I grew up in Pendleton, New York on the banks of the Erie Canal. Tucked far off the road, our house stood at the end of a long, winding driveway made for roller skating and racing my yellow banana seat bicycle down the hill and around the loop. My days were spent skipping stones with neighborhood friends. Many evenings were spent reading in the quiet of my room, which overlooked the water.
This is where I became a reader.
Monthly trips to our local library were a special treat. I’d load up on books and scurry home to devour them, finishing each one long before our next visit. Empty handed and impatient, I started crafting my own stories in order to fill the void.
This is how I fell in love with writing.
Words served me well as a sensitive kid, an angsty adolescent, and a young woman determined to do good work for the right reasons. The first story that I wrote was about Maria Tallchief, America’s first major prima ballerina and the first Native American to possess that role. It was composed on my basement floor, which I turned into a makeshift dance studio. I was wearing a leotard that was too big and an itchy purple tutu that was too small. Both were remnants of my first recital. My most recent story was about my great grandmother, who came to the United States alone at the age of 15. I wrote it with my students’ help during our last writing workshop session, and then I published it in our local paper.
I became a teacher because I had good teachers, and children are some of the best.
I spent twelve years in the classroom and some time as a regional literacy specialist before becoming an independent professional learning facilitator in 2008. Over the last two decades, I’ve lead complex system-wide curriculum and assessment design initiatives, the shift to standards based grading and reporting, sustained lesson studies, and the practice of pedagogical documentation in elementary, middle, and high schools in hundreds of systems within and beyond the United States. I’m a dedicated action researcher whose interests lie at the intersection of purposeful play, collaborative inquiry, multimodal expression, and culturally sustaining practices. Each of my books is a chapter in this great learning story that continues to compel–and yes–confound me.
This has been hard and humbling work.
And I’m grateful if you’re a part of it. These days find me facilitating assessment design and documentation cycles in several western New York school districts, crafting professional learning experiences for educators involved in the New York State PLAN Pilot, bringing multimodal composition, tinkering, and play into writing workshops internationally, and teaching in the Daemen University Department of Education.
It’s storytelling that reminds us of who we are and why our work really matters, though.
I love listening to the stories that people of all ages share with me. I’m passionate about studying how they approach the writing process as well. I’ve learned a great deal by standing on the shoulders of giants, but I’ve learned much more by peering over the shoulders of the learners that I support. I’m serious about this kind of action research, and my work here never ends.
I’ve shared the best of my most recent findings in each of my books. My most recent, The Writing Teacher’s Guide to Pedagogical Documentation, was endorsed by Dr. John Hattie and named a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. This is further validation that it isn’t what we know but perhaps–how we come to know it and who we call our teachers–that matters most.
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