I have been here since 2006.
Many of you have too.
We learned together through Daily 5, through CAFE, through every book and every classroom and every question a teacher carried into a conversation with me.
And here is what I know after all of it.
The children keep coming to school. Teachers keep showing up. And the need, the real need, has never gone away.
I watch schools purchase program after program. I watch teachers spend their own money on resources for students. And I see what is still missing.
Not more content. Not another program. The teaching practices that make all of it work. The ones that are not tied to any program. The ones that belong to every teacher. The ones rooted in research that every classroom needs regardless of what curriculum is on the shelf, regardless of what initiative the district adopted this year.
I have spent twenty years taking research and putting it into practice. In real classrooms. With real teachers. And I know the practices that work. I have built my career on them.
And for a long time I have been wondering, where do teachers have to go to build these practices? Not to learn about them once. To build them deliberately over time. At their own pace.
Then something happened that gave me the language for what I was trying to create. A friend took me to her yoga class. The teacher said to the group, "if this is in your yoga practice, you might want to stand on your head here. If it is not in your practice yet, you might want to try this instead".
I looked around the room. My friend Patti has been practicing yoga for over twenty years. She was standing on her head. It was my first day. I was doing child's pose. But here is what struck me. We were both there. Both in the practice. Both at exactly the right entry point for where we were. Nobody was behind. Nobody was doing it wrong. The foundations were universal. The practice was personal.
After that class I kept thinking about teachers.
Because most teachers are being asked to stand on their heads before they have built the foundations.
New program? Stand on your head. New initiative? Stand on your head. Science of Reading mandate? Stand on your head.
And without a place to learn the foundations and continue to grow your practice, effective teaching is something you’re expected to do, but not actually taught how to build.
That is what I have been creating, a place where you enter where you are and continue to grow your practice in a way that carries into your classroom. I created something to help you see it clearly.
The Teaching Structure No One Showed You
How a lesson moves from instruction to long-lasting learning.
Thank you for being here, and for the work you continue to do for your students.
I’m looking forward to what we build next, together.
Gail
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