A life spent learning
how people learn.
Lailaa earned her Bachelor of Music from Northeastern University in Massachusetts. Studying music isn't just learning an instrument — it's learning how human beings internalize complex skills over time. Through repetition, feedback, deliberate practice, and the specific kind of confidence that only comes from doing something hard until it becomes natural.
That training gave her something most instructional designers don't have: a deep, embodied understanding of how mastery actually develops. You don't become a musician by reading about music. You become one through structured, progressive, intentional experience. She has never forgotten that. It shapes every course, every scenario, every module she builds.
After Northeastern, Lailaa taught middle school. This matters — not as a credential, but as a crucible. There is no more demanding audience for a learning designer than a room full of twelve-year-olds. They do not pretend to be engaged when they aren't. They don't sit through irrelevant content out of politeness. They tell you — through attention, behavior, and body language — exactly whether your design is working.
Teaching that age required her to think constantly about relevance, pacing, cognitive load, and emotional safety. It demanded creativity under constraint and the ability to read a room and adapt in real time. That classroom instinct — knowing when you've lost someone and knowing how to bring them back — is now the foundation of every learning experience she designs.
Alongside teaching, Lailaa worked as a freelance photographer and videographer. That work trained her eye in ways that still shape everything she designs. How light guides attention. How composition tells a story before a word is read. How a single visual decision can elevate or undermine the message behind it.
Visual literacy is not decorative in learning design — it's functional. When a learner opens a module and immediately trusts what they're looking at, they're already more likely to engage with what follows. Lailaa understands this because she has spent years thinking about how images communicate before language does.
Her Master's degree from St. John's University deepened the theoretical grounding that now sits beneath every project she takes on — learning science, instructional systems design, behavioral psychology, and curriculum theory. The academic work didn't replace her practical instincts. It gave her language for what she'd already discovered in music practice rooms, middle school classrooms, and camera viewfinders.
The combination is rare: someone who has lived inside learning — as a student, a teacher, a practitioner, and a researcher — and who brings every layer of that experience to the work.