Rise: Recognize, Inspire, Sustain, Empower
When I teach the word “palpable,” I explain to my students that sometimes the energy is so strong in a room that you can feel it. Last month, after a long day of school, I walked into the ballroom at the Marriott Harborcenter in Buffalo, New York and there was an electricity that energized me…
Knowledge of Students
Life is all about connections. Early in my teaching career, I prided myself in connecting with my students. I thought I could relate to them easily, and that I truly understood who they were. Our proximity of age did not produce the disconnect that many veteran teachers experienced. Yet, as I think back to two…
Why Educators Must Build a Safe Environment for Our Students
On September 11 of my senior year in high school, I was in my ceramics class working on a project when I heard that an airplane crashed into one of the twin towers in New York. When the class ended, I rushed over to Mr. Hunt’s classroom, where we usually met for our student government…
