Teaching
I became a teacher in 1994. I did so reluctantly. After all, many members of my family have been teachers, and I saw how hard it was for them to pay their bills. Still, after giving it a great deal of thought, I decided to get certified to teach "until I could figure out what I really wanted to do." To my surprise, once I set foot on the Holmes High School campus as a new teacher, I felt like I was in my element. I felt like I was doing what God made me to do.
Over the course of thirteen years, I learned to improve my instruction. I learned the importance of treating each student as a person and caring about them. I learned the importance of finding ways to personalize lessons, making them appeal to students' interests and incorporating skills that students would need in the real world. These were truly some of the best years of my life, and I was honored to be selected Teacher of the Year and to sponsor two classes. Most importantly, I was able to help kids who did not think much of themselves to learn to bridge the gap between who they were and who they could become.
To this day, many of my former students keep in touch with me. In fact, when my sister passed away this March, over thirty former students messaged me and indicated they were there for me. I was humbled to know that they still cared after so many years.
Administration
While working at Holmes High School, my mentor, Mr. Green, told me that he thought I would make a good administrator. Considering the fact that I looked up to him as a big brother, I never questioned his judgment. As such, in 1997, I enrolled at Texas A&M, working to earn a master's degree in Educational Administration. Sadly, shortly after I earned my degree in 1999, Mr. Green took his own life. This obviously had a tremendous impact on me, and when I was offered a job as an assistant principal in 2003, I took it. I took it to honor Mr. Green.
Over the course of the next three years, though, I realized that administration was not for me. I missed the students too much. As a result, in 2005, I resigned from my position and asked to be reassigned to the classroom. I just felt that I could have much more of an impact on the "front lines".
A Turning Point
In 2014, a seemingly meaningless experience changed my life. I purchased a digital watch, and I tried to set it. Convinced that I had not done so correctly, I took the directions to school with me. Later that day, when I realized the watch was not working properly, I asked a student to attempt to fix it. I handed him the directions and began wrapping up class. To my surprise, he never looked at the directions. Instead, he instantly logged onto YouTube and fixed the watch.
I remember being struck by this. I had never really considered how much technology could change lives. YouTube was fairly new, and I thought it was just a site where people uploaded videos of their cats. In any respect, as a result of this incident, I spent that entire summer researching different educational sites and apps. By the end of the summer, I was enrolled at Boise State University, ready to earn a second master's degree in Educational Technology.
My teaching changed over the next few years. I learned to believe in the effective use of technology and its ability to engage students. I began creating PBL units, implementing them in class, and teaching other teachers to use technology in their classrooms. It became very simple for me: I would never teach without the effective use of technology again. Moreover, I discovered a love for helping teachers improve. That is when I knew I wanted to be an Instructional Coach.
Instructional Coaching and Administration
Over the next few years, as I began coaching teachers as a part administrator/part instructor in a charter school, I realized that many of the things I was developing did not have a sound basis in Instructional Design. As such, in 2016, I enrolled at Purdue University, working to earn my master's degree in Instructional Design (ID). Through my experiences at Purdue, I was able to redesign units I had created and do so in a manner that grounded them in solid ID principles. I began teaching additional classes at ESC 20 in San Antonio, and I realized my desire to help teachers learn to effectively use technology was reaffirmed.
I also realized that I wanted to become a professor, a curriculum specialist, or a professional development specialist, or a sustainability manager. For this reason, I enrolled in the LTEC Ph.D. program at UNT.
Instructional Design
In 2019, I became an Instructional Designer at ESC 11 in Fort Worth. An unexpected opening needed to be filled, so I decided to try my hand at design. On the job, I contributed to the Texas Reading Academies curriculum, a sixty-hour course mandated for all K-5 teachers and administrators in Texas. It was an honor to have a part in impacting teaching across the state. However, due to the pandemic, my grant-funded position was eliminated.
Leadership Training, Adjunct Instructor, earned Ph.D.
Now, I have completed a leadership program with a district in San Antonio and hope to be promoted to a position that allows me to develop curriculum or lead professional development. I have also been designated a master teacher. I want to have a role in educating the next generation of teachers. I have also been teaching teachers as a adjunct instructor at ESC 20. Here is some of the feedback I got after trainings I led.
Additionally, I have completed my doctorate. Through my studies, I learned that I am a constructivist and have worked to transform my lessons and the lessons of my peers so that they fall in line with constructivist beliefs. Students need to construct knowledge based on real-life situations and applications while learning to communicate, to collaborate, to be creative, and to think critically. These are the type of skills they will need to be successful in the 21st Century.
I have also come to realize that I have a genuine interest in sustainability in schools and organizations. I also believe greatly in Systems Thinking, for I believe that everything we do in our schools is the result of the overall system. It was my intent to focus on Systems Thinking and write my dissertation as a sort of "playbook" by which schools and organizations can become sustainable. In particular, I performed an exploratory case study with a focus on nine universities here in Texas, four that have implemented sustainable practices on a high level, three that have done so to some degree, and two that are in the nascent stages of sustainability implementation. The primary focus was on buildings, energy consumption, and e-waste, as well as things that can be done to make current facilities more sustainable, and the like (aquaponics, permaculture).