​​​​Why I Built the HIVE

 

I didn’t always feel like I belonged in school.

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As a student, I often struggled to connect with the adults in the room, with other learners, and with the way school was structured. I remember wishing that I had a different teacher who could explain it in a way I understood or more than one space where I could go to learn. I didn’t have the language for it then, but what I longed for was shared learning and shared responsibility.

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Years later, as an educator and a parent, I experienced exactly that.

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In a small international school in Indonesia, I co-taught alongside a tightly connected team of teachers and teaching assistants. Together, we supported every learner, including my own children. We regrouped based on student need or interest, not convenience. We shared responsibility instead of dividing it. We built flexibility into our days and belonging into our classrooms.

 

We were, in every sense, a hive.

 

And once you’ve taught in a hive, you can’t go back.

 

Since then, I’ve led and taught within learning community models across multiple international schools. Over time, something became clear to me: this work cannot survive on goodwill alone. It requires intentional design. It requires systems that support collaboration instead of depending on individual heroics.

 

I also realized I could no longer be both a classroom teacher and a system builder.

 

To truly scale this work, and to help schools avoid the missteps I’ve seen along the way, I stepped outside the classroom to do the work from the outside in.

 

That is why I created The HIVE: to support schools and educators in reimagining how we teach, lead, and learn together — not as isolated individuals, but as interdependent systems built to sustain people and learning over time.