I started in 2000, teaching bilingual immersion in a DC public school. Twenty six years later I have been the coach, the curriculum director, the principal, the person supervising principals, the interim head of school, and the network vice president.
That path is the reason I do this work the way I do. I have been the person receiving the consultant's recommendations, and I have been the person writing them. I know exactly how it feels to be handed a beautiful plan in June that no one can actually run by October.
So that is not what I hand people.
What I actually do
I have learned that ideas are rarely the problem. Vision is rarely the problem either. In the schools I work with, the investment is usually strong and the people genuinely care.
What breaks down is everything after the decision. A meeting nobody owns. A form nobody fills out. A conversation a leader keeps postponing. It is almost always smaller and more ordinary than people expect, and once you can name it, you can build something that keeps it from slipping again.
My goal is not simply to solve an immediate problem. It is to help leaders and organizations build the capacity to sustain improvement over time.
That is also why I would rather train your team than become necessary to it. If I am still the reason a system works two years from now, I was unsuccessful.
What I believe about adults
Adults change their practice when three things are true at once. They know exactly what is expected. They get to practice it before anyone evaluates them on it. And someone follows up. Remove any one of those and nothing actually changes in classrooms.
I also believe most struggling leaders are not underperforming. They are under supported, and they are required to make more decisions than any one person should be making alone. A lot of what looks like a people problem turns out to be a clarity problem.
Where I go deep
Eight areas I work across
- Leadership development
- Talent and performance management
- School culture
- Curriculum and instruction
- Assessment and data use
- Intervention and early literacy
- Professional learning
- Organizational execution
Early childhood, and why ISA exists
Early childhood and early literacy are where I go deepest. Working in Pre-K classrooms, I kept running into the same wall: programs would invest heavily in professional development, and their CLASS Instructional Support scores would not move.
The gap was never effort. It was that nobody had broken down what a strong instructional exchange actually looks like, turn by turn, in a way a teacher could practice on a regular school day. So I built it. The Instructional Support Accelerator is eighteen weeks of scripted PD, coaching, and walkthrough tools across three strands, built around nine indicators, in English and Spanish.
The path
A DC Public Schools dual language campus
A DC bilingual public charter school
A high performing DC charter network
A high performing DC charter network
A high performing DC charter network
A DC public charter school
A national charter network, DC region
Growth MindED Consulting
Credentials
M.A. in Education, curriculum and instruction with bilingual special education, George Washington University. Doctoral studies in Educational Leadership, George Washington University. B.S. in Languages, Georgetown University. Early Childhood Education certification, Trinity College. Executive coach training, Center for Executive Coaching. Former CLASS certified observer. ISA materials exist in English and Spanish.
I am Jamaican. I work in English and Spanish, and that is not incidental to this work: a lot of the classrooms I care most about are full of children learning in a language that is not spoken at home.