Now that I have hopefully caught your attention, or at least made you hungry, I am going to explain my passion and what fuels it in regards to education.

As a youngster growing up, I attended four different K-12 school districts stretching from Kansas to Oklahoma. Throughout those school years I experienced a wide range of teachers and instructional methods. Both of my parents were former educators and would always look for the best school systems before identifying a home to purchase. Thus, my education has been influenced not just by teachers and administrators but also by my loving parents. It is this parental interest that partially fuels my passion in education. I so believe that parents need to be involved in their child/children’s education as much, if not more, than teachers and administrators. Parents that participate and interact in a positive manner with their child/children forms and shapes a great deal of the child’s character. Those parents that neglect or abuse their child/children cause so much damage in so many aspects of the youth’s life. Unfortunately, many of those issue affects the student at school. Thus, this area of concern is another passion point for me as an educator, I raise this point as a result of reading a discussion started on Plurk by Paul Bogush. In all honesty, I do not know of any good educator that has not seen the good, bad, or ugly as a student or instructor and chose to interact with students through those times in hope of making a positive difference and showing he/she people do care. What does bother me in those and a variety of other situations are those teachers that do not want to become involved whether it is working with students.

In building off of this point of being positive with students I want to point out a video that has been running ramped on social networks of Twitterand Plurk. This video truly expresses my feeling for believing in students regardless of race, sex, or home lifestyle. This video comes from Dallas, Texas.

Now did that video make you think? Did you ask your self if you “Believe”? Honestly, if this video did not send the same message as I am trying to put forth when explaining my passion for education, those fellow educators that have shared it too would not be “believing” in their students today.

Another source that fuels my passion for education centers around the engagement of students. I ask you now to reflect upon your own education experience and ask yourself Which teacher(s) influenced you and why? Let me guess, those educators have a common characteristic regardless of who is answering this question. I would say that our influences were direct results of educators that engaged us with higher order thought provoking questions, provided real world applicable scenarios, and interacted with us on a personal level.

One evening while reflecting upon the same question that I previously stated, I read through a variety of blogs looking for resources to be used in with my college students. I came across a digital story created by Wesley Fryer. The digital story fit my need quite well. It is titled: Strive to Engage not Enthrall. The emphasis was for students to be engaged and not enthralled. Wesley was trying to make the point that students need opportunities to be inspired, challenged, motivated as well as time for reflection along with collaboration. Over the next few months while providing professional development workshops I stressed that communication between educators and their students was a major key for success. Two additional videos that I would like to bring to your attention about the need to permit students buy-in or take ownership in their own education are 1. A Vision of Students Today 2. A Vision of K-12 Students Today.

To emphasize that need to improve communication and student engagement, I participated in the national mentor certification training developed by Dr. Chris Moersch. Dr. Moersch first developed the program in 1994 and it was known as the Levels of Technology Integration. As the needs of our students and educational systems changed, so did the name is now recognized as Levels of Teaching Innovation(LoTi). LoTi combines the emphasis combines higher order thinking/questioning (Bloom’s Taxonomy), student engagement through the use of authentic real world forms of assessment and the integration of technology as a transparent resource.

It is the vision of Dr. Moersch along with my own experiences and passion that drives me to continue discovering tools and pedagogies that nourish the motivation of 21st Century students. I feel that students of today and tomorrow will need to be self-motivated, anytime anywhere learners. For those reasons, I find it my “mission” to pass along the positives of education and the tools that can be used to motivate and engage students of the 21st Century. I will end this post with a phrase I use a lot: To teach is to educate and to educate is to teach.