Returning to What it Means to Make School Human Again

making schools – El Monte instructional coach Jennifer Yoo-Brannon says the post-pandemic moment still leaves teachers facing the emotional work of building belonging. Looking back on a 2021-22 Voices of Change fellowship experience she describes as demoralizing, she now frame

When she wrote her first account in 2021, Jennifer Yoo-Brannon didn’t describe burnout. She described something more quiet—and more corrosive: demoralization.

In her writing. she pointed to a specific condition in which teachers “encounter consistent and pervasive challenges to enacting the values that motivate their work.” In El Monte. California. those challenges were communal. Her school community was trying to keep learning going through online platforms. figuring out how to replicate student services virtually. and struggling to make up time not only in instruction. but in “social-skill development and relationship-building” when students returned to in-person schooling.

Five years later, the global pandemic has ended, and yet she says the essential question hasn’t gone away. It may be less obvious to society at large, she writes, but the challenges for educators remain. She leans on a line from “Going the Distance: The Teaching Profession in a Post-COVID World (2024)”: “A crisis is not merely an event: it’s the context in which an event takes place and the response to that event.” For her. that definition pulls the focus away from the calendar and back onto what educators were asked to absorb—and whether schools truly met those needs.

What she wants to name most directly is the human work that sits inside teaching.

Right now, she argues, teaching is the most important thing we can do. In her view, the urgency isn’t only academic. She says what feels most pressing is helping students “claim their humanity” and helping educators understand how much the communal learning experience matters.

That’s where her story turns. She talks about coming “full circle,” returning to the same claim with “broader and deeper understanding” of what makes a school.

The old adage, “It takes a village…,” becomes more than a saying. She writes that school communities are the village—and the villagers that students need right now. What makes a school more human, she says, isn’t only principals and teachers. She lists the people she believes help students feel they belong: child welfare staff. paraeducators. campus supervisors. guidance counselors. cafeteria workers. coaches. librarians. custodians. and secretaries.

Her point is not subtle: the environment can’t be built by one role alone. She calls it “necessary to name the people on campus” who. in her words. support students and have their backs when students need it. And she argues that “the onus is on all of us” to make mutual respect and empathy the baseline expectations.

In the middle of that reflection is a practical question—one that lands with weight because she knows how teaching can feel when society places blame on educators.

As an instructional coach, a leader, and a “voice of change,” she asks: how does she communicate to teachers who have been “beaten down and blamed for society’s ills” that they still carry a herculean task—helping students learn how to be human together?

Her answer is personal. In 2021, she said she was demoralized. In 2026, she writes that she is “revitalized and committed” to her role as an educator, instructional coach, and teacher advocate.

The change, she says, is connected to her experience in the Voices of Change fellowship. She notes she was a fellow in 2021-22. She describes the fellowship as showing her “the power of personal writing for representation and advocacy.” Since the inaugural cohort. she has contributed essays to The California Educator. Edutopia. and EdSurge. She has joined podcast panels to talk about social-emotional learning, culturally responsive teaching, and civil discourse in the classroom. She has also started to write children’s books about her own neurodivergent children.

Her work has moved beyond writing and into speaking, too. She has presented at local and state conferences, and she says she will continue to advocate for students, educators, quality professional development, and schools that model “the best of humanity.”

The path she lays out ends where it began: with the belief that a school is only as human as the community that surrounds students. The difference is in what she calls her own momentum. In her final lines. she writes that participating in the Voices of Change fellowship helped her claim her voice—her humanity and her power.

This story is part of a series commemorating the five-year anniversary of the Voices of Change fellowship. This story is part of an EdSurge series chronicling diverse educator experiences. These stories are made publicly available with support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. EdSurge maintains editorial control over all content. (Read our ethics statement here.) This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Voices of Change fellowship Jennifer Yoo-Brannon El Monte California instructional coach teacher demoralization social-emotional learning culturally responsive teaching civil discourse post-COVID world EdSurge series neurodivergent children children’s books