MAET SYNTHESIS

While taking the time to reflect on my journey through the Master’s of Art in Educational Technology (MAET), my mind can’t help but wander to the current state of educational affairs. With life having to slow down a bit due to COVID 19, I have had more time to think and reflect than I have in years previous. During these times of reflection, my first thoughts are always about my students. With how anxious I am about the uncertainty that lies ahead, I know they have to be feeling those same intense feelings. I work tirelessly everyday to support them the best that I can through these uncharted waters. My thoughts then wander to our education system as a whole. With schools closing their physical buildings for the rest of the year, many have started to question the status quo of what school can and should look like in our age of technology. With many school districts turning to online, remote learning I have seen schools and teachers scrambling to learn this new type of pedagogy. Still others are questioning our grading system and suggesting that mastery based learning could have a future in our education system. As with any conversation we have in the education world, we always need to keep the larger context of equity in mind. Are there certain populations that would be disproportionately affected? What solutions are there to eliminate equity issues? While the rest of the world of education grapples with these large, existential issues, I realized that the MAET program has already challenged me to confront these ideas.

Overall Impact

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During my time in the MAET program, my professors and colleagues have all influenced me to stretch my own thinking about the role technology plays in education. Through the diverse curriculum I have learned what it takes to be a leader in educational technology, how to complete and evaluate research, how technology fits into the classic learning theories, how to design effective online assessments, the pedagogy behind how to build an online course, as well as how to leverage technology to solve a problem through design thinking. Each of the courses I have taken in this program have taught me an incredible amount about learning, technology, and myself as an educator. I can visualize a future of education that looks very different from what we see today and have ideas on how we can make that happen. 

In summer 2019, I participated in a hybrid cohort for the MAET program. In this program, you take 3 courses in 6 weeks, 2 weeks are face-to-face on campus in East Lansing and then the remaining 4 weeks are online, remote learning. Honestly, this was the most challenging, yet most rewarding educational experience I have ever had. I still find it extremely difficult to put into words how that summer completely transformed me as an educator, but I will give it a shot. These courses were my first in the MAET program and they set the stage for the rest of the program. From day 1, my professors forced me out of my comfort zone and challenged me to shift my mindset about how I think about myself as an educator and how I look at technology in education. They intentionally (and continually) put me in challenging situations and told me to figure it out, reminding me that it was the process that was important and there could be many “right” answers. Through these challenges, I have learned to take on any issue or problem with an open heart, an open mind, and a certain intensity to do my best. My professors truly modeled for me the experiences I want to build for my own students. They helped me realize that I can transform my classroom into a place of possibility and curiosity, where students will not be penalized for not getting the “right” answer. I had gotten complacent in my classroom, which is part of the reason I started this program. My teaching practice has been reinvigorated by what I have learned. It was not just my professors this summer who instilled this in me, but the trend continued as I finished up the rest of my program completely online. The MAET program has a specific, uniform mindset of the faculty that is contagious and is present in every course. I have now completely adopted this same mindset and my teaching practices will never be the same. The professors were not the only people in the program who have had a profound effect on me. The colleagues I worked with that summer and throughout the program have made me become a better educator as well. We pushed and challenged each other when needed, but were also always there to support each other. The whole program has been full of rich, thoughtful conversation between educators that I crave, but is sometimes missing from my professional context. I have learned that making connections with other educators in different fields and specialties are necessary for continued growth and learning. 

While the program as a whole has taught me lessons I can take away and apply, each individual course also left its mark on my practice. They can be broken down into 3 themes, design, assessment, and leadership. 

Design

In CEP 817, Learning Technology through Design, I learned the process of design thinking modeled after Stanford’s d.School Design thinking bootleg. The design thinking model consists of 5 steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. During each module, we would explore in depth each of the steps of design thinking and learn more about the strategies to utilize to effectively move through the design process. At the beginning of the course, I selected a problem of practice from my own professional context with the hope of designing and implementing an effective solution.

My problem of practice was to find a new way to support first time online learners with flexible pacing. In the empathize module of the course, I sent a survey to all of my students to learn about their experience with flexible pacing and about what supports they would find helpful. After reading and synthesizing their responses, I redefined my problem of practice as I realized that my assumptions were a little off base with what my students were thinking and feeling. From there, I started brainstorming both practical and impractical solutions to this problem, while keeping in mind what I learned from the empathy survey. After brainstorming, I picked what I thought would be the best solution and designed a prototype. The prototype I made was a communication protocol to follow throughout the semester along with an action plan document that students would fill out if they got so far behind. To test this prototype, I sent another survey out to my students to have them critique the action plan and give helpful feedback. After reflecting on their feedback, I made some changes to my prototype and am looking forward to implementing this next school year! 

CEP 817 has transformed the way that I go about solving a problem of practice. The biggest takeaway that I had that I feel is sometimes lost when solving a problem is the “empathy” portion. While understanding what your users need before solving a problem seems completely obvious, sometimes as educators, we think we already know exactly what to do to fix the problem. While sometimes this might be true, the problem is usually more complex and there are more layers to peel back to get to the heart of the problem. If you do not know what the heart of the problem is, you will always be implementing new solutions that don’t work and then the search will continue indefinitely. This shift in mindset will now always put empathy at the forefront of any challenge that I face. Implementing design thinking in my own courses that I teach is something I am extremely interested in trying. Again, I think the empathy portion of design thinking would be a vital lesson for my students to learn that could carry on into other aspects of their life. Giving students an effective, human way to solve problems could be a lifelong lesson that they can take with them and use long after they leave my classroom.

Assessment

In CEP 813, Electronic Assessment, I learned about how to effectively design assessments in the electronic space. The course was heavily based on reading peer reviewed research to learn about the pedagogy behind formative assessment. I studied the affordances and constraints that certain Learning Management Systems (LMS) had in terms of assessing student thinking. By combining those two aspects of the course, I learned how to successfully integrate technology and formative assessment in the electronic space. I was also introduced to the theory behind Game Based Assessment, using games to effectively assess student thinking. 

During this course, I made many practical artifacts. One of the most important being a Formative Design Checklist. The checklist serves as a reminder to ground the assessments I make in the pedagogy I learned from this course. It is an essential list of characteristics that should be included in every assessment I build. Using this checklist, I created a formative assessment for my Chemistry course for a unit that I believe my students could benefit from a formative assessment. I also built a game based assessment using Twine software. This assessment was made for a specific unit in my Biology course that I will be implementing in my course next year. 

This course has already and will continue to impact my thinking and teaching practices. “Formative Assessment” will no longer be an educational buzzword, but an extremely useful tool I have in my teaching toolbox. I will use the information I receive from those assessments to drive my instruction, even if that means I need to change my lessons plans substantially. This course has given me tangible tools that I can take back to my classroom and use to build better assessments for my students, which will have a lasting impact on my teaching.

Leadership

In CEP 815, Technology and Leadership, I was given the opportunity to explore what being a leader in educational technology entails. This course allowed me to explore on my own what the tenets of a leader are and I then translated those techniques and tools to the education world. First, I was focused on how I could lead myself, so that then I could lead others effectively. Throughout the course, I was put in different situations that allowed me to practice leading small and large groups of people. 

In my independent study of leadership, I read Dare to Lead by Brene Brown and was completely changed by her research on vulnerability and shame. I realized there was much work to be done on myself to confront these two topics before I could effectively lead others. I then presented my findings on leadership and how educators can apply her work to their own professional (and personal) contexts. During the course, I was able to lead the course in a book study conversation and present tech tools to the course. The course also culminated in a presentation to various College of Education Faculty on a research project we completed. To practice leading others, I was able to mentor a 1st year MAET student on integrated technology into a lesson. I was able to meet with them, give advice and feedback, then circle back and reflect with them on how their lesson went. There were ample opportunities to lead both myself and others in this course.

The leadership journey I went on was the most unexpected part of my master’s program. I was not expecting to take a leadership course or gain leadership skills. I had thought I was already a pretty good leader, but this course truly changed the way I think about leadership. There is much work an individual has to do with themselves before effectively leading others, and that work is constant and continual. The same goes with leading others, you have to constantly change and adapt to different situations. My confidence in myself as a leader in educational technology has grown exponentially due to this course. This may not directly impact the way I teach my courses, but it will have a profound impact on who I am as a professional in my building.

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My time in the MAET program has allowed me to gain an extremely wide range of skills and abilities that have changed my thinking about educational technology and teaching practices profoundly. Through my coursework, I have stretched my thinking and can visualize what education can look in the future. While the rest of the world of education is just now grappling with these ideas, I feel confident and ready to step up and become a leader in the education world. The MAET program has thoroughly prepared me and I am ready to be a teacher leader in the broader world of education. I am ready to take my thoughts and ideas out of my head and classroom and put them into the world. A shift in the way we educate our students is coming and I am ready to be at the forefront, leading the change.