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.
⚰️ 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…
I wish artificial intelligence did not exist. Students need to be taught to use it anyway.
That's not the sentence people expect from someone who talks this much about AI in education, but it's the honest starting point.
For most of human history, understanding something hard required sitting with it. Working it out. Getting it wrong, trying again…
🧠 A mind that never has to wonder is a mind that is losing practice at wondering.
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 thing that degrades fastest is the ability to distinguish content that looks like teaching from content that actually teaches. Encoding that distinction into systems that scale it is curriculum work."
AI is changing the landscape of teaching faster than schools can adapt to it. The foundations of how education uses these tools are being set right now, and I want to help set them, not inherit them.
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.