Centering Community and Change

Harvard Graduate School of Education’s class of 2026 is full of students who have traveled a long way to walk the stage in Radcliffe Yard and accept their various degrees. Rebecca Westlake, Ed.M.’15, might have one of the shortest commutes of them all.

After earning a master’s in school leadership from HGSE in 2015 Westlake never left, calling mid-Cambridge home for the last 10 years. She returned to the Ed School to pursue her Ed.L.D., and as she joins her cohort to celebrate together on campus one last time, Westlake says the moment is bittersweet.

“It’s been incredible. Because I live here in Cambridge, I feel this great sense of joy and profound addition for all of these people who have moved in temporarily,” says Westlake. “And then I feel this sense of sadness as everyone has moved on, because I’m still here.”

College towns always have a transient element of those who call them home. Students come and go, and more permanent residents grow used to the ebbs and flows of semesters as they pass. Westlake – who will serve as the Ed.L.D Program’s Commencement Marshal  this week – says a return to the classrooms on Appian Way brought many benefits over the last three years, and they’ve changed the way she feels about being a Cambridge resident as well as a Harvard alum, not to mention an educator.

“When I came for the master’s program, I really wanted to soak up everything HGSE,” Westlake recalls. “I took all of these courses that felt so relevant and education-based that really changed me.”

The Ed.L.D. Program gave Westlake a “second chance” to think about the educational landscape differently, taking classes across the Harvard course catalog that allowed her to consider the “broader impact” other disciplines have on education.

“Previously I really thought education was the key, and if we can really get this right we can unlock dismantling some of the institutions that have perpetuated inequities. And now I have a broader stance and perspective that it’s going to take more than education,” Westlake explains. “My place is in public education, but I’m trying to hold a wider viewpoint and ask what is the role of philanthropy, and business, and law, and public policy? Because it’s not education alone that’s going to do it.”

Education was not top of mind when it came to finding her place at first. Her mother was an attorney, and so growing up it was assumed she would find a career in law. After earning her undergraduate degree at Bates College, however, she was accepted into Teach For America and taught 10th grade English at an all-Black high school in Washington, D.C.

“Ballou Senior High, which was one of the lowest performing schools in the nation,” says Westlake. “And I found that the best thing in the world was reading books with high school students and reading what they were writing and engaging in conversations around text.”

Though Westlake initially thought there was “nothing else I wanted to do,” she kept finding things that interested her, including teaching English as a second language. She earned a Fullbright scholarship and went to Spain, working as an English teaching assistant.

“I would probably still be a high school teacher if I hadn’t had the variety of these opportunities,” says Westlake. “Every time I got comfortable doing something, I would get a tap on the shoulder or be invited to do something different.”

That willingness to be uncomfortable and learn something new led her to a number of unique opportunities. After working in Madrid, she moved to Massachusetts and worked in a charter school in Chelsea teaching English learners, many of whom had recently arrived to the United States. She then helped launch a second charter school location in Lawrence, Massachusetts, doing everything from building school schedules and preparing lunches to walking around skateparks in search of students who may have left or not yet enrolled in school yet.

It also led her to the Ed School for the first time in 2014, where she laid the groundwork for what would become her Ed.L.D. capstone more than a decade before defending it. Westlake did her principal practicum work at Rafael Hernández, a K–6 dual language school in Boston that helped her reimagine how language can be taught.

“I had never been in a school that really centered students’ first language, Spanish, as equal to or more important than English,” says Westlake. “And I loved it. It was culturally responsive, it was celebratory, and it really honors students’ home languages and cultures.”

Westlake notes that, 11 years later, she completed her Ed.L.D. residency with the same principal at Rafael Hernández School: Ana Tavares Ed.M.’99. She led a team helping the district’s five-year strategic planning process that focused on improving literacy in an equitable way. The resulting work was titled “When the People Meet the Plan,” in part because she learned some considerable lessons about how things get done in larger school districts and that, sometimes, plans have to be able to change.

“I really thought this was going to be about literacy, and it was about organizational change and people,” Westlake says. “I learned so many things around how people come together and how trust is important and how collaboration can and cannot work based on changing conditions.”

Reflecting on being named a Commencement marshal, Westlake appreciates how close the cohort is and how they embraced her five-year-old son, Morty, as a part of cohort 13.

“It’s such an honor, and it’s one I was surprised about because I think anyone in the cohort would be a wonderful representation of cohort 13,” Westlake said. “I’m thinking a lot about what the people in the cohort mean to me and how I hope that I represent their hopes and accomplishments. I hope I’m someone who is a cheerleader and a listener who has brought people into my life.”

Given her teaching background, it’s no surprise that Westlake has made sure Morty is already learning to speak Spanish in Cambridge Public Schools, too.

“For me it’s so important. … He has all of these advantages, and I need him to speak more than English, not for some of the reasons I think sometimes people say,” says Westlake. “I need him to be able to see the world through the eyes of people who have looked and experienced lives and backgrounds that are different than his.”