The Thing about THINGS
When every initiative is brilliant and nothing compounds
The Thing About Things
Why your expertise might be the very thing undermining your impact—and what to do about it
So, it goes a little something like this: An assistant superintendent, curriculum coordinator, or superintendent calls me. They’re familiar with my work—a colleague in the field may have recommended me, they’ve kept up with me online, or maybe they were in a room where I spoke at a conference.
And they want me to come in and help with a thing.
The thing varies. It may be curriculum or assessment design, shifting to standards based grading or reporting, lesson studies that center literacy instruction, or Portrait of a Graduate and PBLA design. Make Writing. Multimodal composition. Pedagogical documentation. If you know me, you know what I do—not the point.
This is: It is always the case that the administrator on the other end of the line or opposite side of the screen cares deeply about the children and the teachers they serve. I know there’s an awful lot of banter—especially in online spaces—implying that too many district leaders only care about test scores, that they’re obsessed with hyper-alignment, and that they impose programs on teachers without regard for autonomy or creativity or joy.
It’s not ever quite that simple, and that is very rarely my experience.
Instead, I’m typically greeted by people who care so deeply that they’re trying to hold an almost impossible number of competing priorities in their hands all at once. One thing over here. Another thing over there. Things happening in this department. Other things happening in another building. Things the state is mandating. Things promised to the board.
A faculty that’s stretched thin and growing skeptical that any thing will ever add up to something they can commit to. Not in word or deed alone—but deep in their bones. Something that helps them build the sort of meaningful legacy they hoped to leave behind when they were much younger and full of hope.
The Curse of Expertise
Here’s the thing about things—including the things I’m known for—they’re often quite complex. So complex that people like me dedicate most of our professional lives to studying, testing, and disseminating our ever-evolving expertise around them.
And that can create tunnel vision.
My greatest mentors in this field weren’t staff developers or trainers or consultants around any thing. They were professional learning facilitators who taught me to consider unintended consequences—including the many curses of developing a specific kind of expertise—while maintaining deep respect for those who hire me because they need support with that very thing.
What Happens When You Walk Into the System
And here’s what happens nearly every time I partner with a school: I arrive to do the thing I was invited to do. And within hours if not minutes, everyone realizes that the barrier to achieving success with the thing I’ve been hired to do in my lane is actually living in someone else’s lane entirely. They’ve been hired to do a different thing. And that thing? Because it’s so complex? It might be the only thing they know how to do exceptionally well. They don’t have a sophisticated or particularly nuanced understanding of the different ways in which other tiles in the systemic mosaic might need to move or even shapeshift a bit. They might, in fact, treat them like simple things, too.
For instance, that knowledge-building curriculum might be beautifully aligned, but our performance-based assessment work can’t land because the design doesn’t support it. “Making” writing doesn’t move the needle on learning outcomes because the data work that’s happening is creating confusion instead of clarity. The school culture “initiative” is running parallel to the literacy work instead of through it. That kind of thing.
Incredible strides are being made within each initiative, and those results may be heartening too, but none of these efforts were calibrated in order to compound. They were designed to address targeted needs by individual experts—each one of whom is talented, credentialed, well-intentioned, and not really prepared to impact systems change.
And I understand this because depth of expertise, by its nature, often narrows peripheral vision. We become extraordinary at seeing what’s inside our own lane, but we fail to notice what’s happening beside us. And that quietly but absolutely undermines progress and burns everyone out.
I don’t say that to diminish anyone’s expertise. I say it because I’ve lived this myself.
The Things I’m Known For Were Never the Point
It’s interesting how I’m known for certain things in certain communities, depending on how the people there came to know me. Online, I’m that “make writing” person. The writing teacher who publishes around multimodal composition. That rare practitioner who uses pedagogical documentation beyond K-2 settings. And I am. Those things matter. They get results. But here’s something I haven’t said often enough: every single one of those practices was a byproduct of working a larger framework that inspires meaningful and manageable systems change.
The things I’m known for were solutions that emerged from my sustained school-based work over the last 20+ years. Work that challenges me to calibrate efforts across the systems I work in, in order to ensure those compounding results. Those things I publish around? They’re solutions to complications that surfaced in the process.
What Calibration Looks Like in Practice
An example: I am often hired to help K-12 educators address high stakes literacy issues. I don’t begin that work by bringing loose parts into classrooms and telling everyone to “make writing.” I don’t suggest we design a bunch of performance based assessments or hyper-align curricula, either. I begin by inviting teachers to do a data saturation assessment with me. State assessment data is often pretty thick. Local assessment and classroom level data? Notsomuch. Warm, qualitative data captured during learning processes? Teacher perception data? Almost entirely missing from the collection.
We typically begin simple documentation cycles to get better information on the table. Multimodal expression is an essential element here, as we can’t really understand a learner’s literacy needs unless we remove the print barrier temporarily—but entirely—with careful intention. We “make writing” then. For a very deliberate purpose. It’s a part of that greater action research study.
Issues with motivation, engagement, and authentic learning almost always surface through those cycles. So we begin inviting learner-centered project and performance based learning. We situate and leverage curriculum resources differently then—for specific effect.
Soon enough, grading and reporting becomes an issue. So, we begin creating the classroom culture that supports standards based grading even as the system works slower beneath us in its transition to standards based report cards (where what teachers are actually assessing in the classroom aligns to the report card dimensions—that’s often a challenge, too).
In time—typically 2-3 years of quarterly visits—the curriculum is better attuned, we’re relying on far warmer, richer, and meaningful data, teachers are documenting their learning beside their students, and the shift to standards based learning, grading, and reporting is opening up great opportunities for authentic assessment.
Is any of it happening perfectly? No. Do gaps in our processes, practices, and work still exist? They do. But we can name them. And we know how to prioritize attention and resources to them, too.
The Framework Behind the Things
I publish books and speak and share content online that makes me known for things in a wider world. And those things matter. They’re a byproduct, though. The real work that I do is all about helping school leaders calibrate their efforts for compounding results. And the framework I rely on produces them.
I wasn’t willing to make such a bold statement in 2009 or 2014 or 2017 or even 2020. But that framework has been tested across different systems seeking many different kinds of change. And rather than merely enabling us to do the wrong thing better, it curbs our certainty entirely.
It pushes us out beyond the simplicity of right or wrong.
It elevates our respect for one another, centers authentic student and teacher voices in the work, and enables us to improve learning outcomes beside engagement and morale. We document for this.
And yeah, test scores always (and I don’t use that word lightly) go up. Often, quite a bit.
On Giants and Evolution
I’ve been sitting with the thing about things for quite a while now and considering what this means not just for me, but for every professional learning facilitator who has worked hard to become expert in their thing.
And then, THE RESEARCH ™️ debunked that thing—because education is still in its infancy and educators kinda like learning. And evolving. And that doesn’t mean that the giants whose shoulders we stood up on were wrong.
Come on now. Like it or not, they sharpened our eyes.
Consultants like me may talk a good game about the promise and peril of silver bullet design, but do we ever consider the curse of our own expertise? I’m compelled by the things I’ve dedicated my life to studying. But understanding how they live within a greater system and being able to facilitate that deeper calibration work has been so much more interesting and rewarding than any thing I’ve ever known.
No One Has Ever Declined That Invitation
So, here’s where I’m sitting now: I have never met an administrator who refused the invitation, when I gently mention that, “I’m noticing something in the system that’s creating a barrier to the work you hired me to do,” and then ask, “Can we talk about it?”
No one has ever declined that invitation.
And that’s because the leaders I choose to work with are not threatened by that kind of observation. They’re relieved by it. Often, they’ve been sensing the same thing and either didn’t have the language to name it or didn’t have the bandwidth to address it or didn’t realize that the person they’d hired to do one thing might actually be willing to work to their very highest potential instead of just doing the thing.
They might be able to help them calibrate for compounding results.
When sensitive, empathetic, and very intentional facilitators extend that kind of offer to those who hired them to do a simple thing, it isn’t a power grab. It’s not about overstepping, either. It’s a deeply respectful commitment to much harder and riskier work—a quiet expansion of what it means to serve a system well.
Steady Eyes Over Perfected Materials
This is what it means to facilitate professional learning with steady eyes rather than perfected materials. This is what it means to offer dynamic lenses and a facilitation toolkit that’s far more agile than a slide deck and more useful than any single essential question might be.
Experience has taught me that my expertise in all the things isn’t very useful unless I can leverage it within efforts that are explicitly calibrated to compound results—rather than compete with one another.
For the Facilitators Who Feel Stuck
I think a lot about the professional learning facilitators in my orbit who are doing extraordinary work but feeling stuck. They know their thing is good. They have the evidence. They have the receipts. But they can sense that something larger is off, and they don’t feel empowered to name it.
Maybe they weren’t hired to name it.
Maybe it doesn’t feel like their place.
Maybe they worry about overstepping or losing the contract or offending someone whose position they respect.
I understand all of that. In fact, I live it every single day.
And I also know facilitators who are able to hold all of these tensions. They can bring systems-level awareness alongside deep content expertise while honoring a leader’s constraints and gently illuminating what’s possible.
Those are the facilitators who don’t just get results in their thing. They get compounding results that ripple outward into corridors they never even entered.
That’s not magic. It’s very intentional and sophisticated professional learning design and facilitation.
Those Leaders Deserve Partners
And those leaders who are overwhelmed by twelve different initiatives? The ones who care deeply about coherence but don’t have the time or the bandwidth to notice where the calibration opportunities are hiding?
Those leaders deserve partners who bring different perspective and the wisdom of varied experience. They deserve facilitators who offer insight with humility, respect, and a deep regard for the constraints they’re navigating.
More to Come
I’m going to keep unpacking this. There’s more to say about what calibration looks like in practice, about how to have those conversations with leaders, about how to better understand a system before you ever open your slide deck.
If this is resonating—if this is the kind of thinking you’ve been hungry for—I am glad to share everything I know. More importantly, I’d be honored to help you translate these ideas into tangible frameworks and approaches that help you serve better in your own context. The Intentional Facilitator is a cohort-based experience where we work through all of this together: the discovery work, the documentation, the in-flight facilitation, measuring real impact, working with the most skeptical people in the room, and learning how to hold the tension between your very deep expertise and systems awareness with grace.
We begin March 16th. You can learn more and register here.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments, too. What resonated? What hit a nerve? What would you push back on?
Something special for my paid subscribers:
Soon, I will be opening virtual and face-to-face professional learning opportunities for those who would like to begin calibrating their own local efforts for compounding results. Context matters, I know.
Any and all of these events will be free to you.
They include:
One hour virtual live webinars with playback access.
A full day event on the ground at Wurlitzer Flats in downtown Buffalo. Come learn how to use my framework to workshop your local plans, vet consultants better, or prepare your own faculty or staff to facilitate deeper work well. Save the date: May 8th. Lunch will be provided by Fat Bob’s Smokehouse at no cost.
And for those that can’t join us in Buffalo, I’ll be hosting the same event online on May 27th.
Registration will open soon, and if you’ve been supporting my work here in any way, you’re welcome to register at no cost or send another representative from your school if you’d like. More to come…