Eighteen summers

It’s July, and for the first time in nearly twenty years, my kitchen table is empty. The garage is tidy. My office is quiet.

I’m not making writing with K-12 kids and teachers in my studio this summer, and it…is…weird.

I founded the WNY Young Writers’ Studio in 2008. It’s a learning community where young writers and teachers come together to make writing, document their learning, and use what they discover to do good in the world.

Rather than situating students as recipients of best practices, Studio made them our partners in understanding and refining them.

This was necessary, humbling stuff, and I miss it.

I miss the kids, and I miss the teachers who hung out with me there. Most importantly, I miss that unmistakable hum of a room where everyone, regardless of age or title, understood themselves to be learning.

Not complying.

Learning.

Sometimes, parents assumed Studio was an enrichment program—a place where strong young writers came to get stronger. It was for some, but honestly? Those young writers were our teachers. We studied them. We watched them draft and tinker and play and abandon their initial ideas and begin again. We listened to the way they talked about their work with one another, and the way they engaged in peer review. We captured what we noticed. Then, we brought that documentation back to the group—kids too—and asked what it suggested about our instruction. When a child’s process contradicted something we’d been trained to believe about writers and their development, evidence scooped from children’s lived learning experiences always won the room. What we believed didn’t matter as much as what we saw and what we heard.

All of this asked much of the adults in the room. We had to be willing to be visibly uncertain in front of our students and our colleagues. We had to let go of everything we thought we knew—releasing assumptions we’d invested years cultivating. Especially when the evidence sitting right in front of us called us to. Nobody stood at the front of that room as the expert whose knowledge would be transferred to everyone else. That included me, and I was the founder.

This summer’s strange, long stretch of quiet is giving me more than I bargained for, if I’m being honest though. It’s giving me time to consider who we were together, how we learned, and whether a community like my little studio could still take root in this current reality.

I am genuinely unsure that it could.

I’ve belonged to several professional communities since 2008, but few of them sustained my learning or fed my heart as well as my mind. One was Communities for Learning: Leading Lasting Change, founded by Dr. Giselle Martin Kniep, Joanne Picone-Zocchia and Diane Cunningham. The other was Studio (and so much of what happened there was influenced by all I learned from Giselle, Diane, and Joanne).

For a long time, I wondered why these communities sustained me and so many colleagues so well for so long while other thoughtfully designed initiatives did not. I used to think it had everything to do with our dispostions of practice, protocols, rituals, and routines. They mattered more than I have words for tonight.

But the fact is that most learning communities have some version of those, and they typically dissolve anyway. This summer, I’m realizing that in my experience, the communities that endure tend to share three specific commitments.

• Learning is truly collective. It’s something members make together rather than something they receive from experts.

• Vulnerability is reciprocal. Facilitators create, test, fail, and iterate beside everyone else. They learn from those they lead. They model this as well.

• The work is also a practice rather than an event, and it has no endpoint. The question at its center…how do people learn and how do we serve that learning better… never fully resolves.

I keep thinking about how, in my experience, when any one of these commitments erodes, the learning breaks down. And when the learning breaks down, the learning community falls apart.

Studio sustained all three commitments for eighteen years, and I don’t think that was because the adults involved were unusually committed. They were simply curious and also? Incredibly humble. I gotta tell you: It’s very hard to protect your expertise while a nine-year-old cheerfully demonstrates a strategy or process that works far better than the one in your textbook series.

But so much has changed since 2008. It feels harder now to find people who are willing to risk vulnerability in order to learn like this. Everything feels so high stakes that it leaves us craving answers that are clean and complete. We’ve made a weird kind of peace with complexity as long as it arrives fully resolved and asks nothing of us right about now. We have no bandwith for emotional expenditure. No room for risk. Little trust. Less connection.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t this is a character flaw in teachers or administrators. I honestly think that all of this makes sense right now. It’s rational. Teachers have spent years (decades, some of you) being observed, evaluated, and often publicly second-guessed by outsiders who have never done the work. And when your uncertainty can be used against you, concealing it becomes a survival skill. It’s not hard to understand why a profession under that kind of scrutiny would develop an appetite for complete answers that close arguments.

What worries me is what that appetite costs us.

When I think about the best of what Communities for Learning and my little studio offered so many of us, I remember this: The learning that actually changed our practice began, every single time, with a curiosity. It began when someone let an entire room see what they did not know.

So I wonder: If I opened those doors again today, would people even walk through them? Would they stay once they understood the price of admission? I’d like to believe the answer is yes, but I’m not certain. And that uncertainty feels important to explore rather than resolve.

This week, I listened to people I admire say things like:

• Schools can’t legitimately invite authentic learning because teachers don’t have the interest, time, or energy to design high quality project and performance based assessments.

• Workshop is just a structure. It’s not a culture. And that’s a good thing.

• Alignment doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t worry about standards, patterns or trends in data or any sort of vision that attends to these things.

• In an AI augmented world, people actually don’t need to know things. They can just ask Claude or Google. So, we should stop expecting children to know things, too.

• And the science of learning is settled (because I almost forgot).

But last I checked, education was still in its infancy. And if I’m right about that, then these statements seem a bit presumptuous. Proposterous.

Harmful.

And every single one of them intends to crush curiousity, squelch uncertainty, and end any sort of debate.

But here’s what I keep thinking: Eighteen years taught me that learning communities last when the people inside them keep chasing good questions and choosing each other’s growth on purpose, season after season.

This is the first July in nearly two decades that I’m not on retreat with a learning community that sustains me. But, it turns out that this missed season is quite instructive too. And what it’s teaching me is that I’m not done participating in inquiry-driven learning communities or facilitating them for kids and teachers.

Because I’m pretty sure we need them more than ever.

The Intentional Facilitator, my cohort for people who design and facilitate learning for other adults, begins on August 3, and registration is open now. It’s my attempt to build the kind of community I have been describing: One where growth is a sustained practice rather than an event, where everyone contributes to our collective knowledge, and where the risk of learning in front of others is shared by all of us, including me. Pricing is tiered, and a zero-cost, community-supported path is open to anyone who needs it. If what I’m describing here sounds like the sort of community you’ve been missing, or one you never had the chance to belong to, I would love to welcome you. You can learn more here.