Dr. Butler's Educational Research and Dissemination Site

I. Potpourri

Becoming the Student Again

In 2011, I returned to the classroom not as a teacher, but as a student—immersing myself in an 11th-grade chemistry class for seventy-nine consecutive days. I completed every lab, quiz, and assignment, journaling nearly 400 pages of observations. What the students didn’t know was that I was also quietly mentoring their teacher, helping refine lessons and classroom structures. Less than two years later, she became Rhode Island Teacher of the Year. Sometimes the most powerful way to study teaching is to sit back down in the student’s desk.

The Gift of Flexible Homework

During my participant observation, one small innovation had a surprisingly big impact—what I called “flexible homework.” Instead of rigid assignments, students were offered choices that allowed them to demonstrate understanding in different ways. Engagement soared. I learned that flexibility doesn’t dilute rigor—it amplifies it by meeting students where they are.

Founding a School of the Future

In 2013, I stood with colleagues on the first day of Village Green Charter School—an experiment in blended learning built on digital curriculum and real-time teacher intervention. My task was monumental: transform an e-courseware product into a full four-year high school program. Few educators ever get the chance to help invent a school from scratch. Even fewer get to document its birth in real time.

Lessons From Failure and Growth

When our students first took the 2015 PARCC assessments, the results were abysmal. Math proficiency was in the single digits, and English wasn’t much better. But rather than accept defeat, we dissected the data, built tools, and rethought instruction. Within one year, our ELA scores leapt from 16% to 71%—the largest gain in the state. Failure, when examined honestly, can become a launchpad for success.

Building a Machine to Read Essays

Frustrated by standardized writing results, I turned to a tool I’d trusted for years: the Wolfram Language. By analyzing nearly sixty scored sample essays from PARCC, I programmed a system that could evaluate student writing, mimic human scoring, and generate feedback. Teachers used it to guide instruction; students used it to sharpen their skills. Technology, when used with purpose, doesn’t replace teachers—it empowers them.

Collaboration as Catalyst

When I think back to my work—whether embedded in a chemistry class, cofounding a school, or coding an essay scorer—the common thread is collaboration. Real change in education doesn’t come from top down mandates or flashy innovations. It comes when teachers, researchers, and students work side by side, learning from one another. That is where transformation lives.

II. The Feel of Time (Psychological vs. Physical)

Desk Lines and Time Lines

Years in classrooms leave more than knowledge—they leave impressions. Some students carry “desk lines” as permanently as others carry “bikini lines.” Our bodies remember time spent in chairs as much as our minds recall the lessons.

When Mischief Finds a Minute

The moments when time hangs loose in class—the start, the end, or during long pauses—are when mischief creeps in. Lost time isn’t just inefficiency; it’s an invitation for distraction.

The Day Without a Break

One professor’s promise of a break turned into ninety extra minutes of lecture, all because of my mischievous question: “When does a theory become a theory?” Time stretches, warps, and sometimes disappears under the weight of curiosity.

Physical Time vs. Psychological Time

The school day is measured in minutes and bells, but the student day is felt in heartbeats and yawns. Physical time belongs to the clock. Psychological time belongs to the learner.

When Time Crawls

Boredom makes an hour feel eternal. Engagement makes it vanish. Classrooms operate in both speeds at once, depending on the student’s state of mind.

Ethics and Timed Tests

If we believe students learn at different rates, why do we bind their performance to the same ticking clock? A proof in geometry is no less beautiful because it took fifteen minutes instead of five.

The Hidden Work of the Subconscious

Sometimes the answer comes hours later, long after the bell. The subconscious keeps working on problems even when time is “up.” Shouldn’t our assessments honor that hidden labor?

III. Lost Time (Interruptions and Inefficiencies)

Lost Days Add Up

Mrs. Waters’ chemistry class had 90 days on paper, but 22 were lost to illness, testing, field trips, and interruptions. In the end, only 64 remained. How much learning vanishes in those unseen fractions of the year?

The Dollar Store Analogy

Ten percent of a student’s year was devoted to chemistry. Imagine walking into a store with just a dime in your pocket—how much can you really buy?

The Bell and the Egg Timer

At Beacon’s early campus, time was measured by an egg timer that had to be reset mid-class. Sometimes it wasn’t. Students knew distraction was all it took to steal an extra lunch. Time isn’t just precious—it’s fragile.

Interruptions as Thieves

A PA announcement, a phone call, a hall pass—each is a thief of minutes. Added together, they can rob weeks of instruction over a year.

IV. Saving Time (Practices and Strategies)

Every Minute Matters

Doug Lemov was right: cut one minute from ten transitions a day, and you’ve saved a week of instruction. Teachers don’t just manage learning—they manage minutes.

Bell-to-Bell in Silence

Mrs. Waters was a “bell-to-bell” teacher in a school without bells. Prepared handouts, written objectives, and tight transitions bought her precious minutes. Organization is time’s best defense.

The Chemistry of Organization

Storage cabinets, a mailbox system, and templates for problems of the day—all small shifts that bought back time. In classrooms, efficiency isn’t mechanical; it’s relational. Time saved is attention gained.

Flip the Lab, Save the Time

Pre-lab worksheets—completed at home—freed class time for experiments. Flipped teaching isn’t just about content; it’s about respect for the most limited resource teachers have: minutes together.

Whiteboards for Everyone

When all students answer at once—holding up boards or using devices—the teacher gains not just engagement but exponential time. One question, twenty answers, no waiting. Time multiplies when participation is collective.

The Urgency of Now

Education always talks about preparing for the future. But for students, school is not rehearsal—it is life itself. To dismiss the present as mere preparation is to squander the only time they truly possess: today.

V. The Larger Story of Time (History and Philosophy)

Summer Once Belonged to School

In the 1800s, American students often attended summer sessions. It was only later that the “long vacation” became sacred. School calendars weren’t carved in stone—they were negotiated with time.

Time as Holy Ground

Beacon’s first building doubled as a Sunday school. Crosses and statues shared space with textbooks. Teachers literally turned Jesus to face the wall before classes began. In classrooms, time and place are always layered.

The Aesthetics of Time

Like Poincaré suggested, inspiration arrives when ideas satisfy the mind’s sense of beauty, balance, and proportion. Perhaps true learning isn’t just about the number of minutes but about the harmony of how they are spent.

VI. Time in Schools

The Illusion of Time

Schools speak of time as though it were a thing to be managed, budgeted, or saved. Yet time is not a container to be filled but a current that carries us forward. In classrooms, the real measure is not how much time has passed, but how much meaning has taken root.

The Geometry of Time

Schedules divide the day into neat rectangles, forty-five minutes each, stacked like bricks in a wall. But learning rarely fits such geometry. Sometimes understanding arrives in a sudden spark; sometimes it lingers and takes weeks. Time, in learning, is elastic.

How the School used its Time

When all the data are filed away and the test scores fade from memory, what remains is how a school used its time. Did the minutes dissolve into routine and disruption, or did they gather into experiences that mattered?

The Measure of School

Time will always slip through our fingers. Yet in classrooms, it can also take shape: in a question that lingers, in a connection that sparks, in a moment of wonder that makes the clock irrelevant. The true measure of a school is not just in what students know when the bell rings, but in how they felt about the hours they spent there.

The Weight of Lost Hours

For struggling students, school can feel like a warehouse of wasted days. Minutes drag, assignments repeat, and years accumulate with little to show. Yet those lost hours are not just inefficiencies—they are stolen chances for transformation.

Moments that Last

Ask adults what they remember from school, and rarely will they mention a worksheet or a timed test. Instead, they recall a moment of kindness, a challenge that awakened them, or a discovery that made them feel alive. Schools cannot control time itself, but they can shape the memories that time preserves.

VII. Aesthetics in Learning

The First Artist and the First Critic

Every act of creation is born with its shadow—the critic. The caveman who painted the bison and the one who mocked it were both part of the same story. Perhaps beauty only comes alive when it risks rejection.

The Problem of Beauty

For centuries, philosophers tried to trap beauty in definitions of symmetry, proportion, or clarity. Yet beauty resists capture. It lives somewhere between the object and the eye, between what is made and what is felt.

The Mathematics of Elegance

Birkhoff tried to measure beauty with an equation: M = O/C. But can an equation hold delight? Can complexity and order alone explain why a poem, a melody, or a proof stirs the heart? Mathematics can describe patterns, but not the sigh they inspire.

Bullough’s Distance

Stand too close to a work of art, and it collapses into practicality. Stand too far, and it becomes cold and remote. Somewhere in the middle—the aesthetic ring—beauty lives. Perhaps classrooms, too, need this same balance of distance: near enough to touch, far enough to wonder.

Aesthetic Failure

When students feel nothing toward their lessons—neither curiosity nor resistance—learning becomes anesthetic: numb, inert, lifeless. The opposite of beauty in education is not ugliness, but indifference.

Jerry’s Origami Cube

A ninth-grader solved a geometry problem not with formulas, but by folding paper into a cube. In that moment, mathematics was not abstract symbols but lived memory, shaped by his hands. His joy was not in the answer, but in the folding. That is what it means to be inside the aesthetic ring.

The Texture of Learning

Every task in school—an equation, an experiment, a passage of text—offers the chance of an aesthetic experience. The effort to attend, the feeling of value, the closure of understanding. When these three arrive together, learning becomes more than duty. It becomes art.

The Teacher’s Task

To teach is to arrange encounters between students and objects—ideas, problems, texts, experiments. But the secret task is deeper: to help students find beauty in those objects. For beauty invites persistence, and persistence leads to mastery.

VIII. Student Connected & Social Emotional Related Musings

Musings about “The Boy Under the Coat”:

The Boy Under the Coat

On the first day of class, he sat motionless in the back row, coat pulled over his head—the school’s first living statue. No response, no participation, no engagement. Just silence. Sometimes the loudest cries for help come wrapped in silence.

Waiting for Eighteen

His teachers knew the story: he was waiting for his eighteenth birthday to sign himself out. And he did. On that very day, he disappeared from school—slipping quietly through the cracks of a system designed to catch him. I still wonder if he had even one reason to stay.

Polite but Disconnected

When I tried to speak with him, he was polite, even well spoken. But he did no work. Not a worksheet, not a quiz, not a test. No connections with adults, no visible friendships with peers. Sometimes, it isn’t defiance we see in students—it’s disconnection, so deep that school feels irrelevant to their world.

Beyond the Data

Years later, I saw him again. No longer a boy under a coat, but a young man working for a shipping company, loading trucks. His story never appeared in a graduation rate statistic nor in any report about student achievement. And yet, his absence tells us more about the failures of our system than any dataset could.

The Poster Child of NCLB

He remains, in my mind, the poster child for students lost under No Child Left Behind. A law that promised every child would succeed but too often measured compliance instead of connection. What he needed was not another mandate, but someone to reach him before he disappeared beneath the coat.

The Other Side of School Violence

When we hear “school violence,” our minds often jump straight to mass shootings. These tragedies dominate headlines—and rightly so, because of their horror and scale. Yet not all school violence involves guns or even physical harm. Often, the root lies in something quieter: isolation, rejection, and disconnection. Perhaps the most powerful safety plan a school can create isn’t just metal detectors or security cameras—it’s a culture where no student feels invisible.

The Loneliness Factor

Research shows that many perpetrators of school violence share a hauntingly consistent profile: loners, students without meaningful peer connections, and with little or no positive ties to adults in school. When students feel excluded, rejected, or invisible, the consequences can be devastating. What if the strongest “early warning system” isn’t technology or policy, but whether a student can name one caring adult who knows them well?

A Simple, Quiet Tool

Years ago, I came across a remarkably simple idea: a Connections Survey. Two one-page surveys—one for students, one for adults—ask the most important of questions: Who do you feel connected to here? From those responses, schools can see who is thriving socially and emotionally and, more importantly, who is utterly disconnected. The red flag is the student who can’t name a single friend or who appears on no adult’s list. These are the students who need us most.

When No One Names You

The hardest cases are the students who surface on neither survey—students who can’t identify a single peer or adult connection and who aren’t named by teachers or staff. These are the young people most at risk of disengagement, acting out, or simply slipping away unnoticed. In these cases, intervention isn’t optional—it's essential. A counselor, a teacher, or a coach must step in. A lifeline must be offered. Because every child deserves at least one reason to come to school besides “because I have to.”

Reading Between the Numbers

Rhode Island’s 2017 Survey Works results paint a troubling picture. Only 27% of students reported feeling engaged in school. Just 45% felt they had positive relationships with their teachers. Barely over half said they valued school at all. Numbers like these don’t just live in charts—they live in the quiet hallways where anxiety lingers, in classrooms where students keep their heads down, and in cafeterias where some sit alone. These numbers are whispers calling us to listen harder.

Safety Beyond Security

We often frame school safety in terms of infrastructure: locked doors, cameras, resource officers, and emergency protocols. These matter. But safety is also emotional. It’s whether a student feels known, cared for, and connected. If we want safer schools, we must invest not only in buildings and policies but also in relationships. Because it’s not just about keeping students alive—it’s about giving them a reason to live fully while they are in our care.

IX. Unequal Education

The Geography of Inequity

Within three miles of Providence City Hall sit twenty-one public high schools. Yet half are chronically underperforming, producing what feels like a permanent underclass of students. Same city. Same boundaries. Different schools. Different futures. Geography, in this case, is destiny—and it shouldn’t be.

The Hidden Cost of Proficiency

In 2017, only 1.9% of Providence high school students achieved proficiency in math. That’s 35 students out of 1,821. The “cost of proficiency”? Nearly $900,000 per student when measured against per-pupil spending. Numbers like this are more than statistics—they are an indictment of a system that spends much but yields so little.

The Cream and the Crop

Classical High School shines in test results—over half of its students are proficient in math and English. But it is a selective “test-in” school, siphoning off high-achieving students from the rest of the district. Its success, while laudable, leaves the remaining schools with disproportionate concentrations of struggling students. We must ask ourselves: are we celebrating excellence, or deepening inequity?

Where Is the Outrage?

Suspensions, absenteeism, low test scores, and graduation rates below 80%. Year after year, report after report. And yet, silence. Why is there not more outrage over the fate of thousands of Providence students? Perhaps the most dangerous thing is not failure itself, but how accustomed we have become to it.

Musing 5: Disruption That Worked

When Village Green Virtual opened in 2013, it was dismissed by some as just another experiment. Yet with 94% of its students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, the school now boasts the state’s highest graduation rate (98.5%) and 100% college acceptance. Innovation, transparency, and documentation of both successes and failures have made it a national model. Disruption is often uncomfortable—but sometimes, it works.

Musing 6: A Blueprint for Turnaround

Village Green’s story proves that poverty need not equal failure. Competency-based curriculum, data-driven pathways, and blended learning environments can unlock student potential. One graduate left with 22 college credits, others finished high school in three years, and together a class of 54 earned $3.5 million in scholarships. Success breeds success. The real question: why aren’t we scaling this blueprint across every struggling school?

A Few of Dr. Butler’s Quotable Quotes

“There are only two documents in life that your ability to write will see no light—signing one’s own birth certificate and signing own’s own death certificate. However, in between these major life milestones, there will be numerous times where the ability to write effectively will be an essential skill no matter where life may take you in the future.”

— J. D. Butler, From Paragraph to Essay, January 4, 2023

“All teachers should strive to be teachers of writing”

— J. D. Butler, From Paragraph to Essay, January 4,

“Student feedback is one of the most valuable, but untapped teacher resources in the typical classroom.”

— J. D. Butler, Inventing School, p. 129

“The moments when time hangs loose in class—the start, the end, or during long pauses—are when mischief creeps in. Lost time isn’t just inefficiency; it’s an invitation for distraction.”