Fellow Profile: Katie Cassedy

About Katie

Trinity/Program in Education Graduate Scholar

Katie is a first-year fellow for the 2020-2021 school year. She recently graduated from Duke University with a major in Economics and a minor in Visual Media Studies. Katie is a competitive sailor, and she has spent her summers teaching children how to sail in Annapolis, MD. Her summers with children led her to pursue teaching. She is beyond excited to earn her teaching license this year and grow from the supportive TeachHouse community.

After TeachHouse, Katie is starting in LinkedIn’s Business Leadership program in Dublin, Ireland. Her goal is to move education to the forefront of conversations in all fields and industries. She hopes to take her TeachHouse experience with her to influence educational technology. Katie is from Tampa, FL.

What are you hoping to gain from TeachHouse? 

Living with six other teachers is making a commitment to enriching myself in education and learning more from others with different experiences. I recognize the invaluable opportunity there is in this living learning community. Teach House is a chance to connect, to dive deeper, and to immerse myself in conversations about productive change in education. I want to develop a deep understanding of systemic equities in education and use this knowledge to impact individual lives in the school system. 

For high school, I attended a lower income school for its magnet program, a school that was significantly less funded than my locally zoned high school. While Plant High School, the better funded school, sported a brand-new lacrosse field, my team at Robinson played on a half-grass, half-dirt field with no lines. At the end of every week, I scrubbed my cleats from all the dirt that turned my Nike swooshes five shades darker. I now understand that the unfair funding structures are so ingrained into a broken system that it’s hard to imagine improving schools in disadvantaged areas. I believe TeachHouse is a path to stop the imagination and start the conversations about real, tangible change.