The Hand in the Framework: Reflections on Creation, Compliance, and the Future of Teacher Professional Development

A reflection on Induction, professional development, and refusing the role of passive learner. From the margins, I’ve built what didn’t exist—books, tools, frameworks—forged in the absence the system won’t name.

Introduction

It started, as these things often do, with a form. A simple enough document, tucked into the final pages of my (teacher) Induction paperwork—the kind of bureaucratic ephemera you’re expected to complete with mild enthusiasm and no resistance. It asked about my post-program professional development goals. Innocuous on the surface. But the phrasing caught something in me. Not what I hope to contribute or plan to create—but what I will attend, complete, consume. It was all written from the perspective that professional development as a teacher is something that happens to you. That you, as a teacher, are not a wellspring of knowledge or insight, but a vessel to be filled. Dutiful. Passive. Grateful.

As I sat staring at the screen, the memory came unbidden—vivid, theatrical, absurd in its clarity. The Devil’s Advocate. Late-90s, high-camp, Pacino playing the Devil with full operatic flair. I hadn’t thought about that film in years. And yet, there it was. That final monologue, delivered like a sermon from the underworld: “I’m the hand up Mona Lisa’s skirt. I’m a surprise. They don’t see me coming.” It’s a grotesque boast, but that’s the point. He isn’t revelling in destruction—he’s revelling in manipulation. In being the force beneath the surface, shaping lives without being seen.

And as much as it startled me to admit it, I saw the same energy in the structures surrounding teacher training. Not as a character or a person, but as a system. An ideology. There is a hand—subtle, bureaucratic, invisible to the untrained eye—that moves through every form, every rubric, every mandated PD. It tells us what to value, how to behave, what to become. Not through orders, but through expectation. Through omission. Through the quiet reward of compliance and the social cost of deviation.

This is how the system works. It doesn’t shout at you to fall in line. It simply assumes that you already will. And if you don’t—if you pause, question, resist, or reframe—you’re made to feel like the problem. The odd one out. A foreigner in your own profession. That’s how it’s always felt for me, sitting in weekly PDs where the language is familiar but the values are not. Where professional development is treated like a product line and growth is defined by alignment. Where the purpose is not transformation but standardisation.

I filled in the form. But not as they intended. Instead of listing workshops to attend or certifications to pursue, I listed my next three book projects. Not because I was being difficult, but because it was the most honest answer I could give. I don’t wait for the right PD anymore. I write it.

Observations from the Field: Compliance as Culture

Over time, I’ve come to recognise that teacher induction, professional development, and credentialing are not simply about learning—they are cultural artefacts, shaped by a system that privileges compliance, standardisation, and linear notions of progress. These are not inherently malicious structures, nor is this a complaint about my state or my employer. It’s simply what I’ve observed, as someone who has never quite fit within the lines they draw.

The emphasis is always on inputs—on what can be measured, documented, attended. Rarely is lived experience given equal footing, especially when that experience does not affirm the dominant narrative. The assumption is that professional development is something done to you, not something you might already be generating from within. That perspective—teachers as consumers, never as originators—sits at the heart of this system. And it leaves very little room for people like me.

My five years in the classroom have not just shaped my pedagogy—they’ve generated books. Frameworks. Tools. Reflections. None of which were “assigned.” Each one emerged from something I couldn’t find in the system as it exists. No Place for Autism? grew out of the disorienting absence of a neurodivergent lens in special education training, and from the bullying I experienced as I joined this district—bullying not because I was new, but because I was autistic and unafraid to bring my full self to the work.

Holistic Language Instruction followed, born from the deafening silence around gestalt language processors, whose ways of communicating are often pathologised or erased entirely. In their place, I encountered what felt like a kind of ideological possession: the rigid, uncritical fervour of the ‘Science of Reading’ bandwagon, which left no room for nuance or divergence.

And most recently, Decolonising Language Education, which rose from what I’ve heard and witnessed among my students and their families—the quiet devastation of being expected to perform English fluency in a place that neither recognises your home language nor honours it. For many of my students, school is not a bridge—it is a border. English exists only within the school walls. To demand performance in that context is to demand assimilation. These children are not failing. They are navigating a foreign land with no map, and no time to breathe.

So when a form asked me to list what I plan to consume next, I could only laugh. Not with bitterness, but with recognition. What I’m creating now—my next three books, my resource banks, my frameworks—they are not responses to what’s on offer. They’re responses to what’s missing. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for someone else to build it. I build because the absence demands it.

The weekly PD meetings are their own landscape of disconnection. I sit in those spaces with others who look settled, who speak the language of the system fluently. And I feel like a foreigner—not because I lack skill, but because I cannot pretend to belong. The materials, the tone, the assumed shared context—it all passes through me like static. I am physically present, but the meetings remind me, over and over, of my outsider status. Not just here, in this district—but in every space I’ve ever tried to call home.

This feeling is not new. It is the throughline of my life. I have always felt like a foreigner—geographically, neurologically, culturally, ontologically. Whether as a trans person, an autistic person, or someone shaped by places and traditions far from the assumed norm, I have rarely found a space where I simply belonged. And so, instead of belonging, I build. I write. I make the things I wish had existed for me—and that now, perhaps, will exist for someone else.

This piece is not a critique. It is not an indictment. It is a reflection. A tracing of the quiet, persistent ache of otherness. A record of how I’ve tried to turn that ache into something useful. Something beautiful. Something that, in its own way, might help someone else feel a little less alone in the spaces that still don’t speak our language.

Refusal as Creation: The Last Five Years

None of this has ever been about rebellion for its own sake. I don’t create because I want to disrupt—I create because I need coherence. Because survival, for someone like me, has always required it. I build what I couldn’t find. Frameworks, articles, books, poetry, tools—not as acts of defiance, but as acts of stitching myself into something that might hold. Something with shape. Something that makes sense in a world that often doesn’t.

As a gestalt language processor, my brain seeks patterns—intuitively, relentlessly. I don’t assemble things in sequence. I feel them as constellations, emergent and whole. And across these last five years, a pattern has become undeniable. It begins with harm. Always. Subtle, persistent, or sometimes sudden. A sharp corner that catches. Then comes the question—is it just me? That foreigner’s reflex of self-doubt, of wondering whether I’ve misunderstood the landscape, misread the signs.

But then I listen. I look. I research. I speak with others, read their words, trace the outlines of their silences. And what emerges—again and again—is the shape of a system. Not personal, not incidental, but structural. Recurring. Predictable. And from that recognition comes the need to write. Not just to name the pattern, but to offer something else—something beyond reaction. A path. A scaffold. A different rhythm.

It’s a five-step process I never set out to formalise, but one I now see clearly:

1. Recognising harm

2. Wondering if it’s just me

3. Researching others’ experiences

4. Discovering systemic patterns

5. Writing toward both understanding and creating alternatives

This is the work I do. And it is professional development—just not the kind that fits on a slide deck. It doesn’t arrive as a SMART goal or a six-hour training with an evaluation form at the end. There are no ‘salary points’ or CEUs earned. It arrives as poetry scratched out after midnight, as chapters shaped in quiet moments between survival tasks, as tools made in the margins where others don’t think to look.

I move like a foreigner through these systems, always on the edge of their rituals. I wait before stepping in. I observe the current, the eddies, the silences between their words. Safety comes first—always. And age has given me something time alone can offer: the ability to see not just the patterns, but the periodicity of them. The recurrence. The return.

This isn’t just a moment. It’s a cycle. And my work, if it has any purpose, is to name it—not for validation, but for those who might still be inside the wave, looking for a way to breathe.

What Comes Next: Leadership in Practice

What comes next for me isn’t about advancement in the institutional sense. It’s not about moving up a pay scale or securing a new role. It’s about continuing to create from the margins—because that’s where the need is most acute. These next projects aren’t born of ambition, but of necessity. Each one answers a question the system doesn’t even realise it’s asking. Each one is a form of professional development that wasn’t offered—so I’m building it myself.

The first is The Story of Math, a full-year developmental maths textbook designed for students often left behind by traditional pacing guides and abstract curricula. It stretches from arithmetic to calculus, anchored in real-world connections and a pedagogical structure that makes room for diverse learners, especially those with IEPs, ELD needs, or both. It’s story-driven, rooted in cultural context, and designed with flexibility in mind—not just for students, but for the teachers guiding them. Alongside the book, I’m creating a standalone statewide scaffolding resource—a curated appendix of tools, strategies, and entry points to support teachers navigating the same pedagogical challenges I face daily. The outline is already done. The work is underway. It was never just a curriculum—it was a refusal to keep pretending that existing materials were enough.

The second project picks up where my own case management training left off—which is to say, it starts from nothing. My path to becoming a special educator focused almost entirely on teaching. Beyond a few brief seminars led by practitioners outside the system I’d later inhabit, there was nothing transferable, nothing reliable, nothing repeatable. Case management—the core administrative, ethical, and procedural heart of special education—was an afterthought. So I’m writing the book I wish I’d had.

This new volume will take the shape of a detailed, logical, and repeatable system for grouping students for instruction, rooted in holistic data interpretation. It will guide educators through the process of decoding student files—not to sort or simplify, but to understand (when SLD means GLP, and etc.). I want to show how to turn assessment data, language surveys, behavioural notes, psychoeducational evaluations, IEPs, and state test scores into maps. Maps that lead to equity. Maps that help case managers truly know their students. It will be structured like my first book, Forensic Photoshop—not a random assortment of Dr. H’s favourite tips and tricks in no particular order, but a full methodological workflow. Forensic Photoshop gave people a reliable and repeatable pattern of activity, enabling confident decision-making in a complex space. This one will do the same—but in the terrain of human learning and educational justice.

And then there’s the third project: a deeper expansion of my neuroqueer frameworks for language, learning, and IEP design. If the second book is about interpreting the data, the third is about translating that understanding into enforceable, actionable goals. Anyone who’s tried to write a meaningful IEP goal knows that it’s not intuitive. There’s a performative language to it, a bureaucracy of phrasing that often obscures the actual needs of the child. This book will break that open. It will show how to write goals that are legally sound but also human. Goals that reflect students’ ways of knowing and processing. Goals that work with neurodivergence, not against it. This book, like the others, is being shaped by my lived experience as an autistic gestalt processor—but it’s designed for the many allied language processors caught in systems built for someone else entirely.

These three projects are not supplements to the system. They are what the system should have provided, but didn’t. They are acts of leadership from the margins—not in spite of those margins, but because of them. I didn’t get here by fitting in. I got here by noticing what was missing, by living in the gaps, and by choosing—over and over again—to build what I needed, even if I had to build it alone.

The Invisible Hand Revealed

Pacino’s character in The Devil’s Advocate boasts of his subtle influence—revels in it, really. He takes pride in moving unnoticed, shaping lives without being seen, manipulating outcomes without leaving fingerprints. It’s performative omniscience, cloaked in charm and menace. But where he celebrates invisibility, my work has always moved in the opposite direction. My writing doesn’t conceal. It reveals. It names what others are trained not to see. It brings forward what’s been hidden in plain sight—not for power, but for clarity. For the possibility of change.

Because let’s be honest: the system doesn’t want teacher-authors. It wants quiet implementers. It wants fidelity to the script, adherence to the framework, engagement with the PD cycle as designed. Creation unsettles all of that. It introduces risk. It brings lived experience into spaces designed for abstraction. It insists on seeing the teacher not as a passive recipient, but as an intellectual, an observer, a witness.

And yet, it is from these quiet, liminal spaces that the most necessary work often emerges. Not the most celebrated, perhaps. Not the most easily absorbed into the dominant narrative. But the work that names what others have felt but couldn’t yet articulate. The kind that arrives as recognition. Relief. The kind that whispers to someone else at the edge of belonging: you’re not imagining it. I see it too.

That’s what I hope my writing does—not disrupt for its own sake, but translate. Translate the murmurings of dissonance into something legible. Offer shape to a sense of wrongness that too many of us carry in isolation. Not because we failed to conform—but because the shape we were handed never accounted for our existence to begin with.

Final thoughts …

And so I come to the end of Induction—not with a checklist of future trainings I plan to attend, but with a map of future contributions I’ve already begun. The form asked what I planned to consume next. I answered with what I intend to create. Not out of defiance, but out of alignment—with myself, with my students, with the quiet call to build what doesn’t yet exist.

There’s a kind of irony in that, isn’t there? In a system designed to train teachers to be consumers of knowledge, creation becomes both refusal and leadership. To name what’s missing and then make it is to step beyond compliance and into authorship. It’s to say: I see what this could be, and I’m not waiting for permission to begin.

I don’t write from a place of privilege or certainty. I write from the ridgetop. From the margins. From a space that’s always been slightly outside the frame. And it’s from that space that I’ve learned to notice, to trace patterns, to build in the silence. I didn’t wait for the system to hand me development. I wrote it myself.