My Biggest Lesson: Rachel Smith

Rachel Smith is a strategist at L+R, a Webby Award-winning leader, overseeing high-visibility projects for some of the company’s most prominent clients and partners. Since joining L+R in 2021, Rachel has leveraged her unique background in education, where she served as a principal in KIPP’s national school system.

Transitioning from education to the design and technology consulting world, she brought her expertise in learning, communication, and strategic instruction to emerging technology. At L+R, Rachel uses her deep understanding of learning dynamics to collaborate and create impactful strategies, applying her transferable skills across sectors, from startups to enterprises.

It’s very cliché but it was advice my dad gave me when I started my first serious job, which was teaching special education in New Orleans, and that was to find a mentor as soon as I could. I’m not in teaching anymore, I switched to the creative side during Covid, but it was the same thing, and I would’ve crashed and burned without my mentor.

When I graduated college I was recruited for Teach for America. It’s an organisation that drops kids into schools and is perhaps a little too rosy on their outlook of us changing the world. Teaching is a vocation, it takes time to find your voice, and it takes time and patience to make headways with your kids. The initial program was only supposed to last two years, which is entirely too short a time to make an impact.

Coupled with that I was placed in New Orleans, where the post-Katrina school system was still a disaster, and we were expected to figure a lot of it out on our own in schools that were minimally supported by local and state governments.

I ended up teaching for 10 years, and grew into a school and regional leader in the special education space. The only reason I survived that long was finding a mentor who was able to teach me about ‘unstructured structure’.

In special education it was especially important to have a looser structure within a greater long term plan. Every child was different and had their own needs and their own ways of relating to us as teachers and trying to be militant and applying the same rules to every one wasn’t helpful, and finding someone who could teach me, and most importantly show me in the classroom how this worked made all the difference.

A dear old teacher friend, Julia Keller, gave me a shot at her creative agency when I left education after the second Covid year covering her first parental leave. I was working 100 hour weeks running a special education Covid school, and my health was failing, which inevitably would fail my students and families. 

I knew I had a lot of transferable skills, but wasn’t sure how I could relate to a whole new set of folks. And I was so excited for a new industry, but there was a lot of jargon and terminology I didn’t yet understand. I didn’t have a 6am to 8pm workday anymore, bound to school buildings and student schedules. I had to plan my own time, and make meaningful connections through Slack, across Google Meet screens, and in emails.

Luckily, I had Julia, who had made the transition from education management to digital design many years before me and had brought so much gold to L+R, particularly in training, systems, and procedures. She helped me figure out how to apply what I call “unstructured structure” - that sweet spot in the classroom in which there’s structure through goals, protocols, and timelines for everyone to rely on and feel safe within, but enough “unstructure” to allow for creative freedom. 

Creatives and clients who need digital product development are so different from middle school students and families, but I found a real niche from the perspective of individualising to peoples’ needs and creative “unstructured structure” for my projects, team, and clients. This would have never happened if I had just been left alone to find my own voice, and for that I can thank my mentor.