Does anyone really know what they are doing?

 

As a child, I would look up to the adults in the room and expect them to know the answers. For every problem, for every situation, there was a correct way to do something, and the adults somehow knew that correct way. Fast forward to when I became the adult in the room as a high school teacher, fresh out of college. As you might have suspected, I did not know all the answers. There was no rule book of life that told me what to do for all the different situations life threw me into. I felt like a fraud. How did anyone trust me to teach their children? I was terrified that someone would eventually realize how little I actually knew and would figure out I did not belong.

 

Imposter syndrome is a real issue for many people. Mine stemmed from the belief that professionals and any put-together adult (whatever that means) should, in general, always be making the right choices. What I came to realize with a few more years of experience under my belt was that: 

1. Making mistakes and learning from them was truly the most impactful way of becoming a little bit wiser. This meant feeling less guilty when something did not go as planned, and feeling happy when it went better the next time. 

2. No one could possibly ever know all the right answers. We use our best judgment based on the experience we have. If I wanted to improve, I could seek out more experiences, whether they be my own or listening to what other folks have learned from their experiences.

So, to answer my question “does anyone know what they are doing?” I say, we are all figuring it out as we go, usually with some help along the way.

 

Looking back, I can see that my feelings of inadequacy about being a qualified educator stemmed a lot from feeling underprepared by my undergraduate degree. This is not to say that my professors and classes at Drexel were not important for my teaching foundation, because I did learn a lot of basic, overall knowledge about teaching and child development. It was more so the fact that I was never fully able to understand the material at a deeper level to ask the right questions. How could I when I did not know what I did not know? Sure, I had helped tutor students and completed my student teaching, but taking on sole responsibility of planning out and teaching several classes without another adult always in the room presents a whole host of scenarios that are never addressed while obtaining an undergraduate degree. That is why when I completed my bachelor’s degree, I did not have any real desire to go back to school to get a master’s degree. I was eager to get away from theory and get straight to hands-on practice. I realized, however, that there would be a significant difference between how I would approach a master’s degree and how I approached my bachelor’s degree. With several years of experience under my belt, I would be able to ask more thoughtful questions and actually connect theory with practice. 

 

After considering several factors like flexibility, online structure, and reputation, I chose to enroll in the MAET program at Michigan State University. I knew that the focus on technology would serve me well, and I felt like the courses incorporated plenty of practical and hands-on experiences. After taking my first class, I knew I had chosen the right program for me. Not only did the professor do a wonderful job connecting with me as an individual student, she also helped me make connections with peers even in the fully online setting. Collaboration was a key component of the class, and the lectures and assignments did not feel at all arbitrary. They were engaging, utilized all types of media from different sources, and had a clear purpose. The miraculousness of it all was that each and every one of my classes was structured in the same way. 

 

Going through this program helped with my imposter syndrome significantly. There were three key courses in this program, CEP 812, CEP 817, and CEP 800, that helped me realize a few things that have changed my overall mindset and approach to my job. Those realizations are:

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1. Education is full of wicked problems. I will not be able to fix them, but that does not mean I need to give up. There is still a lot that I can do to make the situation better. It is okay that my solutions are not all encompassing and perfect.

2. Teaching can be approached with design thinking, just as businesses approach product design. I can learn to become a better designer by going through a deliberate design process and improve upon all areas of teaching. Again, this takes time and will never be perfect.

3. Sometimes, it makes sense to adapt teaching strategies to the technology available, but most of the time, you should actually be choosing the technology that fits good teaching strategies. Do not choose tools based on pressure from people jumping on the bandwagon due to how shiny and exciting it seems.

 

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CEP 812: Applying Educational Technology to Issues of Practice

I never would have thought I would be able to come up with an action plan to a wicked problem like shifting the focus of education away from standardized testing to student-inquiry driven learning. I felt it was too complex and beyond the scope of my ability. In CEP 812, we spent time learning to ask questions to our original questions, ask questions of other stakeholders through surveys, and develop solutions that are not all encompassing, but simply have the goal of moving towards positive change. 

 

Education has always had and always will have many issues that seem impossible to solve. And they are - that is what makes them wicked problems. I have come to realize that I am not an imposter for not knowing the answers to these conundrums. I do not need to be a superhero that we see in movies to be a great teacher. This course helped me change my mental framework for how I approach these types of problems, encouraging me to “fail forward” by trying out new ideas, generating new questions, and coming up with the best bad solutions. The main text we read in this course was A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. The one main idea from this text that really resonated with me and guided my path away from self-doubt towards a more positive, solution-oriented outlook was this: I do not need to know the answer to ask the question; asking good questions, despite not knowing the answer, can only help with moving forward.

 

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CEP 817: Learning Technology by Design

As a teacher, I constantly go through the design process. Before taking CEP 817, I had never labeled myself as a designer, but throughout this course, I realized that each lesson I create, each meeting I have with my colleagues where we discuss what our plan of action is moving forward, is part of the design process. This class was structured around the Stanford Design School’s Design Thinking Bootleg, which includes five phases of design: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. At the beginning of the course, I identified one problem of practice I wanted to create a solution for, and delved into the design process for creating a real prototype of the solution I could test.

 

My problem of practice evolved throughout the course, and in the end, I was not able to create a perfect design, but going through each phase of the process provided many opportunities for learning and improvement, showing me that this deliberate cycle is a great way to generate great solutions that can turn into even better ones. It reminded me of the importance of having a growth mindset. Growth mindset and design thinking are both founded in the idea that anyone can improve, and that we all grow and learn from each experience, whether that experience is considered successful or not. This course has led me to believe that design thinking should be an integral part of what we teach our students. If we can get them to see how important mistakes and failure are to the learning process, to a wonderful well-rounded education, I believe it would decrease student anxiety and increase engagement and productivity. 

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CEP 800: Learning in School and Other Settings

Math classrooms are notorious for “killing and drilling” students in skills that are presented out of context and seen by students as useless outside of the classroom. When I started out teaching, I modeled a lot of my strategies after what I remembered being done in class by my teachers. For the majority of my math classes, if not all, that entailed a lot of “I do, We do, You do”. If you are not familiar with this concept, check out this quick video explaining this teaching strategy.

 

For some topics, this model of teaching worked, but student engagement, retention of material, and deep understanding of the content was not great. CEP 800 had us diving into what learning actually looks like for both expert and novice learners, assessing the power of habit, differentiating between social and individual learning, and analyzing the reasons why we pick the tools we utilize in the classroom for learning and assessment. Instead of trying to fit new technology into old practices, this class pushed me to think more outside the box. What ways can we completely change our approach to teaching because of the affordances we are given with the technology available to us? Teachers are no longer one of few sources of information, like it was back when easy access to the internet did not exist. They can serve students in much more powerful ways by being the facilitator of learning rather than telling students all they need to know.  In the end, I was able to develop a theory of learning that was based on practices that focused on successful learning practices, not just old habits.

 

I realize now that the way forward in creating mathematically strong and creative thinkers who can transfer their learning to outside the classroom is to incorporate plentiful collaboration on problems that are embedded in real-world contexts and providing opportunities for multiple iterations of trial and error where students receive frequent and meaningful feedback. Students will benefit from using math to solve interesting problems, not from teachers presenting specific types of problems that follow the same algorithm each time. A deeper understanding of skills will develop through productive struggle and working with all different levels of expertise. 

 

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In Conclusion

Earning my master’s degree did not magically make me an expert in all things education and educational technology. I am sure I will still run into days when I feel below par and feel the remnants of imposter syndrome. What has changed, however, is that those days have lessened and that I am equipped with a much more positive frame of mind, concrete strategies and lesson ideas that I can implement, and most importantly, a more flexible, design-based approach to improving myself as an educator.