The Year I Didn’t Blog

Well. The 2025-2026 school year was a year.

And apparently, it was a year in which I completely forgot to blog.

Which is actually pretty funny when I think about it, because so much of my work over the last year has revolved around learning, reflecting, creating, sharing, and helping other people do the same. I spent a lot of time encouraging teachers to try something new, helping people make sense of technology, building resources, presenting what we were learning, and thinking about what makes learning meaningful; I just didn't spend much time writing about any of it. I think there is probably a reason for that — this was a year of doing.

I started the school year with a lot of momentum. I was mentoring a new district instructional coach, supporting a brand-new school and a new technology coach, and spending more time working with some of our large secondary campuses. I had also been asked to support ALL of English Language Arts at the district level, which was something I was genuinely excited about, especially because I had spent quite a bit of time learning about ways to use AI responsibly in writing classrooms and was looking forward to helping secondary teachers think through what that could look like with students. There was a lot to learn and a lot to do, and I was excited about all of it!

In looking back, some of the most meaningful work happened simply because I kept showing up. At a few of our secondary campuses, teachers were still carrying a lot of frustration from the years of COVID (yes, even 5 years later); technology had been forced into classrooms in ways many teachers had never been prepared for, and for some, it had become associated with a really difficult time in their teaching careers and personal lives.

Then came AI, which created a whole new set of questions about cheating, writing, and what students should or shouldn't be doing with these tools. I knew that walking in and telling teachers what they should be doing wasn't going to get us very far.  So I listened, met teachers where they were, tried to understand what was frustrating them and what they actually needed, and then asked them to try just one thing.

One of the things I did regularly was hold monthly trainings. I wanted teachers to leave with something they could actually use the next day, along with directions they could come back to later, and I can't tell you how many times someone would say, "I've been using this since 2016, and I didn't know it could do that!" Those moments were my favorite because they weren't really about the tool; they were about giving someone a little more confidence in something they were already using and helping them realize that maybe they could use it for more than one thing.

There was one teacher in particular who, by the end of the year, was using AI to help him create a slide deck. Before that, he had been projecting a Word document with his agenda and lecturing from it because he “wasn’t a graphic designer and had no time to learn how to be one”.  He reported that his students were so engaged that he had to keep it going; they were so excited for his slide decks.  The change wasn't magic.  He simply had a new tool, a little support, and enough confidence to try something different. His students responded positively, and so he continued moving forward.  His excitement caught on, and before long, even some principals were playing around in AI graphics.

At some point, people started calling this turn around “Katie-magic," which always made me blush, because there really wasn't any magic involved. I was simply showing up; I was building relationships and listening; I was willing to sit beside someone instead of standing in front of them; I was encouraging people without making them feel bad about what they were already doing, and, perhaps most importantly, I was making the next step feel manageable. I think that is one of the things I have learned about coaching over the years — sometimes the most important thing you can give someone isn't a new idea, it's enough support to make trying the idea feel possible.

That idea followed me into another enormous project that became a huge part of my year: Bluebonnet Learning.

As we began working with the new Elementary English Language Arts curriculum, one of the first things I noticed was how little of the teacher and student experience existed digitally in the materials I was reviewing. There were a lot of printed materials and PDFs, but very little that took advantage of the digital tools already available to our teachers and students, and my brain doesn't really know how to leave a problem like that alone. I knew the curriculum had to be implemented, and I knew that technology wasn't going to replace the curriculum — that wasn't what I wanted it to do. I wanted to find the places where technology could make the work more engaging for students and more manageable for teachers.

So I started creating.

First came what was dubbed the Coach's Toolkit. The campus coaches had the enormous task of implementing this on the daily. I found out that they were spending their time creating visuals and digital materials, and so I took that on.  They needed to focus on learning and coaching the teachers. I created slide decks for planning units across grade levels, bilingual resources, digital planning documents, walkthrough materials, and consistent branding so that coaches and teachers had a place to start; I participated in the rollout planning (“Camp Bluebonnet”) and kept asking the same question: What can we do to make this easier for the people who actually have to use it?

Eventually, I realized that I couldn't build the whole thing by myself, and that was actually one of the best parts. I was able to design projects through coaching collaboratives and other spaces that allowed teachers from across the district and across grade levels into the work; we found people willing to create digital learning activities and who didn't need extensive training to make something useful, and we used curriculum writing time to build resources that could actually be used with students.

By the end of the school year, we had digital learning activities aligned with the Bluebonnet units across the grade levels we supported, as well as a framework to keep that work moving forward. Kindergarten through second grade resources were built in Seesaw, while third through fifth grade resources were built in Canvas, and there were student activities, teacher directions, assessment opportunities, accessibility considerations, language supports, and all the behind-the-scenes work required to actually get those resources into teachers' hands. It was a lot of work — but it was also exactly the kind of work I love.

I don't use technology because I think technology is the answer to everything; it isn't. Technology is a tool, and sometimes it is the right tool, and sometimes it isn't, but when it is the right tool, it can be a catalyst. It can give a teacher a better way to see what students understand, give a student another way to demonstrate learning, make feedback easier, provide access, increase engagement, or take some of the paperwork off a teacher's plate so that the teacher can spend more time doing what teachers do best: teaching. That is the part of educational technology that has always fueled me — it's not really about the technology, it's about what the technology makes possible.

That same idea was behind another project I worked on this year, around screen time. I became increasingly frustrated with the conversation that seemed to reduce digital learning to one question: How much time are students spending on a screen? I wanted to switch the conversation to ask a different question — what are they doing while they're there?

There is a pretty significant difference between a student passively watching something for twenty minutes and a student creating, collaborating, connecting, communicating, or solving a problem for twenty minutes; the number on the timer doesn't tell us nearly enough. So I developed a professional learning experience called "Beyond the Timer." Instead of giving teachers another list of rules about screen time, I wanted to give them a way to think about the learning happening on the other side of the screen. We looked at where a particular tool or activity fell, and then considered what the next step might be to make the student experience more active and meaningful.

The goal wasn't guilt — it was curiosity. Where are you now? What are your students actually doing? What is one small change you could make? That felt much more useful to me than another conversation about whether screens are good or bad.

That brings us up to TCEA.

My dear friend/colleague and I took a presentation we had developed in our district called "Doodle Notes for Grown-Ups" and shared it with a much larger audience. The room was packed — so packed that people were sitting on the floor because there simply weren't enough seats. I wasn't nervous in the traditional sense (thanks to all the professional learning sessions a district-level coach provides throughout the year), but I definitely felt the responsibility of standing in front of that many educators from all over and saying, essentially, "Here is something we've learned; we think it is worth sharing." It was received overwhelmingly positively, and more importantly, it gave me a little more confidence that the work we were doing in our district mattered beyond our own hallways. Sometimes we spend so much time doing the work that we don't stop to consider whether anyone else might find it useful; sharing it reminded me that part of being a learner is being willing to share what you've learned along the way, too.

Then spring came, and everything changed in an instant.

Our district-level instructional coaching positions were eliminated. After twenty-one years in Conroe ISD, I suddenly found myself having to think about what came next. I didn't choose to leave — that decision was made for me, and that was so hard, especially after I had devoted half of my life and the majority of my professional career to CISD.

There were a lot of emotions wrapped up in that moment: shock, anger, sadness, grief, and frustration. I remember texting my husband what happened, going home, and crying in the shower.  The shock of it was still so fresh, and the next day I went back to work. That sounds simple when I write it, but it wasn't; it was so incredibly difficult.  It was probably one of the hardest things I have ever had to do in my professional life-to separate the feelings of losing something I had cared about for so long from the responsibility I still felt toward the people around me.

One of the things I have learned about myself over the years is that when things go sideways, my brain tends to get into a practical, problem-solving zone. There were people around me who were hurting, and I wanted to help them. I wanted them to know that the work they had done mattered, and I wanted them to know that the value of their work didn't disappear because an organizational decision had changed. At the same time, I had to figure out how to do that for myself.

I kept thinking about things I had learned from leaders and mentors over the years about leading through difficult situations — you can have feelings about something without allowing those feelings to determine how you lead. The feelings are real, and they deserve space, but what you do with them still matters. I thought about the leaders who had modeled that for me, and I thought about the things I had learned about vulnerability and emotional intelligence; those ideas became much more real when I was the one who had to practice them.

For me, that ultimately meant leaning hard into my faith. My worth was not suddenly different because my job was different. My value was never dependent on my position, my salary, or a title on an organizational chart to begin with.  My identity is much bigger than that. I am a child of God, and I believe God created me with gifts and a purpose. I didn't know what was coming next, but I trusted that He did. That didn't make the loss disappear or the feelings go away, but it did give me somewhere to stand while I walked through it.

And there was still work to do.

One of the things I am proudest of from the end of my time in the district happened after I knew I would be leaving, ironically. Because the district no longer had the same coaching structure, some of the technology training that had traditionally been part of onboarding new employees was no longer going to happen in the same way, so I built it with others who were also leaving the role, but staying in CISD. I refreshed the presentation, created speaking notes, delivered the sessions, and spent time with colleagues who would need to continue the work after I was gone.

That last part mattered to me because it wasn’t about the names tied to the work; it was about the actual work itself.  I wanted a new teacher sitting in that training to think, "I am coming into a place where people want me to succeed. I have tools. I have support. I can do this." I wanted people to know that the work was hard, but they weren't expected to figure it all out alone, and I wanted the people who would be carrying that work forward to feel confident that they could do it.

That is what coaching has always meant to me, anyway. The goal isn't to make people dependent on the coach; the goal is to help people become more confident and capable so they can do the work without you. So when people told me, "I can't believe I have to do this next year without you," I understood the sentiment behind it, but I also knew that I had done my job if they were ready to keep going.

And then there was the whole part of how I had to figure out what I was going to do next.

I had opportunities, and so many good people encouraging me to stay in familiar places. I knew I could have been happy in some of those roles, but there was a tug at me that said I needed to keep looking for work in educational leadership within the educational technology space. When presented with an opportunity to do exactly that outside of Conroe ISD after twenty-one years was waaaaay outside my comfort zone.  I stepped outside of it — not because I had everything figured out, but because I trusted that God was leading me to the next place.

I don't have a neat ending to this story because I'm still living it. There is grief here, and there is gratitude; there are people and things I miss, there are things I am excited about, and there are still questions I don't have answers to. But there is also a lot I know.

I know that twenty-one years cannot be reduced to one painful meeting. I know that the work doesn't become meaningless because someone else decides to structure an organization differently. I know that I can experience enormous professional loss without allowing it to define my worth, and I know that sometimes people won't understand the work you do or why other people find value in it. That is hard, but it doesn't necessarily mean the work wasn't valuable. Most of all, I know that I still want to tell the stories.

Maybe that's why I'm finally writing again.

This past school year was full of learning, creating, coaching, problem-solving, presenting, and building things that didn't exist before. It was full of people who trusted me enough to try something new, and it was full of moments that reminded me why I love educational leadership and why I love learning. It was also full of change, loss, faith, and a lot of figuring things out as I went.

I didn't blog about any of it. I was too busy living it. So maybe this isn't really a post about the year I didn't blog. Maybe it’s just the beginning of telling the story of a year that had a lot more to say than I realized at the time.