SEEING WHAT’S POSSIBLE By Jill Perry-Balzano
Years ago, when colleague John Graf coached alongside Dave Miceli, he noticed something about the way Miceli prepared the varsity girls lacrosse team before a big game. Miceli would gather the players, ask them to close their eyes, and guide them through a visualization of the game ahead—what success would require, what it would feel like. More often than not, Graf recalls, what the team had worked hard to prepare for and imagine became reality.
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raf knows that Miceli has been doing something similar throughout his twenty-five years at Burr and Burton. “Like those players,” Graf reflects, “his hard work, preparation, and visualization have resulted in success”—as a teacher, a coach, a department head, a teachers’ union president, and finally as athletic director. In each role, he set out to help every student, athlete, and colleague around him see the best version of themselves and work toward realizing it. It is a fitting lens through which to understand a career that has been defined, above all else, by the ability to see potential—in students, in colleagues, and in the institution itself.
Dave Miceli has been an educator since 1991—thirty-five years during which he has watched American education transform more dramatically than it had in the previous hundred. His first formal teacher evaluation, as a young educator in Jersey City, included the feedback that his desks were positioned too close to the wall. That was the kind of thing that mattered then. It was a different world. Since that first classroom, Miceli has taught through the rise of the internet, the transition to block scheduling, the emergence of positive psychology, and now the arrival of artificial intelligence. Each shift required teachers to fundamentally rethink what they were doing and why. That Miceli has not merely navigated
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