“True leadership involves not only encouraging teachers to reconnect with their purpose but also ensuring that they are seen, heard and supported,” writes Ryan Burns, an instructional coach and adjunct professor in Warwick, Rhode Island, and a 2024-2025 fellow of the EdSurge Voices of Change Writing Fellowship.
Over the last nine months, we’ve worked with eight fellows whose pathways in education are as diverse as they have ever been, including a trauma psychotherapist turned early childhood counselor, a physics teacher with a penchant for storytelling and a Jordan-born immigrant who moved to the United States to pursue her passion for teaching. In that time, each fellow has managed to speak vulnerably about educational leadership, student engagement and systemic challenges in K-12 education.
Burn’s opening quote is a reminder that teaching is purpose-driven work and that student growth and development depend on supporting teachers and school leaders.
Before we usher in the 2025-2026 EdSurge Voices of Change Fellows, we want to reflect on the important themes our recent cohort of fellows wrote about in their personal essays. Each story written by these educators reaffirmed that educators' voices are powerful and deserve to be heard through a platform like EdSurge.
Vulnerability and Mental Health in Educational Leadership
These fellows reflected early and often on what it means to be vulnerable as an education leader and how challenges have impacted their mental health. In her first essay, Noelani Gabriel Holt spoke about how she manages anxiety as an elementary school principal in the Bronx and learned to ride the wave instead of viewing it as a weakness:
Similarly, Ryan Burns felt the need to conform to school authority, and over time, he realized that the script of the well-behaved teacher came at the expense of advocating for needed change in his school community:
Shortly after becoming a school leader, I received the best advice for managing anxiety from the greatest therapist I have ever worked with. She said, ‘You have anxiety. Just accept it. Learn to ride the wave.’ To ride the wave of my anxiety and not let it control me, I had to reject the ableist notion that anxiety is a weakness.
Similarly, Ryan Burns felt the need to conform to school authority, and over time, he realized that the script of the well-behaved teacher came at the expense of advocating for needed change in his school community:
I longed to grow as an educator, but nothing felt more constricting than the expectation to be the ‘well-behaved teacher’ who never questions authority. This narrow role was exhausting and disingenuous. I found myself dialing down my teacher self, showing up in ways that neither reflected nor respected my commitment to teaching and learning.
Reimagining Curriculum to Foster Engagement and Identity
Over the years, fellows have noted how hard it has become to not only create engaging curriculum for students but also find ways to foster community and identity development in the classroom. Edgar Miguel Grajeda, an elementary art teacher in Washington, D.C., who teaches in a school with a high number of multilingual learners, found a way to reimagine the curriculum while maximizing the cultural wealth of his students:
As a visual arts teacher who is dedicated to teaching in schools with a high percentage of multilingual learners, I design a curriculum at the intersection of language development and artistic expression, creating an environment where my multilingual students can thrive.
Another way educators have sought to foster and connect identity to curricular engagement is through social-emotional learning practices and strategies. Lauren Snelling, an early childhood counselor in Chicago, made SEL a foundational part of her curriculum so students could bring their identities into the classroom:
As I’ve built these foundational skills with my students, my school has also given me enough time to build an expectation that students discuss their identities as a valuable component within the SEL curriculum. My teachers and administrators understand that this is imperative to the work that I do in creating systemic change.
Advocating for Representation in Education
Identity was at the core for many of these fellows, and they sought opportunities to advocate not just for their students’ identities but also for their surrounding community of parents and alumni. Gene Fashaw, a middle school math teacher in Aurora, Colorado, who teaches in the same district where he went to school as a child, reflected on the implicit bias Black students experience in math, and how this impacts their confidence:
Educators and the educational system often harbor implicit biases that result in lower expectations for Black students, particularly in mathematics. These biases manifest in various ways, such as underestimating Black students’ math abilities and providing less encouragement. This lack of belief in Black students’ potential can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In addition to their students, these fellows also stressed how important their own identities are as teachers in the classroom. Hind Haddad, an Arabic language teacher in Columbus, Ohio, experienced many microaggressions as a Muslim educator. Despite these challenges, she believed her story was important to build cultural understanding and advocate for her students who share the same social identities:
Still, despite these challenges, I believe my story is important — not only to create a better understanding of Muslim culture and Muslim women’s identity, but also to build a more welcoming educational environment for Muslim educators and students.
Addressing Systemic Challenges and Supporting Educator Sustainability
Last but not least, educators were not only adamant about the systemic challenges of K-12 education, but also expressed ways schools and districts can work to better support the retention of educators in our schools. As a self-proclaimed neurodivergent educator, Fatema Elbakoury, a high school English teacher in San Francisco, spoke about her struggles with mental health and why she feels it's important to be honest with herself and her students about her neurodivergence:
The truth is, there hasn’t been a day in my life where I haven’t struggled with my mental health. The only difference is that I now have the tools and discipline to manage it sustainably. When I first got into education, I wanted to be there emotionally for young people. Now I realize it is not only about being there for them, but about passing on the skills I have gained to live with my neurodivergence.
Meanwhile, Rachel Herrera, a high school physics teacher who also teaches in San Francisco, talked about her journey from corporate America to the classroom, and how the education profession often lacks a structural emphasis on career development:
Teachers lack the structure and career development of other industry and professional jobs, and this is important because it is one major factor in creating a broken public education system. Compared to what I experienced myself and have learned from colleagues and ex-classmates in consulting, finance and tech industries, it feels like this lack of opportunity for career progression within K-12 education disincentivizes a talented, driven and diverse workforce, which in turn inhibits the long-term success of the education system.
Welcoming the 2025-2026 Voices of Change Fellows
With six new fellows entering the fellowship program for the 2025-2026 academic year, we hope to continue to publish stories where fellows are not only able to reflect on their identities as teachers and educators in a changing educational landscape, but also explore emerging trends in instructional practices and new technologies that are made to support student learning.
As we close out another successful year of the fellowship, we are excited to see, read and learn what this new cohort of fellows has to say about the state of K-12 education.
