About Michelle Boyd Waters

Professor Michelle Boyd Waters, M.Ed.

Professor Michelle Boyd Waters, M.Ed.

I have been a writer for as long as I can remember, but writing is only one thread in a career that has also included journalism, web hosting, ecommerce, online media, classroom teaching, educational publishing, teacher education, and research. For a long time, those experiences felt like separate chapters. Looking back, I can see a much clearer pattern: I build resources, systems, and spaces that help people learn, connect, and do meaningful work.

I first published my work for a real audience in middle school—yes, I was on the yearbook staff—and went on to write for newspaper staffs throughout junior high, high school, and college. I majored in journalism, with minors in art and public relations, and worked for local weekly and daily newspapers. My reporting and writing appeared in publications including The Dallas Morning News and The Edmond Evening Sun and on the AP Wire.

And then I became a mother and entrepreneur...

When I became pregnant with my son in 1999, I started reconsidering what I wanted work to look like. I left newspaper journalism, became a stay-at-home mom, and found a few of the parenting communities that were beginning to form online. I taught myself graphic and web design partly because I had a lot of baby pictures that needed somewhere safe to live, and that hobby eventually grew into a business.

In the early 2000s, I worked with the founders and leaders of Sybermoms, installing, hosting, and managing the vBulletin platform that gave the community an independent online home. As a member myself, I focused on the web and hosting infrastructure (two dedicated servers running Red Hat Linux and Apache), while the founders and administrators shaped the culture, relationships, and direction of the site. Together, we built a space that eventually grew to 35,000+ members and more than 8 million posts and became a platform for substantial grassroots fundraising. In December 2003 and spring 2004, Sybermoms members organized two online auctions that raised more than $20,000 toward the $70,000 raised by a team of Sybermoms members for the 2004 Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk benefiting the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation; in December 2004, members raised another $7,500 in a single auction for St. Jude Children’s Hospital; and in February 2005, members joined with several other online communities to organize more than 200 donated items for an online auction benefiting relief efforts following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Community members pledged more than $21,000 during the auction.

At the same time, many of the women I knew online were building businesses of their own, selling cloth diapers, jewelry, baby slings, and other physical products. Once they learned I could build websites, they began asking me to create ecommerce sites for them. I filed for a sole proprietorship (later an LLC) and eventually built a web-hosting and ecommerce business focused largely on helping small independent sellers establish businesses of their own online.

Over the next several years, I worked with more than 400 clients and gradually moved from providing technical services into teaching people how to navigate ecommerce itself. I created resources, coached sellers, organized online educational events, and produced and hosted 56 episodes of Product Sellers Talk Radio. The show was downloaded more than 18,000 times from 2007-2008 and featured conversations with entrepreneurs and experts about pricing, hosting, shopping carts, suppliers, customer service, marketing, outsourcing, target markets, and the practical work of running an online business.

I tell people I wanted to be a teacher when I was 7 and forgot for 30 years...

When I was building online communities and ecommerce stories, I didn't think of that work as preparation for becoming a teacher. But looking back now, I can see that teaching was already becoming central to what I did. I was learning complicated systems, translating what I knew into usable resources, and helping other people develop the knowledge and confidence to do the work themselves. I had to make a hard choice, and I did it: I sold my company and started substituting in my children's school district in 2009.

I eventually brought that work into classrooms. I began by teaching web design to adult learners and substitute teaching before earning my Oklahoma certification in English and journalism and spending a decade teaching middle and high school English. Since then, my classroom has continued to change. I have worked with teachers through the Oklahoma Writing Project, with student writers in university writing centers, taught first-year and advanced composition and writing center theory and pedagogy, served as an interim writing center director, and continued my doctoral research in English education.

Today, many of those strands come together through reThink ELA. I develop resources, instructional frameworks, professional learning, and digital content for secondary English language arts teachers. My work includes the Curated Short Stories Library, Reading TRIIPS, mPOWRED Writing, a podcast, and an emerging school-partnership program designed to help schools implement research- and theory-informed approaches to reading and writing while gathering meaningful evidence about what students experience and learn.

When I look across all of these chapters now, I see writing, publishing, technology, entrepreneurship, teaching, community-building, and research continually folding into one another. Much of that work has also been collaborative. I have learned alongside other educators, built resources and systems with them, and drawn on their classroom knowledge, questions, and experiences to shape my own thinking. Across each stage of my career, I have been most interested in what becomes possible when people bring their different kinds of expertise together to solve complicated problems and create better ways of doing the work that matters to us.

Selected Writing & Editorial Work

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