Dr. Hester's Blog

Why I care about this stuff

Here’s the basic idea that underlies all I’m trying to do with New Teachers Thriving: Happy and healthy teachers are more likely to...

Being a New Teacher Kinda Sucks. I Want to Fix That.

During my first months as a teacher, I regularly felt miserable, overwhelmed, and full of self-doubt. When I woke up in the morning, I...

Avoid the 5 Pitfalls of First-Year Teachers

I started crying just after the waitress dropped off the pancakes. It was October of my first year of teaching, and my mom had come to...

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...

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...

In the last post, we learned about research that found that some educators, in an effort to help their students, actually ended up...

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...

The clock struck midnight. The first day of the school year had officially begun. And I was in my classroom. Frantic. I’m not describing...

In my last post, I wrote about the idea for a professional development program to help early career teachers overcome the pitfalls that...

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