Retired Herndon Teacher Continues Career Online

Connie Casserly may have left the Herndon High School when she retired in June 2011 after teaching for more than 30 years, but she hasn’t left education.

Casserly has been working to keep furthering the goals of English, creative writing, language arts and journalism teachers everywhere, by sharing her lesson plans through TeachersPayTeachers.com.

The website allows her to upload middle and high school lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, worksheets and more, where other teachers can purchase them for a small fee.

Casserly said she always had the tendency to plan long range, and sometimes planned entire years of lesson plans at a time. She said she even got teased for it, but it allowed her to get to know her students right at the beginning of the school year and not worry about what she would be teaching the next day. Planning in advance also helped her deal with things like snow days, she said.

In addition to sharing her work on TeachersPayTeachers.com, Casserly also shares her insights as an educator and a writer on her website and blog at TeachItWrite.com. She covers topics such as the items needed for a teacher to stay healthy throughout the school year, working with parents and what it’s like teaching teens—she loves them. “They keep me laughing,” she said.

Casserly said after spending hours working on her lesson plans and teaching materials she wanted to share them along with her classroom experience. Often teachers recycle the same lesson plans and are looking for fresh ways to share those lessons in the classroom, she said.

Casserly said many students love to hate English classes and she wants to continue creating and sharing her lesson plans because she hopes to help other teachers make it a fun subject their students can enjoy. “I try to work fun into my worksheets,” she said.

She said one of her classroom goals is always to teach students how to think on their own, and not simply parrot what they think the teacher wants to hear. She also wants to ensure students learn to communicate through both writing and speaking.

Continuing her career by moving to the online world has been a change, Casserly said. She said she first began selling her lesson plans online in Aug. 2006 and began her website and blog in March 2011. Learning about things such as key words and meta tags has taught her a lot about the Internet, she said. “My husband said he thought I’d never talk geek,” she said.

Though still involved in education, Casserly said she enjoys retirement. “I 100 percent love it,” she said. She’s happy to not have to wake up at 4:45 a.m. anymore, but she does miss the energy of the classroom, as well as her students, she said.

At one point she was asked to take on a full-time substitute position, but decided against it so she wouldn’t be tempted to stay in the classroom, she said.

In addition to her online work, Casserly has also been working on a novel. She published her first book in 1993, on the subject of teen dating abuse. Her current manuscript is a fun, romantic comedy about a 30-year-old teacher, she said.

Reflecting on her teaching career, Casserly said she has always wanted to write a book based on some of her first students. The first school she taught at was a boys’ reformed school. She said her students helped her learn about fairness, how to not judge people at face value and what kind of teacher she would turn out to be.