B.A. · M.Ed. · M.A. · Doctoral Candidate
Curriculum designer and instructional researcher with a decade of classroom practice behind the research question that drives my doctoral work: whether what gets designed to teach something actually teaches it.
Cross-posted from LinkedIn, roughly as often as I can keep up with it.
🕵️ I have started writing a little worse on purpose.
I doubt I am the only one, and I have spent a few weeks trying to work out whether what I am watching is a small stylistic tic or the front edge of something linguists will find obvious in thirty years…
🤖 I say please and thank you to AI, and I am not planning to stop.
There is a real argument happening right now over whether courtesy toward a language model is a harmless habit or a small act of self-delusion. The case against it is sound. Here is my rub: that case is measuring the wrong thing. My reasons have almost nothing to do with the AI…
⚰️ Death of the Em Dash
The em dash used to be one of my favorite tools, the little pause that lets a sentence pivot, add a thought, or land a punchline without starting over. Then ChatGPT and Claude fell in love with it too, and now it is basically their signature move…
🎭 I grew up in theater, and I never really recovered.
Translation → zero shame, a permanent instinct to hold a room, and an internal volume knob that only goes to "projected to the back row." Extremely useful in a classroom. A genuine liability in a library. 📚🙅♀️
I teach history like a spill-the-tea session. Less "here are the causes of the war" → more full reality-TV-recap energy, gasps included…
Curriculum experience usually gets summarized. Six design documents are posted in full instead, from a six-week C3-aligned curriculum map and a UC a-g approved course proposal down to a one-page scaffold built to fix a single missed rubric point.
A map that cannot survive questions about sequence, format, budget, and evaluation is not yet a map.
Every claim on this site was tested on real students first. AP World History, AP US History, AP Psychology, English, music, and drama, taught across a decade at the secondary level, alongside directing and producing full-length musical theater productions as a department head. The research question I now study formally started as a practical one I faced every Monday morning: did the thing I designed actually teach what it was built to teach?
AP World History and AP US History, secondary humanities, and curriculum design across a full instructional career.
Acceptance rate for the two-week college readiness seminar I designed and ran, built backward from outcomes.
A B.A. in History, an M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction, an M.A. in Education-Teaching, and an Ed.D. now in the dissertation phase.
Two years of formal action research on an AI-powered adaptive practice platform, with only 17% question overlap between practice and assessment, ruling out memorization.
My doctoral research asks a simple, uncomfortable question: when a course is taught well and students still underperform, is it the students, or is it the design of the sequence they were taught with? My current dissertation investigates this through three years of AP World History exam data.
"The people building these tools are designing the cognitive conditions of the next generation, and almost none of them have that written anywhere in the product spec."
Corporate and classroom AI are not two markets for the same technology. They are two ends of one pipeline. The foundations of how education uses these tools are being set right now, by whoever shows up to set them. I would rather show up.
From five letters written by principals, deans, and colleagues who've worked alongside me for years.
Taylor operates at an elite academic level and brings that rigor and excellence directly into her classroom.
Taylor's AP scores were the highest on school record.
She brings a rare balance of expertise, empathy, and practical insight.