Stories for September

Among Roses and Thorns:

Reflections from the CHSA Summer Experience 

For many Teaching and Teacher Leadership (TTL) licensure candidates, Cambridge-Harvard Summer Academy (CHSA) marked the point in the TTL program where conversations about teaching moved into a daily lived practice. 

Throughout the experience, teacher candidates (TCs) were guided and worked alongside teacher mentors—many of whom graduated from TTL. Rather than entering classrooms alone, they spent the summer teaching and planning alongside their teaching teams, which consisted of TCs and mentors. Together they planned lessons, built relationships with students, and engaged in critical conversations surrounding an understanding of the science behind the ‘sacred art’ of teaching. 

CHSA served as a memorable, pedagogically rich shared starting point for the licensure strand. It functioned as a place to practice, receive feedback, and self-assess—all while building a community within TTL.

To learn more about the experience, we spoke with several TCs, including Alex Rodriques, Sarah McDonald, and Mitchell Kim, all ED.M students in the TTL licensure program. Although their classrooms and experiences differed, several common themes emerged from their conversations.

For Mitchell, an English Language Arts (ELA) TC, collaborating with his teaching team was a defining part of the experience—bringing ideas from TTL coursework to life in the classroom. Motivated and inspired by his peers, Mitchell gained the confidence to translate his learning as a student into his developing teaching practice. Alex Rodriques, a History TC, also found the close collaboration with his teaching team especially valuable. Before each school day, the team reviewed lesson plans, worked through challenges, and addressed questions. These daily conversations not only strengthened their teaching practice but also fostered meaningful relationships grounded in trust, mutual support, and growth.

“I enjoyed that we all got to collaborate before the day started. It was also a time for us to just bond as humans.” — Alex Rodriques 

CHSA classrooms varied considerably and those differences created their own opportunities for growth. Alex taught in a particularly small middle school class, where four students worked with four TCs and a mentor. He described the class size as “both a rose and a thorn.” The experience taught him that effective teaching is not only about knowing when to step in, but also recognizing when to step back and give students the space to think, participate, and develop greater independence.

For some TCs, the intensity of the experience came from its accelerated pace. Sarah McDonald, another ELA TC, guided her students in creating zines and experimenting with several forms of writing before presenting their work in a gallery walk. Within CHSA’s condensed structure, lessons were planned, rehearsed, taught, and assessed in rapid succession. Although demanding, the pace created an ongoing cycle of practice, reflection, and adjustment—giving TCs repeated opportunities to respond to what they observed and strengthen their teaching in real time. Feedback became central to that process of refinement. Sarah received more frequent and detailed feedback than she had encountered before—prompting her to distinguish between changes she could implement the next day and aspects of her practice that would require months of sustained development. Mitchell, similarly, emphasized the volume of feedback CHSA invited. Looking back, he described the summer as “rooted in growth”—an experience that sharpened his awareness of both how far he had come and what he could continue cultivating as he entered his yearlong practicum.

“I can’t imagine going into my practicum now without having CHSA.” — Mitchell Kim

At the heart of CHSA were the students themselves. Sarah described her students as the “rose” of her experience, noting how quickly meaningful relationships took shape over the course of the summer.

“My rose was our students. We had such wonderful students—and I feel like I became so close to them in such a short amount of time, which made me really excited for the year.” — Sarah McDonald

The relationships Sarah described capture what made CHSA so formative, with teaching shaped through lesson planning, feedback, connection, inquiry, and responsiveness to students’ individual needs. CHSA, therefore, became more than an early teaching placement; it served as an entry point into the TTL community. At its core, the program invites emerging educators to navigate the complexities of teaching through collective inquiry, collaboration, and care. As TCs carry that learning and those relationships into yearlong placements across Greater Boston, the experience provides a strong foundation for what comes next—and for the teachers they are becoming.

Welcome to the Weave

How creativity, reflection, and collective care brought TTL Cohort 5 into community

On August 4, more than one hundred students gathered in Longfellow Hall for the TTL Community Welcome—not simply to begin a new academic year, but to consider what it might mean to build a learning community together.

The afternoon opened not with a list of expectations or a formal presentation, but with three slow, deliberate breaths. Participants were invited to close their eyes or soften their gaze—to become a little more grounded, a little more present, and a little more connected to why they were there. It was a small gesture, but an intentional one. Before stepping further into their roles as teachers, leaders, and students, members of Cohort 5 were invited to arrive first as themselves.

The experience, titled Welcome to the Weave, was organized around a simple arc: arrive, reflect, connect, create, weave, belong. Through conversation, creativity, reflection, and play, students explored what it might mean not only to enter a community, but to participate in shaping one. For Teaching & Leading students, the gathering marked their first day together as a cohort. Until that moment, many had known one another primarily as names in emails, profiles on Canvas, or faces on a screen. When they were invited to stand, the room paused to see them—to recognize their presence and welcome them into the larger TTL community. Teacher Candidates then stood alongside them—making visible the many experiences, pathways, and aspirations gathered within the room.

Students introduced themselves by sharing not only their names, but the name of someone they loved: a family member, friend, mentor, partner, child, or beloved pet. The prompt shifted the rhythm of a conventional introduction. Each person entered the space accompanied—in some small way—by someone who had shaped or sustained them. The room became filled not merely with names, but with relationships, histories, and sources of care.

Associate Director Emily Hess then offered reflections inspired by The Sacred Art of Teaching—inviting students to think about teaching as more than a set of techniques. Teaching, in this framing, is a deeply relational practice—one shaped by presence, responsibility, imagination, and the ways educators learn to see and honor those before them. That spirit carried into the afternoon’s creative experience. At tables and floors filled with watercolor, pastels, markers, collage materials, and paper, students responded to a shared question:

What does a thriving learning community look, feel, and sound like?

Across the room, words, images, colors, and symbols began to accumulate. Students reflected on what they needed from one another to thrive, what conditions allow people to feel that they belong, and what they hoped this new community might become. Some worked quietly; others talked as they created. Individual contributions gradually became shared compositions—community murals holding many distinct voices without asking them to become the same. The purpose was not to produce a perfect object. The act of creating together was itself part of the community-building: making room for uncertainty, experimentation, intuition, and multiple ways of knowing.

During a gallery walk, participants moved among the collective works—noticing recurring themes and unexpected connections. Ideas that had begun privately became visible to others. Hopes were echoed. Values converged. The artwork offered an early portrait of Cohort 5—not as a finished identity, but as a community still taking shape.

As the afternoon drew to a close, participants gathered in Radcliffe Yard for a final reflection inspired by the image of a woven web. With time running short, the yarn activity unfolded more briefly than planned, but its central invitation remained: to recognize that community is shaped through many individual threads—each person bringing their own presence, perspective, and responsibility to the collective. Even in its abbreviated form, the gesture echoed the larger spirit of the afternoon. No one person determines the shape of a community; it emerges through what each member contributes and what they are willing to hold together. The web offered a simple metaphor for the year ahead: community is not something we merely enter, but something we create through presence, participation, and care.

By the end of the gathering, students who had arrived as unfamiliar faces had begun to see themselves as part of a shared community. The afternoon concluded with a Cohort 5 photograph in Radcliffe Yard, students gathered together holding copies of The Sacred Art of Teaching—a fitting image for the learning, relationships, and collective work still to come.

The invitation for the year ahead was simple: Keep weaving.