Writing & Storytelling
Writing has always been the way I make sense of what I’ve seen and learned—in schools and in life. It’s where the two sides of my work, strategic and personal, often meet. Through essays, reflections, and occasional stories, I explore how institutions evolve, how people find their voice, and how clarity of purpose gives shape to both.
Several of these pieces first appeared in Our Weekly Fast, a collaborative blog I wrote and curated over two to three years. That space brought together voices from different parts of the world reflecting on gratitude, humility, and the daily work of becoming more human. Those themes continue to ground much of my writing today.
In recent years, my writing has appeared in professional journals and newsletters including InterEd and The International Educator, through the Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIE) and the Academy for International School Heads (AISH).
Among my current projects:
Essays & Papers
Reimagining PreK–12 Schools
This essay argues that many contemporary school reforms remain constrained by inherited structures—age-based progression, fixed schedules, and standardized pathways—that no longer align with what we know about learning and development. It invites school leaders and trustees to consider structural rethinking rather than incremental change as they imagine the future of schooling.
Originally published in ISC Research.
Read the full essay
The Convergence of Three Ideas
Working copy/forthcoming piece
Education must move beyond the 19th-century structures it inherited and align form with function. This essay proposes design principles for flexible, student-centered learning models that promote agency, adaptability, and purpose—calling schools to reimagine both how and why they educate.
Conversations
How My Mind Has Changed: Tim Kelley
Part of the AISH Series, forthcoming publication
The first in a series of conversations with retiring international school heads. In this interview, Tim Kelley reflects on what three decades of leadership have taught him about courage, humility, and the evolving meaning of success in education. His insights remind us that growth is not a matter of certainty but of continual change.
How My Mind Has Changed: Melinda Bihn
Partt of the AISH Series, forthcoming publication
The second in a series of conversations with retiring international school heads. In this interview, Melinda Bihn reflects on nearly three decades of leadership, considering how courage, humility, and discernment have shaped her understanding of success in education. Her reflections suggest that leadership is less about certainty or arrival, and more about remaining open to learning, change, and the responsibilities of stewardship over time.
Read the full essay (PDF)
Reflections & Essays
The Brooklyn Bridge
Published in the AISH Newsletter, 2025; awaiting submission to literary journals
The Brooklyn Bridge is a meditation on endurance, imagination, and leadership—told through the story of the Brooklyn Bridge and the lives that built it. This piece explores how vision and perseverance can span generations, connecting the personal and the structural in both bridges and human endeavor.
The Battersea Boulevard Block Party
The Battersea Boulevard Block Party is a meditation on childhood, neighborhood, and the formative power of ordinary communal rituals. Through the remembered textures of a Midwestern summer—crepe paper streamers, wagons and parades, picnic tables and square dancing—the essay traces how belonging is first learned not through abstraction, but through shared time and place. Moving gently between memory and reflection, the piece considers how early experiences of community, love, and loss continue to shape identity across decades, even as time thins families and distances grow. What emerges is not nostalgia, but gratitude: an acknowledgment of how a single street, for a brief span of years, can become the quiet ground from which an entire life unfolds.
Navigating the Challenges of International Schools in a Rapidly Changing World
International schools operate at the intersection of global mobility, geopolitical uncertainty, and rapidly shifting expectations about learning itself. Leaders and trustees are asked to make consequential decisions amid cultural complexity, market pressures, and evolving community expectations—often without the luxury of stability or clear precedent.
In this essay, TJ Coburn examines the distinctive challenges facing international schools today, not as isolated problems to be solved, but as interconnected conditions that require steadiness, judgment, and perspective. Drawing on decades of leadership experience across international contexts, the piece explores how schools can remain anchored in mission while adapting thoughtfully to accelerating change.
Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the essay invites leaders to step back from immediate pressures and consider the deeper patterns shaping governance, leadership, and long-term sustainability—clarifying what truly requires transformation, what demands continuity, and how wise leadership emerges in moments of complexity.
Originally published in InterEd, Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIE), Spring 2024.
A Central Question
Sermon and unpublished essay
A personal reflection on vocation, identity, and care—rooted in the formative experiences that shaped my sense of belonging and purpose. It’s a piece about seeing and being seen, and about the questions that continue to live quietly at the center of one’s work.
The Angel of Waters
The Angel of Waters is a reflective essay that moves between public space and private reckoning, using Central Park—and the angel who presides over Bethesda Fountain—as a lens through which to consider passage, vulnerability, and the sustaining power of presence. Beginning with close observation of ordinary life unfolding in the park, the piece gradually widens into an account of personal turning points shaped by loss, responsibility, love, and uncertainty. What emerges is a meditation on how change is endured not through control or foresight, but through the compassion of others who arrive, often unbidden, at moments of juncture. The essay holds together memory, grief, and gratitude, suggesting that the deepest forms of blessing are found not in answers, but in accompaniment.