Professional learning for K-12 leaders
What should students be able to do now, and how would we know?
Writing, workshops, and consulting on curriculum, assessment, and leadership for district and school leaders. The work students hand in no longer proves what they can do. The question under that is older than AI, and it's where I spend my time.
Areas of focus
Where the thinking lives
Assessment & Evidence
What grades and student work can still prove, and how to verify mastery when they can’t.
3 piecesCurriculum & Leadership
Deciding what changes about teaching, and leading a district through the change.
2 piecesAI Projects & Roadmaps
Practical plans for AI in schools that start from learning, not from tools.
2 piecesProfessional Learning
Building educator readiness, and knowing whether it is working.
1 piece
The argument
Artifacts don’t do the work of determining skill mastery anymore.
For as long as there have been schools, we have inferred what a student can do from what a student hands in. That inference underwrites nearly every grade, transcript, and placement decision a district makes, and it broke everywhere at once.
Most districts responded by writing rules about tools. But a rule about how a student may produce work says nothing about what the work proves. The real work is in the instructional core: what changes about teaching, how mastery gets verified, and whether anyone is getting better.
Latest
Recent insights
The with-and-without line
Integration guides add AI to the units you already have. The harder curriculum decision comes first: what students must do without the tool, what they should do with it, and what no longer needs teaching.
Tool training stops at Substitution
Most AI professional learning teaches teachers to do their current jobs faster. The work that actually changed sits two rungs higher on SAMR, and almost nobody is training for it.
The AI roadmap that ends at rollout
Most AI roadmaps treat adoption as the finish line. Tools change every quarter, so a plan anchored to tools never settles. Anchor it to the evidence instead.
AI didn’t break your AI policy. It broke your proxy.
A rule about how a student may produce work says nothing about what the work proves. Why the real problem sits in assessment, not in the acceptable use policy.
About
Twenty years in K-12, in the seats this work touches.
Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and New Jersey School Administrator certification. Former executive board member of the Monmouth County Curriculum Consortium.
- Technology teacher
- Middle school assistant principal
- Supervisor of instruction
- Director of curriculum & STEAM
- Director of district data
- Adjunct professor, TCNJ
Work with me
Start with a 30-minute Readiness Snapshot.
Structured questions across five dimensions, ending in the one finding that stands out most. Free, and bounded.