Twenty years inside education.
One pivot that changed everything.

I started teaching the year after I graduated. I thought I'd do it for two years and then go to law school. I stayed.

The classroom is a strange place. You arrive thinking you know what you're doing. You have a degree, you have a plan, you have ideals, and within six weeks you realize that none of it survives contact with thirty real children. You either become someone who can hold the room together with five different priorities competing at once, or you don't. The ones who don't, leave. The ones who do, stay forever.

I taught middle school English first, then jumped to high school, then back to middle school because that's where I was actually useful. I built curricula. I co-taught. I argued with administrators about pacing guides. I lost sleep over it more times than I can count. I had years where I was the best teacher in the building and years where I was the worst. Every educator I respect has had both.

In 2004, while still in the classroom, my district pulled me in to start facilitating professional development for other teachers. That was the door. Once I learned I could teach adults the way I taught kids, with structure, with purpose, with a plan. I never stopped.

In 2013, ACES recruited me as a Professional Learning Specialist. For the next thirteen years I designed and delivered professional development across more than thirty Connecticut districts. Curriculum work. Coaching. Restorative practices. Data teams. The whole architecture of what makes adult learning actually stick.

This is where the P3 Framework was born, not in a coaching certification or a business book, but in thousands of hours inside real schools, watching what worked and what didn't. Purpose, Practice, Planning didn't come from theory. It came from the room.

An old friend called from another state. Her team needed curriculum training and she wanted me. There was a grant deadline. I had one week to form a company so the contract could land.

That's how DKS Advanced Educational Solutions started. Not in a plan, not in a launch. In a phone call and seven days. I incorporated, I built a basic site, I showed up, and I did the work I'd been doing for almost two decades.

That's when I realized two things. One: the expertise I'd built was worth something to the field beyond any single building or organization. Two: nobody had ever told me that. Nobody had ever pulled me aside and said, "By the way, your work has market value out here. Here's how to access it."

In 2025 I took a role as a building administrator. Not because I was leaving consulting, but because I wanted to understand school leadership from the inside again, with everything I'd learned outside of it.

The view from the principal's office is different. You stop solving problems for one class of thirty and start solving them for a building of nine hundred. You learn that almost everything you thought was a teaching problem is actually a systems problem. I loved the systems work. I learned what the people I now consult for are actually carrying.

Over time the notes became a methodology, and the methodology became the P3 Framework: Purpose, Practice, Planning. The three things that determine whether adult learning actually changes practice, built from inside the field, for the field.

The Practitioner's Pivot is the version of that work I wish someone had handed me. There is no one right way to pivot from inside education into your own consulting practice. There is only your way. The framework just helps you find it faster, and charge what your expertise is worth while you do.