Dr. Hester's Blog

Life update: This coming year, I’m going to be a teacher at Chavez High School in Stockton Unified School District.

This past October, I was so flagrantly behind on the deadlines for my doctoral capstone paper that the director of my program reached out...

I’m back! And I’m officially Dr. Hester now. It’s been 398 days since I last shared a blog post here. That’s a long and lame delay! My apologies. Turns out that the third year of my doctoral degree program was busier than expected. I spent the past year here in Stockton, California. All the folks who complete my doctoral program spend the third year of the program away from Harvard, working in some organization in the education sector. During my year here in Stockton, I worke

Over the course of this year--my second here at Harvard--I’ve had the good fortune to get connected with two outstanding people: Crystel Harris and Akash Wasil. Crystel and Akash have each been helping to build out the ideas for New Teachers Thriving, and so I wanted to be sure to introduce them here. Crystel is a first year student in the Doctor of Education Leadership Program. Prior to coming to Harvard, Crystel excelled at managing high-stakes projects ranging from the cla

In the last post, we learned about research that found that some educators, in an effort to help their students, actually ended up hurting them. Why? In short, because they don’t prioritize effectively. Let’s figure out how to change that. Below, I’ve outlined a method that can help you avoid the feeling of overwhelm that befalls so many educators. It’s based on an idea that changed my life: The Eisenhower Principle. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United S

There’s a chance you’re trying to do such a good job for your students that you may actually be hurting them. We’ll come back to that in a minute. First, this: Overwhelm was #1. During the first session of the program I led this year in Boston, teachers identified which of the five pitfalls they were struggling with most. The answer was pretty clear: overwhelm. You can see a fairly representative poster from one of the table groups in the course here: As you and I know, the t