Professional Growth

GROWTH MINDRESET

The trajectory I was once on started to reorient while teaching the research fundamentals of Boolean search operators — how to construct precise queries, filter noise and extract useful information from the internet's undifferentiated mass. It was competent, but, within the same month I delivered it, obsolete: in real time I was seeing how generative artificial intelligence was outpacing the need for these skills while I was still teaching them. I stood in front of twenty-eight tenth-graders and understood then that the technological tricks of my era had a shorter half-life than previously assumed. 

With my mentor's experienced encouragement I began to move toward what I thought of as an even more previous era — sustained attention, handwriting, face-to-face discourse, the discipline of rereading a paragraph before deciding what it means. But the deeper realization arrived more slowly and matters more. The problem with AI isn't primarily the threat of skill obsolescence; it is the severing of the effort-to-value link that underlies competence and self-worth. A student who outsources their brain learns that thinking is optional, and that learned helplessness — only compounded by the pandemic's erosion of social-emotional skills — deepens a vulnerability to the mental health crisis already so deeply seeded in student populations. The capacities worth cultivating are those that (should) remain prime regardless of technological change: the ability to hold an argument long enough to transform its beginning, to sit with ambiguity, and to recognize when someone needs to be heard.

This slow-rolling realization reshaped my practice in both directions simultaneously. In the classroom I learned GoGuardian and helped the Language Arts department implement internet-blocking protocols after compiling data showing the extent to which task-switching on school-issued laptops siphoned attention away from lessons. Outside of the classroom, during my ongoing education in pursuit of my vocation, I've built the C.R.I.C.K.E.T.S. app to address those questions of equity (who participates, is structurally silenced, by what mechanism?) that require diagnostic precision to address: technology in service of seeing what the classroom does and for whom. Identifying where opportunity gaps persist requires collective intelligence, and I will bring technical fluency in participation data, Smarter Balanced results, and a range of formative assessment patterns to every PLC session I attend.