Heather Cerny Van Benthuysen
About me and EngagEd
In the 4th grade. Ms. D had a chart on the wall with everyone’s name next to a row of stickers. Some names had a long, bright, and shiny row of stars. Me and my friends were the ones with few. We were the ones that stuck together after school so we didn't have to go home. The ones that had trouble sitting still, doing homework, and paying attention in class. I didn't have language for it then, but I felt how a daily strategy meant to motivate students could make some of us feel shamed and invisible. I distinctly remember that feeling one morning as she added more stars. I thought “could do this better,” and decided I wanted to teach.
I first started teaching on the West Side of Chicago at age 26, and dreamed of my own classroom for so long that it felt more like a memory than a vision. I grew up poor on the South Side, barely graduated high school and struggled to finish college, while supporting myself. By the time I made it to the classroom, I carried a personal conviction and a myopic commitment driven by my lived experiences. I also brought a lot of assumptions about what my students needed, and the kind of teacher they would need me to be.
In the first week, I learned a lot about what I didn’t know, what didn’t work - and the hardest lesson was learning how much trust I had to earn. Their experiences with adults, with authority had given them every reason to be suspect. I learned that sometimes my questions or comments or concerns felt like a judgement, and that what excited me about the class was boring, or even made them cringe. I felt frozen, unsure of what to do because everything I tried blew up in my face. But – I was still curious, I still cared, and I wanted to be the teacher they needed. And also think I was desperate and humble enough to lean into their candor. So the more I learned about what they thought, who they were, what they cared about the more I saw them engage and the more our relationship changed. I was transformed because they opened themselves to me, and in turn I was able to be what they needed me to be, in the skin I am in. My students showed me that trust, belonging, and engagement begin with humility, curiosity, relationships built on shared power, not power-over.
Those values drive everything I do. After a decade if teaching I moved into school leadership and eventually into executive roles at the central office of the nation's third-largest district. I founded the Department of Student Voice and Engagement, designed a Learning Cycles framework and Student Voice Infrastructure that embedded student voice, experience, and agency in continuous improvement across 570 schools. The infrastructure and programming also built coherence, connecting 238 school-based committees to district governance and policy. Connecting civics students to their local elected leaders in genuine dialogue about power and change in their own communities. Connecting teachers in continuous learning of culturally responsive inquiry. I led the development of civic action projects integration across content areas, and authored district guidance and training on engaging in controversial topics and teaching across difference. All of this was part of the continued work to build, scale, and measure the learning environments our students continue to tell us they need.
I am a proud product and advocate of public schools. I am a practitioner of sustainable, human-centered change. And I believe we can only succeed in our great democratic experiment if we redesign our institutions for infrastructure that is both developmental, adaptive to social and structural transitions, and both anchored and driven by student experience. I’m driven by a curiosity about the interdependence of systems, conditions, humans, and the complexity of change. I am grounded by a love of learning, people, community, and the natural world.
I’m grateful to have worked with and learned from the most incredible educators, and in a school system that is relentlessly committed to its young people. Doing this work over 20 years, with a brilliant, driven team and visionary leaders in Chicago has given me a priceless understanding of the human side of systems-change. Now with EngagEd, doing this work nationally in red, blue, and purple states, in K-12, higher education, and in other sectors has shown me that the challenges we face in achieving lasting and transformative change in schools are uniquely shared, everywhere. And finally, I have come to know that in order lead change in a rapidly changing, polarized world, then we must look closely at how our systems shape the daily experience of students and adults - and imagine what they would look like if our ways of learning and leadership mirror and model the outcomes we seek.