Megan O'Brien

If you haven’t taught in a classroom post-Covid, you don’t know what it is like to teach the modern student. The students have changed. Teaching has changed. You have to be in the classroom daily to understand what I mean.

I heard someone once say: if you have been excluded, stay excluded. it is not an invitation for you to try harder… to be liked, to be wanted, to prove yourself, to be included. it is an invitation for you to take a step back and go where you are loved, where you are valued, where you are wanted, where you are included.

There should be a teacher on every school board… and at every table where education decisions are made. Because right now, we’re making policies for classrooms without the people who actually live in them. You wouldn’t design a hospital system without doctors. You wouldn’t build a plane without pilots. But in education… we leave teachers out of the room

At my last job, there was this unspoken rule that lunch had to be social. Everyone gathered in the break room, making small talk, laughing a little too loudly, pretending we weren’t all exhausted. But there was one coworker who always took her lunch outside, sat on a bench with her food, and just… existed. No phone, no conversation, no pressure. At first people whispered—“she’s kind of antisocial,” “does she not like us?” One day I asked her about it, and she just shrugged and said, “It’s the only 30 minutes in my day that belong to me.” After that, I started noticing how drained everyone looked by 3PM… except her. She came back calm, focused, recharged. Meanwhile, the rest of us had spent our “break” performing. That’s when it clicked... wanting quiet doesn’t make someone rude. Sometimes it just means they know how to take care of themselves.

please normalize letting people eat their lunch alone if they want and decompressing for 30 min without the pressure of being considered antisocial in the workplace.

This 2 hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT & Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers. Bookmark this & give 2 hours today, no matter what. It'll be the most productive thing you do this week.

If (and this is a big if) we grant that teachers are underpaid, setting a minimum salary seems like entirely the wrong incentive structure What about the 30-year, accomplished veteran? Upscale the top end of the income spectrum and reward experience and excellence

If you haven’t taught in a classroom post-Covid, you don’t know what it is like to teach the modern student. The students have changed. Teaching has changed. You have to be in the classroom daily to understand what I mean.

Instead of bringing in guest speakers to talk about teaching and inspire us with anecdotes, why not have them actually teach? Put them in a real classroom and let’s watch the magic happen. Let us see how they plan, how they adjust in the moment, how they respond to student questions, manage behavior, and assess understanding. Now that’s the kind of professional development that would actually inspire me.

Much of professional development in education is built on the illusion that teaching is more complicated than it truly is. Instead of simply asking students to read, write, think, and discuss, we bury ourselves in jargon, acronyms, data charts, and endless protocols.

Can we please stop “modeling” classroom strategies during professional development as if teachers are students in the room? Do we really need to find our “sole partner,” complete another icebreaker, and pretend we’re in a simulated lesson?

The genius of great teaching lies in its simplicity. The tragedy of modern education is how complex we’ve made it. To be truly great, a teacher must resist the noise of fads, trends, and buzzwords—and return to the art of simplifying everything.

A PhD does not mean you are an expert. It means you are qualified to begin studying.

People don’t realize how much busy work exists just to stretch learning across a 7–8 hour school day. I was helping in another teacher’s class the other day. She had a list of 10 assignments on the board: “If you’re finished… do this next.” All this just to keep the rest of the class occupied while she tried to help the students who were struggling. Students who can learn at even an average pace are given more work, when they could be coding an app, designing a game, or writing a business plan or book.

Repeat after me: 📢Too often accommodations just enable bad habits 📢

A formal evaluation should never be your first visit to a classroom. If it is, skip the evaluation. Leave a Post-it of Praise note instead. Notice something good. Name something specific. Let the teacher know you saw the work, the heart, and the effort before you ever try to score it. Because trust has to be built before feedback is ever received.

Hear me out: If a student calls their teacher a "f---ing b-tch," they don't need a hug, a bag of Takis, and some time to cool down in a bean bag chair They need to get marched out of the school

Can we please stop “modeling” classroom strategies during professional development as if teachers are students in the room? Do we really need to find our “sole partner,” complete another icebreaker, and pretend we’re in a simulated lesson?

If you haven’t taught in a classroom post-Covid, you don’t know what it is like to teach the modern student. The students have changed. Teaching has changed. You have to be in the classroom daily to understand what I mean.

Unpopular opinion: Being an academic is actually a meaningful job. You are developing human knowledge and educating future generations.