Professional Development
A professional development experience that walks teachers through backwards design with the same care and intentionality they're expected to bring to their own classrooms. Part framework, part hands-on lab — participants leave with a unit plan they actually want to teach and a design process they can repeat.
Most teacher PD feels like sitting through a presentation about presentations. Teachers are told to "be more intentional" and "design with the end in mind" without ever being shown what that looks like in practice. I'd watched too many brilliant educators leave professional development sessions with a head full of buzzwords and no idea what to do on Monday morning. The gap wasn't knowledge — it was application. Teachers needed a design process they could actually use, not just admire from a conference slide.
I built the workshop around backwards design principles — starting with what students should know and be able to do, then working backward to build the assessments, activities, and daily lessons that get them there. But instead of lecturing about backwards design, I made the PD itself a backwards-designed experience. Participants work through the same framework they're learning, building a real unit plan as they go.
The session covers curriculum architecture (how units connect across a course), assessment alignment (making sure you're measuring what you're teaching), and the practical craft of lesson sequencing. Every section includes hands-on work time, peer feedback, and templates participants take with them. I designed the materials to be clean, usable, and free of edu-jargon — because if a resource needs a decoder ring, it's not a resource.
Participants left with a completed unit framework they were genuinely excited to teach — not just a set of notes they'd never look at again. The feedback consistently highlighted the "finally, something practical" factor. Several teachers reported going back to rework their entire course maps using the design process from the workshop. That's the kind of ripple effect that makes PD worth doing.
