About Me · Pirl Experimental
William Pirl.
Husband. Father of four. Educator.
I have spent more than fifteen years teaching, designing, experimenting, revising, and trying to figure out what actually helps people learn. I am a middle-school science and STEAM teacher, curriculum designer, tutor, coach, and founder of Pirl Experimental Education & Consulting.
The perspective I bring
More than one side
of the table.
Being a husband, a father of four, and an educator for fifteen years has given me a view of education from many sides of the table. I bring the perspective of the teacher planning a lesson, the parent thinking about a child’s needs, the tutor working through a specific struggle, and the colleague helping another educator find a way forward.
That combination matters. A decision that makes sense on a lesson plan still has to work for a real child, a real family, and the educator putting it into practice. It reminds me to listen carefully, ask better questions, and look beyond an assignment or test score. The goal is support that builds knowledge and confidence while making sense in people’s everyday lives.
My background
A classroom
foundation.
I earned my degree in biology from Rutgers University and my master’s degree from the University of Maryland. I began my teaching career outside Washington, D.C., before returning to New Jersey, where I have spent most of my career working with middle-school students.
The classroom has always been the foundation of my professional life, but my work has rarely stayed within the walls of one. Over the years, I have designed and adapted curriculum, developed classroom resources, differentiated instruction for a wide range of learners, tutored and coached students, led extracurricular programs, planned field experiences, developed STEM and environmental initiatives, pursued and implemented grant-funded projects, collaborated with scientists and community organizations, and worked with other educators through professional learning and district initiatives. Those experiences have varied enormously in size and scope, but the underlying approach has remained remarkably consistent: What are we actually trying to accomplish? What is getting in the way? And what can we build that works better?
How I approach the work
Why
Experimental?
My background is in science, so experimentation comes naturally to me, but the word Experimental in Pirl Experimental means something broader. It describes how I have learned to approach education. Develop an idea. Try it. Pay attention to what happens. Keep what works. Change what doesn't. Then try again. Some of the best things I have created began as solutions to problems I encountered with my own students, while some of the most useful lessons I have learned came from ideas that did not work nearly as well as I expected.
Fifteen years in education have also made me increasingly skeptical of absolutes. I believe in inquiry and student discovery, but I also believe there are times when a knowledgeable teacher should simply explain something clearly. I believe students should struggle with difficult ideas, but they should not have to struggle with unnecessary obstacles that prevent them from accessing those ideas. I believe technology can dramatically expand what teachers and students are capable of accomplishing, while also believing that sometimes the best solution is a pencil, a conversation, a physical model, or a thoughtfully designed piece of paper. Good education requires more than allegiance to a particular method. It requires judgment.
That judgment develops through experience: working with different students, trying different approaches, making mistakes, reflecting on them, learning from other people, and being willing to change something you once thought was working perfectly well. I have taught students who could take an open-ended question and run with it and students who needed that same question broken into several manageable pieces. I have watched the same lesson succeed beautifully with one class and fall apart with another. Those experiences have made me less interested in finding the right way to teach and much more interested in figuring out what a particular learner, classroom, or situation actually needs.
The scale can change. The purpose stays.
From ideas
to practice.
The same mindset carries into work beyond individual lessons. Some of my professional experiences have involved ambitious projects—grant-funded programs, community partnerships, field experiences, STEM initiatives, environmental education, and complex science investigations. Others have involved much smaller questions about a worksheet, an assessment, a tutoring session, or why one student isn't understanding something. I find both kinds of problems interesting because both require the same basic process: understand the goal, identify the obstacle, and design a practical way forward.
Sometimes the solution to an educational problem involves specialized equipment, community partners, significant funding, and months of planning. Sometimes it is a better piece of paper. A good educator should be capable of recognizing the difference.
Where this work is going
Why Pirl
Experimental?
I created Pirl Experimental Education & Consulting because I wanted somewhere for this work to grow beyond my own classroom. It gives me a place to create and share resources, explore ideas about teaching and learning, work with students and families, support other educators, develop educational experiences, and collaborate with schools and organizations on interesting problems. Although those areas may appear quite different from one another, I see them as extensions of the same work I have been doing throughout my career: helping people learn and figuring out how to turn good educational ideas into experiences that actually work.
At the same time, I want this work to remain connected to where it began. I am still a practicing classroom teacher, and that matters to me. The things I create and the ideas I write about continue to encounter real students, real schedules, real learning differences, real curriculum requirements, real budgets, and all of the unpredictability that comes with putting an idea into practice. Sometimes something works exactly as intended. Sometimes students take it somewhere I never anticipated. Sometimes I realize halfway through a lesson that an idea I spent three hours developing was considerably better in my head. Then I change it.
That is probably the best explanation of Pirl Experimental. I don't believe good educators eventually discover the one correct way to teach and spend the rest of their careers repeating it. I think we build a larger collection of experiences, strategies, successes, failures, questions, and professional judgment, and we get better at deciding what a particular learner or situation needs.