Personal Teaching and Technology Philosophy

My teaching philosophy centers on a few mantras I have learned over my career.  First, I believe that teaching does not stop at the classroom door, and that any person in a student's life can be a teacher.  When I work with a student to fix their Chromebook, I will explain what I'm doing to troubleshoot the device and why.  With this approach, students can become independent and learn how to think through a problem.  

In 2024, I applied to the Keystone Technology Innovators STAR Summit and was asked to describe what it means to be a technology innovator.  I wrote then that an innovator is a person who is doing something never done before. To be a technology innovator in education means to embrace change and use it as a catalyst to help students grow. For me, being a technology innovator means helping students understand their “why”, and leveraging technology to help achievement.

This is where I love the SAMR Model for tech integration - substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition.  Using Chromebooks in a classroom is great, but if they are only used for word processing, then we have failed to use the devices to their full transformative potential.  I have seen many times where educators think Technology will fix student engagement issues, but any integration needs to be done in a thoughtful and intentional way.  

Whenever I hyper-fixate on certain pieces of a problem, or work so deeply in the backend data of ed tech systems, I can lose sight of the overall purpose of our role as educators.  In those moments, I remind myself of words from Dr. Woodie Flowers, a professor emeritus from MIT, co-founder of FIRST, and an amazing teacher.  Woodie often said there is a difference between training and education:  “Learning calculus is training. Learning to think using calculus is education.”  It's easy to train people.  But to educate, to redefine tasks, that's where the magic in school can happen and transform lives.  I know it can, because I've seen it with project-based learning and student-driven goals.  That is what drives me as an Educator.