For years, I was celebrated as a “top student,” in school, yet I graduated from high school almost entirely disabled to learn by myself. I had mastered the game of schooling—memorizing facts, following rules, earning high grades—but without ever thinking deeply, or truly understanding.
My transformation came later, outside of school, when I discovered my own power to learn. It was 1999 when, as part of a team led by my mentor Gabriel Camara, we set out to develop an alternative educational model that would help young people in some of the most remote, small and scattered communities in Mexico to develop the skills and habits of independent learning.
After a few years of trying out different ideas and realizing that the practice and learning that we were seeing happening in these communities was far from what we had envisioned, we came to an important realization: if we wanted to see thriving learning communities in action in the most remote parts of the country, we had to become a thriving learning community ourselves.
With the support of the expert in literature in our team, I learned for the first time to make meaning of poems that at first felt undecodable; with help with the expert in Science, I explored and figured out robust answers to questions such as why do airplanes fly?. As an expert in Mathematics and English, I helped my colleagues gain new confidence in tackling complex Math problems and challenging texts in English.
This experience helped me reconnect with my own power to learn, and instilled in me a deep confidence that I could learn whatever I set myself to learn.
This realization changed my life, and ever since, I have dedicated my work to igniting and scaling deep, meaningful learning for students and educators across the world. I have worked alongside education leaders in Mexico, Chile, California, Canada, Scotland, Australia, and beyond, guiding schools and systems in developing clear strategies to help young people and adults to become independent, engaged learners. Through my books, research, and hands-on work with leaders and practitioners, I have helped catalyze a movement of pedagogical transformation that has liberated learning in thousands of schools and continues to grow today.
I bring to this work not only top-tier expertise in educational change but also the lived experience of leading transformation from the inside—working at every level, from classrooms to ministries, to bridge the gap between powerful learning and the institutions that should foster it. My approach is not about quick fixes or rigid programs. It is about building movements, aligning beliefs with action, and creating the conditions for real, sustained change.
If you are an educational leader striving to create learning environments that unleash the full potential of students and educators, I invite you to join me. Let’s build a future where schools are living examples of the societies we aspire to, where learning is a practice of freedom.
Welcome to Liberating Learning—where educational change begins with reigniting our power to learn.