Pieces of the puzzle

I love teaching because I love learning. But, I have to make a confession. I have always had a negative association with the language of education because it always seemed to me to obscure more that it explained. So I am surprised to be writing an essay at the end of a master’s program for a degree in education.

 

This was not where I thought I would be or what I thought I would do. Yes, as a child I imagined being a teacher, but the teacher I wanted to be was the one tramping through the woods with students discovering which leaves belonged to which trees. Learning in the world rather than away from it was what I imagined education should be. What I wanted it to be.

 

So it is pretty surprising to me that I am finishing a degree for which half the classes were online and asynchronous. But it is the other half! Ah, that is the magic of the journey I am completing. I know that I learn best with others, in person. Also, I do not do things in life halfway. I want to be able to dive in–swim in the deep end without distractions and divided attention. Life doesn’t give us many chances to do that, but that is what I crave and where I thrive.

 

The MAET program, though, has that magic in the overseas program in Galway, Ireland. A summer of intense study, not only in the world, but in a new world. It would be hard to overstate the impact this program has had on me personally, academically, and professionally. I have been utterly changed by it. I have been inspired to put myself back together in a new configuration. I would like to share a small part of that process with you.

 

I discovered this program through a colleague who had completed it completely in person over three summers in Galway. I thought that was what I would be doing too. It fit my style perfectly. The changes to the program made it much harder for me, but I am so glad that I did it. Most of my online courses have epitomized the best of online education. Even though I am literally on the other side of the world in Korea, I felt connected to my professors and my peers through the thoughtful crafting of courses that epitomized the best practices of humanizing and connection, feedback and focus on learning rather than grades. 

 

This program practices what it preaches. Anyone who has ever attended a poorly planned and executed teacher training–a more common occurrence than one would imagine–knows that is a rare and wonderful thing. It teaches through its structure as much as through its content, because it embodies the beliefs, the theories, the practice that comes from reflection and research deeply rooted in equity. What I learned about the structure of teaching, both implicitly and explicitly, in this program has had the biggest overarching impact on my own teaching practice. Let me give you some examples.

 

I took CEP 817 Learning Technology Through Design with Anne Heintz in the spring of 2025. It was my first online, asynchronous course in the MAET program. While I was familiar with the feedback notebook structure of student-teacher interaction from my experience in Galway, Ireland the previous summer, in an online course it took on a whole new role. It made it possible for me to communicate with my professor, reflect on and revise my own work in a way that enriched my learning.

 

In both online and in-person courses, the program’s ungrading policy and implementation imposes a structure on teaching and learning through a standard course content delivery sequence: 1. Engagement with course content through D2L, 2. Reflection and interaction with peers, 3. Production based on D2L content and/or formal reflection on D2L content, 5. Submission of work for review through the feedback notebook, and 5. Revision based on expert feedback and guidance. Learning with and through this structure taught me how to use structure to enrich learning for my own students. My daily teaching practice has changed as a result. 

 

When I first read the MAET program’s ungrading policy, I felt a thrill of recognition. I thought: I already do this, I just don’t call it ungrading. Now, at the end of the program, I realize that the effectiveness of what I was calling teaching to mastery paled in comparison. When I entered the program, I already had most of the pieces of the teaching puzzle, but didn’t know how to put them together to make a comprehensible, beautiful image. When I discovered that the structure behind teaching and learning is more important than the content, I not only found a critical missing piece of my teaching puzzle, but also the framework in which to put it all together. 

 

In the summer of 2024, I took CEP 815 Technology and Leadership with Kyle Shack. It was the most personally challenging course I have ever taken. (For perspective, I earned a master’s degree in history as part of the twelve years of post-secondary coursework I have completed over the course of my lifetime.) Prior to becoming a teacher, I served on the management team of a large social services agency for six years at the director level.

 

I had leadership experience, so what made this course so challenging was not the leadership material, but wrangling with what leadership means to me and for me–something that you can only discover if you reflect deeply on the meaning of what you are learning–not in general, but up close and personal. Asking and answering the question, What does this mean for me, in my life and work? is a powerful reflective teaching and learning tool. This course taught me that the second critical missing piece of my teaching puzzle was effective use of reflection in teaching and learning. 

 

In my second summer in Galway, I took CEP 800 Psychology of Learning in School and Other Settings with Liz Owens Boltz and Christopher Sloan. I entered the course with some prior exposure to the psychology and theories of learning thanks to the alternative teacher licensure training program I completed at the beginning of my teaching career. (I was a lateral entry teacher.) My previous MAET courses also touched on the subject, but I had never had the experience of studying the psychology of learning as a contextualized theoretical construct. 

 

This course framed the study of theories of learning as a progression of deeper and more nuanced scholarly grappling with what human learning is and how it happens. Although the usual museum gallery presentation of the course was modified to accommodate the intensive nature of the abroad program, the spirit of the course’s invitation to experience the content was preserved. And it was an experience!

 

Each day’s learning made me feel like I was waking up to new ideas and ways of thinking about learning. I was energized by understanding, only to be jolted awake again the next day with a new way of seeing the teaching world. Each day I found something that challenged me, like Bandura’s Bobo Dolls, or thrilled me, like Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I loved how each piece of the learning psychology and theory puzzle fit together to form a more perfect picture of what learning is and can do. 

 

Through this course, I found where my current teaching fits–in socio-cultural and situative learning. I already had those pieces, but I learned where to put them in the greater context of the teaching puzzle that is the field of learning psychology. That understanding was valuable as a way to understand who I am as a teacher and how my teaching approach works. The even more valuable outcome of the course was that I discovered the theoretical underpinnings of the values I want to express in my teaching–equity and excellence.

 

Equity was not the word I used to describe what I wanted to work toward when I was first exposed to the tragedy of homelessness caused by Reagan-era changes to the psychological health care system in the United States in the 1980s, but it was the value that drove me to devote 14 years of my life to addressing homelessness. It also lay underneath my decision to become a teacher in an urban high school filled with immigrants and children living in poverty, who were studying alongside the children of some of the wealthiest members of my community.

 

I thought I knew what equity was and how to achieve it. I was wrong. I needed to know and understand so much more about learning as a process and about how context affects learning. I am deeply challenged by Gloria Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy and Django Paris’ culturally sustaining pedagogy.

 

Even though I have the heart for equity and want to be a teacher who embodies that ideal, I can see so many ways in which I fall short. Reading Jamila Dugan and Shane Safir’s Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation in CEP 822 Approaches to Educational Research–the other half of my Summer 2025 Educational Technology Abroad program–made me realize how urgent it is to overcome the structural racism of the U.S. education system, and how necessary it is to explicitly name and address the barriers to equity that currently exist in that system. That is why–when I started learning about assessment–I was shocked and distressed to learn that the situation is even worse than I thought. 

 

CEP 813 Electronic Assessment for Teaching and Learning is my final elective course in the MAET program. Wayne Au’s critique of the U.S. standardized assessment scheme in Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality was particularly enlightening, but all the course readings greatly impacted my perspective on the education system of which I am a part. Before taking this course, I did not know the origins of the failing school narrative, the extractive nature of the billion dollar educational technology industry, or the white supremacist, or at a minimum, the power-greedy classist basis for standardized testing.

 

I already had a healthy skepticism of education, for instance, as I mentioned at the start, I object to making learning about learning opaque with inaccessible terminology; however, this course gave me an important missing piece of my teaching puzzle–the understanding of and ability to critique assessment. While learning about the underpinnings of our education system fed my cynicism about ever changing it for the better, the assessment course also made room for hope.

 

Reshaping assessment is not impossible. Reading excerpts from Erick Montenegro and Natasha A. Jankowski’s Equity and Assessment: Moving Towards Culturally Responsive Assessment showed me how the equity I hope to create in my classroom can be integrated into assessments that do more than overcome structural biases, they can create teaching and learning excellence.

 

My mission is to put together the pieces from everything I learned in the MAET program to create assessments for learning. Along with the pedagogical knowledge, tools and techniques I have learned in this program, I hope to complete a teaching and learning picture in which students can see themselves.