About me.

My educational philosophy revolves around the dire importance of creativity and collaboration. Our students will go on to study science, write screenplays, create new technology, write our legislation, and create communities wherever they are. The only predictable thing about the world they're becoming a part of is that it will be wildly different than anything we can predict. The real skills that students need to be prepared for their future are creative problem solving, critical thinking, and working with others.

The curriculum I write and deliver to my students is designed to not only give them the fundamental knowledge they need to about our world, but the skills they need to navigate its changes. I believe in fostering their natural curiosity and nourishing their innate desire to explore. Giving students every opportunity to discover new skills, new interests, and new worldviews allows them to find novel applications of their talents and develop their skillsets in fresh new ways.

Since 2020, I have been fortunate to work at the innovative Brown-Barge Middle School. BBMS is a magnet school in the Escambia County School District in Pensacola, Fl. Since the early 1990s, it has used an integrated curriculum: in place of traditional subjects, students choose from a handful of "streams" to drive their learning each trimester.

Streams are 12-week thematic units taught by teams of 3-5 teachers. Students explore these interdisciplinary themes with project-based learning, encouraging critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. This approach fosters hands-on learning and real-world problem solving. Each stream culminates in one large simulation, during which students apply the knowledge and skills they've learn over the course of the stream to a real-world problem.

My experience at Brown-Barge has given me ample opportunity to create curriculum that engages me as much as our students. I am very frequently learning as much as I am teaching, and I'm grateful for the creativity that this work has allowed me to engage in.

I've led or participated in the writing, re-writing, and development of several of these streams, including Mass Media, a stream about the impacts of news media and film; Calling All Heroes, a stream about the history, psychology, literature, and science of superheroes and comics; Communities, an introductory stream about the interdependence of all living things; and Robotics, a stream about shaping the future of new technologies to be as helpful as possible to human beings.

This work has helped me develop a passion for writing lessons, creating educational materials, and collaborating with teams to build innovative and effective curriculum.