We have both been so lucky in our careers to be able to attend education conferences across the country. The opportunity to learn alongside and network with like-minded professionals is probably the most energizing experience a teacher can have. That’s a call to action for school leaders - find space in your PD budget to send teachers out to learn and see first hand the kinds of innovation you want your schools to adopt! I’m headed to the iNACOL Symposium next week and will be presenting a session on reimagining schools with personalized learning, and as I was thinking through what I want to say posing questions to myself about how I’ve changed as a teacher, I thought this might be a great opportunity to put you in the hot seat, Erick, and see how you would articulate some of what we’ve gone through professionally.

We haven’t really discussed who we are yet on this podcast, so let’s give our listeners a little context. Why don’t you share a quick glimpse of who you are and who you’ve been as a teacher?

Sure, so I grew up in a home where mom and dad were both teachers, by sister’s a teacher, education is such a huge part of how I was raised. For 12 years, I taught high school social studies and I always had an interest in using technology to push what was possible in the classroom. I welcomed Google into my classroom with open arms, and that challenged me to transform my teaching methods. At the start of my career, I considered my role to be the content expert and the final word on assessment. Toward the end of my years in the classroom, I was leaning more into the ideas that we need to ask “Google-proof” questions that drive to the deeper concepts of history, rather than merely the superficial facts.

For the last three years, I’ve been a media specialist and a technology integration coach, a role in which I strive to draw teachers together, across the curriculum, to engage in real world projects with their students, using the library space as a sort of learning hub - a place where all the disciplines converge and interact. As I do this, I also provide professional learning for teachers in a wide range of settings and circumstances - doing what I can to address their needs, while inspiring them to try things they may have never thought possible.

In the end, I’m still simply a teacher. I get to inspire and empower both students and teachers on a daily basis, and I love it.

I can say having known you since the start of my own career that you had a good reputation as a teacher since the beginning, but if your own reflection, what was it that changed your mindset from being the content authority taking an inquiry-based, immersive approach to teaching?

I can remember the actual moment that the transformation happened. I was delivering content to my very first class of honors European history students - a course I did NOT feel I had the content mastery to teach well. So, I did what any of us would do - I got online and searched for the best of the best unit maps, assignments, primary source documents, lesson plans, and of course, notes, that I could find. It was while I was lecturing from these notes I found online that I became paranoid that my students might actually get online and find the some notes I was using.

That was when it hit me. How absurd was it that I was withholding something valuable to my students’ learning so that I could retain my role as the “expert” in the classroom. After that moment, I everything changed - there was no going back.

Were the seminal moments in your career that called your teaching philosophy into question?

The example I just mentioned was certainly one of them, but I hit another one a few years later when it seemed that every student had a smartphone in their hands all day...