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From a Conference Hallway to a Lasting Collaboration: How Lynsey and Jody Found Each Other

Some of the most meaningful professional relationships don’t start with a formal introduction or a signed agreement. They start with a conversation after a session ends, a business card exchanged, and a quiet sense that this person gets it.

That’s how Lynsey Gibbons and Jody Guarino found each other.

It was 2014, and both women were at a conference for mathematics teacher educators. Lynsey had just finished presenting, and Jody stayed to talk. They were thinking about similar things — what it really takes to improve math teaching and learning, how to support teachers in meaningful ways, and what it looks like when schools actually organize teacher learning well. The conversation didn’t end when the conference did. They stayed in touch over email and occasional Zoom calls, two people in different corners of the education world who had found a shared wavelength.

Over the next several years, that connection deepened quietly. Jody introduced Lynsey to John Drake, a district leader she was working closely with through her role at the Orange County Department of Education. Each fall, the three of them would find each other at the same math education conference and carve out time for a meal together — not a formal meeting, not an agenda-driven debrief, just a chance to catch up on what they were each learning and what was happening in the field. These annual dinners became something of a ritual, a space to think out loud and stay connected to each other’s work.

Meanwhile, Jody had been doing her own digging. She had read deeply in the research on instructional improvement, including a book had contributed to, Systems of Instructional Improvement, which she returned to again and again as she tried to make sense of what it would take to build real capacity in schools. She had also been following the work Lynsey and her colleague Elham Kazemi and others had done with a school in Renton, Washington — a school where teachers and leaders had built something that felt genuinely different. In 2019, Jody visited the school in Renton. Within thirty minutes of walking through the door, she found herself thinking: How do these teachers talk with each other about kids? How did they get here? She left inspired and a little haunted by the question of how to bring something like that to Orange County.

So by the time Lynsey and Jody sat down together at a conference dinner in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2023, they weren’t strangers exploring a possible collaboration. They were two people who had spent nearly a decade building trust, reading each other’s work, and asking the same kinds of questions from different vantage points. The conversation that fall turned naturally toward what it might look like to work together more intentionally — to bring Lynsey’s research and Jody’s deep knowledge of the Orange County context into genuine partnership.

That spring, in 2024, they began. Together with Jody’s team, known as the Sunshine Team, and a group of district partners across Orange County, they launched a community of practice focused on coaching and how to organize it to support teachers’ ongoing learning. It was a real beginning, the start of something that both women had been, in some ways, building toward for years.

What made this possible was the slow, steady accumulation of a relationship — years of showing up at the same table, reading each other’s work, asking hard questions, and staying curious about what the other person was learning. Jody brought a practitioner’s urgency and a researcher’s instincts. Lynsey brought a researcher’s lens and a deep respect for the complexity of real schools. Neither of them was looking for someone to validate what they already believed. They were looking for a thought partner — and they found one.

This is the foundation on which their work together now stands. And as you’ll read in future posts, it’s a foundation that has made possible something much larger: a district-wide effort to reimagine what learning looks like for educators of all kinds and students alike.

But that story starts here — with a conversation after a conference session ended, and two people who decided to keep sharing with each other.