Podcast Episode
Episode Description
In this episode, I chat with Gerardo Martinez, Executive Director of Educational Technology for Westminster School District, about what educators can learn from the field of architecture when designing meaningful learning experiences.
Gerardo shares how his journey from architecture to education shaped his thinking about instructional design and the role of physical learning environments. We also explore his innovative i4 teacher leadership program, why inspiration must precede innovation, and how districts can cultivate cultures in which teachers feel empowered to experiment and grow.
Finally, we discuss how AI is reshaping the design process and why the teacher’s highest-value work has never been delivering information, but designing learning experiences that foster curiosity, agency, and deep understanding.
Episode Resources
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.
Catlin Tucker
Welcome to The Balance. I’m Doctor Catlin Tucker, and today my guest is Gerardo Martinez, the executive director of educational technology at Westminster School District, a district I have had the absolute pleasure of working with in terms of a professional learning capacity and was just so impressed by the work that Gerardo was doing in that district that I really wanted him to come on the podcast and talk about it. He has degrees in architecture, education, leadership and administration, 18 years of classroom experience, more than four years as a technology coordinator at the Orange County Department of Education, and just a really generous person when it comes to sharing his work and his ideas. And so I thought it would be so fun to talk about that work on the podcast. Well, I am super excited we found time to have this conversation. I’ve been wanting to do it since I was down working with your incredible group of educators and went to Westminster, and so I wanted to start by letting you kind of share a little bit about your journey in education. Where did you begin? How did you get to the work that you’re doing now?
Gerardo Martinez
Yeah. So, interesting how I stumbled into education. I do mean stumbled. So I graduated with a degree in architecture, and that was in the 90s. And the economy wasn’t doing too good. So I was applying everywhere. I had resumes out trying to get interviews, and then I realized I need to make some money. In the meantime, I had been doing some architecture work from home for an architect, for some homes he was designing, and then my mom owned a bridal shop, and I was sort of like redesigning her shop and doing some graphic work and fliers for her. But I needed a real steady income. So I remember that if you take the CBEST and you have a bachelor’s, you can substitute and you have the total freedom to kind of go in and out as you need, as needed. So I began substituting, but about 2 to 3 weeks after I began substituting, I walked into a middle school classroom where the teacher said to me, hey, I’m leaving. So if you want to interview for this position, you should.
Catlin Tucker
Oh, wow.
Gerardo Martinez
I’m like. And now I’m like, I’m right now I’m a part-time babysitter. And that’s all I know. And I barely can do that. So teaching was not in my, in my future as far as I could see. But then I thought, hey, wait a minute, I need interview experience. I need to get out there. What’s it going to hurt if they’re not going to hire me? So let me just go through that stress of an interview and get some practice for that. Well, I interviewed and I got the job. Why? I was asking, why in the world would you hire somebody with zero experience? Well, it happened to be at a middle school with kids from the same neighborhood that I grew up in. I’m bilingual in Spanish, English, and, that was the same population. And they thought, well, you’d be great. You could connect with the kids. And it is a bilingual position. So I thought, okay, let’s do this. So I began, but with my one foot in the door and went for like, I’m going to architecture. I can’t wait to get out of here. Not because I hated it, just because my passion and my love really was for design and architecture. But I kept interviewing and just nothing was biting. So I thought, okay, I’ll keep doing this. I’ll start the credential program. Next thing I know, a year had gone by after not knowing anything about what I was doing, they literally gave me a key and a box of chalk. That’s all I got on my first day.
Catlin Tucker
Oh my god.
Gerardo Martinez
So no books there? No. I was calling my brother, who’s not even an educator, and I said, hey, I don’t know what to do. He goes, don’t they have like some standards or something that you can follow? I’m like, oh, a mask. So anyhow, a year later I decided, okay, if I’m going to keep doing this, I need to start thinking and changing my mindset as well. I be designing buildings for will I be designing learning experiences, learning what students can do. And I actually took a little piece of paper and I sketched out an apple as a symbol of education, and I made my own little graphic logo with dimensional lines and callouts, like a floor plan, the kind of that the vision for what I was going to do next. I had no idea what that would look like, but I thought I would design learning experiences and so that, within the first year, the principal asked, hey, we need somebody to teach a technology elective. Anybody want to do it? And I put my head down. I didn’t want to do that because I knew nothing, and then nobody raised their hand. I had the most experience with technology from a design studio where we had an Apple II computer, one for the entire studio in college, and then I had some computer classes with, 3D drawing back then, and I said, sure, I’ll do it. So that began my journey of looking at understanding content and teaching and then collaborating with other teachers and the school site, and then learning technology and learning how technology plays a role in education. So that began my journey, and then I became an Apple Distinguished Educator, and then I became a EdTech coach, worked at the district office as a literacy coach, and just jumped around. And then the high school recruited me across the street from the middle school to teach film production, graphic design and architecture, and I thought, wow, what an opportunity. I’d love to do that, because that reminds me so much of studio when I was in school. So I went ahead and I took that position and it was in the same classroom, in the same high school where I went to high school, in the same drafting classroom where I where I learned drafting. Wow. This is this is a weird but okay, this is great. So I began a journey of just really, understanding this whole CTE world and pathways. And I’m like, oh my gosh, this is so much like a studio. This is active learning. This is where students can really build and make, meaning and make sense of what they’re doing, but they’re going to design. And that’s what I’m after with students. So I also realized that, hey, during that time I’m going to do a couple things. I’m going to teach them process over product. And I had a sign on the front of my classroom that says, process is more important than product. I want to teach you something that you’re going to learn that’s going to go beyond this classroom. And you may never be a graphic designer, film production, or an architect, but you’re going to learn how to solve problems. So I’m going to take you through the process and those three disciplines. And then I also did one more thing. I divided the trimesters into three things. First trimester. Let’s design for yourself. You know yourself best. So that’s the background knowledge that you’re going to have and you’re going to design for that. So it was either, I would have them do self-portraits with Adobe Illustrator, but they had coming out of their heads, they had to illustrate something that they do, not something they like, but something they do. So you like music? Don’t put that. But if you play music right, put that you’re going to put a guitar, you’re going to put a piano if you like to, if you like singing with me. But music, don’t put that. If you sing, then put something with vocals, anything related to what you do physically and with skills. So those were all about the self. The second trimester I went into care designing for others. Let’s start designing for classmates. Let’s do it like a magazine cover. If your, teammate is in the marching band and you’re on the football team and you’re going to interview each other and create a magazine cover for each other’s interests. So that began the whole process of learning how to understand a problem and how to design for others. The third trimester went into designing for community, either the school site, the school district, or actual city. So we would do projects and film, like doing historical projects for the city or entering competitions and that sort of set the stage as a framework for how I started to teach. I loved it, I loved teaching in middle school, I love teaching in high school, and that was awesome. So the whole idea was really influenced by my experience as an architecture student and being in a design studio, but that has a lot of impact in how I see education, which really is what we’re all after anyway.
Catlin Tucker
100% for everybody listening. So when I went down to work with your incredible Innovate Innovators group, I just used my teacher as architect metaphor in that session without even knowing your background at all. So listeners have probably heard me kind of compare the work of teacher as designer of learning experiences to that work of an architect, and the reason I make that comparison is truly because what I hope teachers will do will, like, take their professional expertise and create a blueprint for a lesson that allows students to be the builders of meaning, right? For students to be the ones constructing the knowledge in the classroom. And so I stopped talking and we had this total moment of like, oh my gosh, we see this so eye to eye. And what I think is interesting though is I don’t know. And maybe I’m curious, your perspective, like I don’t think teachers think of themselves that way as these architects of learning experiences. And I don’t know if it’s adopted curriculum. I don’t know if it’s something else that has like kind of gotten in the way of this idea, or it’s simply that so many teachers have created kind of a single experience for everyone for so long. But I feel like that’s something that metaphor for a lot of teachers is a little bit I don’t have. Jarring is the right word, but it’s not necessarily one of the roles they see themselves as having. As an educator, do you find that?
Gerardo Martinez
I do, I do it, and I agree with that. First, I’ll go back to the part where you say, how did it? Why did it resonate with me so much? So in architecture, when we’re going through school and then when you become an architect, you know, the whole purpose there is that you’re designing for some experience that’s known and many times for an experience that’s not known when you’re trying to be innovative and design something new that no one’s ever experienced. So it’s really about understanding what are those experiences? What is the, the moment that you want to create in that space? But more than that, it’s about the function of the space. How do you make a building function so that it meets the needs of what’s supposed to be happening in that organization, or whatever it is, or even if it’s just a home? So that’s partly where it started. And I thought, well wait, the classroom experience that was our experience is that we if we know our standards and we know curriculum, a good pedagogy, then we’re going to estimate what a good learning experience is going to be. As to get students to arrive at understanding the meaning of the standard or the objective or the skill. That’s that’s part of one way to look at it. But I started thinking about the classroom. The other thing that resonated with me is in the blueprint. So and as an architect, when you’re before you even do the you create the blueprint. You have to do a lot of research and understand a problem. You have to understand the client. You understand what it is. You may be designing for the South Pole, you may be designing for, you know, hot weather or cold. It just there’s so much terrain, landscape and, the weather, you have to really understand all those things. So understanding students and understanding that differentiation and learner variability and needs of students makes it a very complex system to try to, you know, rally around. Therefore you are designing a lesson, you are designing a blueprint. But when it comes to the actual classroom, another thing that resonated with me because I had just designed that space. There’s an architect, his name is Edward Allen, and he wrote a forward and a book a long time ago, probably about 25 years ago. And it’s a book about architecture. He wrote a forward and he made this, this comment about, this design studio being, this marvelous educational device. He saw it as it’s a it’s he marveled at it kind of because he thought it’s it’s powerful and it’s audacious and what it’s trying to do because you’re trying to do nothing less than to teach what would seem to be unteachable in a studio, like, how do you teach people to design something? And then he thought, okay, this is a space where you’re using your mind, your eye and your hand in concert to create something that you’ve never, ever seen before to solve a problem for function and experience and joy. So I thought, oh my gosh, that’s exactly what we do. But you need a blueprint. You just can’t really go in like I did when I first started teaching with a key and chalk, and they think that it’s magic. It’s going to happen. Yeah. You have to have a plan. So when it comes to teachers seeing themselves as designers, I often tell, you know, have a conversation with teachers about like, you know, we’re all designers, even when you got up today, I mean, look at what I’m wearing. You might judge that. Maybe my shoes and my socks don’t match what I’m wearing. But there was a design thinking there that was either lacked or hit it right on the spot. You were designing yourself today. What about your home? What about your kitchen? What do you love about. So I try to connect to people seeing themselves as designers and really trying to make those connections. And then I think of that right then I try to carry it into the lesson design. And lesson design is you’re trying to take in so many complex ideas from not just the, the, the content and the standards and the skills and the concepts that you’re trying to communicate to students, but you want them to unravel and dive in and get dirty with those things. So when they can make meaning with it, but they can also experience it. And so I started thinking, there’s obviously there’s two parts, the teaching and the learning. The teaching controls the experience and the conditions. That’s the educator in the classroom. But the students have to kind of weave through this experience. And why does the lesson have to start always in the same spot? Can it start in the middle? Can you start at the end? So I started really exploring as to how we could do that. And then just to kind of illustrate that, I visited the, the, Museum of the History of Classroom Museum in Germany, and that kind of explained a lot. Right? You see the design of classrooms from the 1800s through, you know, World War One and two, and nothing changes. It’s all the rows, it’s all the static. It’s that industrial model. But then you start to see new designs today for furniture that really start to give you ideas of like, wait a minute, maybe the space can start to be agile and maybe the furniture can be configured to foster AI, ways of engaging students or ways for them to engage with each other. So that kind of a design thinking and seeing themselves. So the designer, when I start to connect the content, the pedagogy and the technology and how the space is organized, then that really starts to impact how we might revisit as the design of instruction.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, and I love the idea that we’re designing to achieve some kind of experience. Right. Or we want students. You know, when I think about my work in backward design, it’s like, okay, have we articulated that kind of standard aligned desired result for this unit? Like where are we all headed? What’s the destination? And that can help to inform all of those design moves that we make to try to ensure every single student in a class can make that journey from wherever they’re starting, which is not in the same place to that particular destination. And then also like another layer that I’m thinking about as you’re talking to is like, when we think about it as I’m having an experience, it’s not just like, hey, this is what we want you to walk away from this, this unit, you know, knowing, understanding, being able to do. But like, do we also like want to create experience where kids feel belonging, where they feel support, you know, and so when we start to really get clear about what is it we’re striving to create in this space for these learners, then the kind of thought process around how we design the individual or sequence of lessons that lead kids there, it’s a really different proposition.
Gerardo Martinez
We also have to know that learner variability. What is it about students’ strengths and deficits that we can tap into so that we can start to redesign the learning and really differentiate. Another thing that I think about the experience that it’s hard to design for and that just hopefully happens, is serendipity. That’s one of my favorite words in the world. Serendipity. That moment that you it’s unexpected. And you get that Where you see the students’ light bulb come, come on. Or they’re just happy about something they just discovered. And you see this sense of, I just want to say, like self-empowerment for themselves of them, like achieving something they didn’t think they could, achieve. Those are the moments that I think we all long for. And I think most teachers experience something like that. And how do you design for that? I think it begins by looking at the barriers to learning 100%.
Catlin Tucker
I think one of the reasons I always so I went through a rebuild after I lost my home in the fire, which was the first time I had ever had the opportunity to work with an architect. And, you know, instead of rebuilding the exact structure that had burned down, I figured you know, let’s make something positive. That’s let’s design the house I would love to live in the future. And the amount of questions that he asked to understand me, my needs, my preferences, how I, my family use space, what we liked about the old house, what we’re hoping to, you know, have in the new. And it was like exhaustive. And it was this moment, we have to get as curious about our kids as that architect was about me and my family to design a space that would work for us. And so when I started talking about teachers, architect, and I was also doing all this work in universal design for learning, also finding out that UDL or universal design has its start in architecture. Like how do we create spaces everyone can access. And so to me, all of those layers are so meaningful and interesting to me. And to your point, just like the architect designing a building that is accessible and inclusive, anybody can access it, navigate it. That is truly what we need to do if we want to design lessons that position students to get in those flow states to be able to kind of lead their own learning without hitting bumps or barriers and obstacles that make it really hard for them to be successful.
Gerardo Martinez
Yeah. Yes. You know, you made me think about, a time when in order to be empathetic, to really understand a problem, one of the best things to do is experience it like somebody who can experience it like others. Right. We had an exercise and in when I was in school, in studying architecture, where they told us you’re going to check out a wheelchair and you’re going to go at the impact throughout the entire campus on a wheelchair. We want you to experience what it’s like to try to access a building. And it was amazing how people treat you. Some are very helpful. Some of them you know, you encounter a building and you see stairs and steps and you’re thinking, how do I get into this building? Oh, I have to go all the way around to the back and enter some kind of ramp for delivery or, you know, that’s so that’s why, you know, Universal Design for learning has that background and that start in architecture and having that empathetic approach is, is difficult when you’re a teacher, you know, the experiences from experiences of students’ personal lives that you have through a history of teaching. But it’s really hard to understand that you actually haven’t been in those shoes. You’re sort of an observer and a spectator, and you try to be. And you and some teachers are incredibly awesome at building those relationships and supporting those students. But I think that has a huge role in trying to understand our learners and try to understand how do we design a lesson that meets those needs. It is truly overwhelming to try to do that. It is really, truly overwhelming to think of. I’m supposed to reach every single student according to their assets and deficits and what enter I. And that’s a whole nother discussion that we can now explore with that.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. And one of the things I often will point out, because you’ve mentioned differentiation is like differentiation. And now like with AI, it is so much more manageable to differentiate for students. And I think there is this misconception that when we talk about differentiation, somehow we are creating a separate lesson learning experience for everyone, which isn’t accurate. It’s those teacher moves that we’re trying to make based on the data we’re collecting, the observations we’re making, the what we know about our kids and our professional judgment to try to remove those barriers. And as much as we might try, it’s really like to your point, it’s impossible to meet every kid’s needs, every moment of every day, which is why I often talk about the other side of that coin for me is the student agency piece, which is sure, we can make the moves as teachers to do our best job to try to remove barriers and with differentiation. But if we give students meaningful choices about their experience, we’re also inviting them into the equation, saying, hey, now you get to remove a barrier for yourself. Which of these pathways and options speaks to a strength or an interest or a preference that you have? And I think sometimes we feel like we have to do it all and we don’t, you know, we can actually partner with students to make all of this feel so much more sustainable.
Gerardo Martinez
I think oftentimes when we’re designing lessons, we think of this long list of things that we’re trying to meet. But I think just focusing, focusing on one thing, often includes all the other things you’re trying to do. For instance, I’m thinking of this whole idea of agency. I mean, it starts with engagement. And I love, like, you know, you’ve made references also to, Rebecca Winthrop and Jennifer Anderson and what engagement is and looking at this behavior cognitive and emotional engagement. When I started to really analyze what those three things mean and how they play out in the classroom, it really started to change how I think about a student’s experience through a space. So can I design for all those three things to me so strategically that my lesson gets super long? I don’t think that I have to I think some of those things will happen in tandem or simultaneously or sometimes and mean you do. But it’s really about addressing those. Those things about the student that really start to help me rethink, okay, sometimes it’s just about a moment. It’s about a teaching moment. It’s about how I start. The lesson is how I inspire the students to think differently about a topic. And that alone, that beginning of that lesson, that participatory set or publication, however you wanted to create it. My wife used to teach me that great dissonance in the classroom. She’s a third grade teacher. I was middle school grade teacher when I first started teaching. She was helping me, and she says, start by creating dissonance and challenge the students on a topic and see if you can get them to start talking about that. And I thought, oh my gosh, that’s brilliant. So sometimes and how we do that in that first part of the lesson, you can cover so much ground on emotion and cognitive thinking and an inquiry so that you can tackle. So if you methodically start breaking down the lesson and designing it by every system, architects don’t design exactly everything they don’t do the electrical, they do the electrical plan, but they don’t do the actual engineering for it or the structural engineering. You get the architectural engineers, the foundations. And so there are many people that come into play when you’re building a building. So maybe you’re designing the big picture, and sometimes you have to break it down to go step by step to get those experiences. For students.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. And I love that you mentioned that idea of dissonance and provocation. And I was doing some research for the book that I’m working on now is just digging into the power of curiosity, right, as obviously, if we can pique curiosity, which feels like it gets harder to do the longer they’ve been in school. Right? It’s like kind of buried underneath, but not only do we potentially get them kind of interested in what we’re teaching, but even some of the mechanics of how it starts to prime the brain to encode new information better is like so fascinating. So I think I just totally nerd out on all the, like, the kinds of ways in which we can design better. Also from like a neural network kind of perspective, which is really interesting. So I want to bring it back to your design, because when I was with your innovator group, you had designed that professional learning space, and it was one of the most beautiful spaces I’ve been able to facilitate a training. And even though we had quite the crowd that day. So I would love for you to kind of tell us about that process. Obviously, it sounds like you started with a computer lab and screens in front of people. And so how did you decide, like what informed the decisions you made when you were designing that space? How did you even get the opportunity to design that space? Yeah.
Gerardo Martinez
Well, actually, that was it. That isn’t the first space I’ve ever designed for education, but it started at the county office. Like I mentioned, I did, professional learning spaces there, and that began my connection to so many people in the world of architecture and, and furniture manufacturers and design and I did a lot of research and started really putting together my ideas. I eventually designed, two TK classrooms for a private school, where I made a tunnel between the two classrooms. I designed these bookcases for big picture books. And then there was a big circle about a three foot circle down in the bottom with had a little pad as a little door. Nobody knew it was a door until the teach. The two classes had to come together and you’d open it and they could all go into the next classroom right through this little tunnel. I made these reading circles where students would climb into these big padded circles, that they could sit there and read. I got all the little mobile furniture for little from the littles and so on, and I looked at the walls and so on. So I started to really study, like, how do I design for a TK classroom versus adult professional learning? So I had already had some experience in designing STEM rooms, etc. in other spaces when I was in Westminster to design this space. It really didn’t start with the idea of the space it really started with knowing that I needed to design a professional development program for teaching and learning. But I needed a garage, if you will think of Steve Jobs, Hewlett Packard, how they all started innovating and just experimenting and prototyping and testing. I thought, I want to do professional learning where teachers come together to really explore and reimagine how they could teach. But I don’t want this to be a place where I come to lecture at them, or any one of my, team lectures at them. And tell them how they should teach thought. We need to model the way we need to get people to experience. So I, I started actually with our strategic plan. I looked at what we said we were going to do in our vision and our mission. It was brand new in 2023. I looked at our strategic goals, what we said we’re going to do, what we’re going to do for academic achievement and continuous innovation. We actually added those words in there and I thought, okay, innovation, you said it. We’re going to do it. Let’s think about a space. So for a year of my, professional learning, we were meeting in an auditorium in a multi-purpose room for doing our PDs while I was designing this new space that I wanted, I interviewed all of our departments because I thought, this space has to be agile. It has to be not just for professional learning, but it has to be multi functional and faceted for different departments. So I’ve got a lot of information from different groups, but that all together started to synthesize and then I started to add it, adding the concepts that I wanted to see in the classrooms, that agility, that active learning, that student agency. And then I started looking at the room I were in, I design, I look at all planes. If it’s a box, there’s six planes. How can the walls help me learn? And how can they help me teach? But how can the floor also do that? And how can the ceiling do that? I literally go through each plane and ask the question and try to figure out, what can I do in this space to contribute to the entire experience of learning? So I did that with this space, and I knew I needed, I wanted three conference rooms because I thought about breakout rooms. But I was also thinking of small group instruction. If I want professional learning to experience small group instruction, but they need time to process, I need to give them little mini versions of the bigger space where there’s a whiteboard, interactive display, mobile furniture where they can get up and move around and just wrestle with the ideas of the strategies that we’re trying to teach them and try to work together in collaborative groups. Glass conference rooms became, kind of a cool little thing. It’s not uncommon to see that in corporations, but it also was a way of me communicating transparency. We see the learning happening in those rooms. But I also was thinking about our vision and our branding for our district. I was also fortunate that I was able to redesign our district logo, all of our school branding, all of our core values, all the graphics. It was a 60 member stakeholder input for all of that information. I took that and I synthesize it into an interactive, strategic plan digital. And then I started to design the graphics for the room. I wanted the room to be a manifestation of the vision, the mission, and our core values. What, you don’t read it on a wall, you see it in a room. So the room having that mobile furniture, having your cafe in it, having, a kitchenette was a way of me saying one at the end of the day, teacher, when you come here to DPD and you’re tired, I want you to feel like you’re at home. I want you to feel like you can get up and go grab something from the little fridge, make a coffee, sit up the stool height, bar stool table, or sit at the end in groups, go into a conference room, interact with the technology, interact with people. And then I wanted the room to start to reflect all those great things about learning spaces. Audio. Audio was a way of removing that barrier to trying to understand the words and the enunciation and the frequencies of every person who speaks. You turn your back to one side of the room, the other side of the room can hear noise, but they can’t really hear every articulate, consonant and vowel. So looking at audio technology that helps me enhance that and removing that barrier, so I had to train people like you guys. Everybody hates to hear the voice on the microphone. It’s not about you. This is not about you. This is about the learner. You have to think about them when you think you have a teacher voice. Your voice is actually super high within the first minute or two, and your energy just drops. And so the microphone allows you even to whisper and everybody can understand you. So thinking about like a universal design for learning aspects about a space and how barriers can contribute to learning. So I started to look at how can the walls help become that visible thinking that stand up and talk act of learning, interact with the whiteboard, make connections. Everybody grab a whiteboard marker and see how you can do that. And I also wanted to experiment with some things that I had tried. So one of the strategies that I often did with when I’m new in a new location, when I teach and professional learning, the first thing I do instead of going through the big interaction and talking about what you’re going to learn, I just huddle people around me. I want everybody huddle around me, come around this table here, and if it’s a writeable table, I put whiteboard markers on it or I’ll put chart paper or if it’s not readable and I’ll write a question upside down and I’ll say something basic like what? What is your belief about teaching and what is your belief about learning? And I give everybody whiteboard markers and I tell them, I don’t want you to answer these two questions. I want you to ask as many questions as you can think of for that question. And so they start populating questions all around. Is, are you talking about teaching for GCC early or adult or middle school? Is this math? So they’ll ask so many questions that then I send them to whiteboards and they have to map these questions, and they start to configure the patterns of the sequence of questions. And then I tell them, okay, go and answer those questions, organize yourselves, get into groups, and then come back. And we’re all going to talk about this big question. So that’s a way of using some of that inquiry, using the space and the furniture and changing that experience to be more personal and intimate, because I also challenge them to think about when you’re learning at home from your own kids or your grandchildren, where are they in proximity to you? And they often answer, they’re right next to me.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah.
Gerardo Martinez
And I and so I say this, this is strategy that I just use was about proximity and making it more personal and just changing it up to see how can inquiry and questions really get you to be more the ones who have intrinsic motivation to want to learn? Because I just got you to ask questions instead of you answering my question. So the space and in that I was able to do in the space that I design and we do variations of that, we use the whiteboards around the room, we put up reflection questions. A lot of our PDs actually start with that. We actually begin. We’ll do something inspirational that’s brief, and then we’ll do a reflection activity. And that’s that becomes the power of the space. But now this program that I built, I designed for it. And how did I get that opportunity? It was an empty room where we dumped everything.
Catlin Tucker
I love that, and I think, you know, I obviously facilitate professional learning all over in all kinds of spaces. And, you know, one of the things I’ve heard you say, and I feel like this is so true is the learning environment or the space can almost be like another teacher, right in the way that it supports and enhances the learning. Because I will tell you, being in a high school cafeteria with 120 people who are at those, like, you know, the tables where the bench is connected to the table and you got to kind of shimmy in and shimmy out. It’s just like it makes movement hard. It makes collaboration hard. It also I think people just the space really gives so many cues about what do I expect from you as a learner in this moment. And obviously I don’t have a ton of control over the spaces. You know, sometimes the configuration of the tables, I can tell them, hey, I’d love this or that or whatever, but I have this conversation with teachers to where I’m like, how you set up your space tells your students without you saying anything, what kind of experience they’re likely to have in here.
Gerardo Martinez
I call that the built pedagogy. So once that’s sometimes you walk into a classroom and you see the layout, the configuration of the tables and the desks, you see the front of the room, you see how it was just kind of, populated with charts and papers. You know, how learning happens in there and you know how teaching happens. That is a very difficult thing to get across to many of us, because I think one of the things that I think about is that teachers, we want a template, we want a lesson template, we want a space template. Right? I don’t have time to figure this out. I have time in the beginning, meaning to quickly create a theme in my classroom and decorate it and so on and make it look the way I want it to look. But we don’t. We’re not thinking about, well, wait a minute, how do I want to teach? I don’t want, I don’t want, I want to experience may activating learning. How do I want to be able to jump between a digital technology to tool to an analog technology which is paper and pencil? So or just an activity of how I guide them through instruction. So that built pedagogy. If you see another room when it has this mobile furniture, there’s different stations and zoning in a classroom that really starts to indicate, oh, this is going to be fun. What? I’m curious, what are we going to do in here? One of the best examples of that, I think, is a kindergarten classroom. They understand zoning in a classroom very well, yes, but their costumes are also happened to be larger. Yeah. And I think that’s one of the, the, the unfortunate things about in our system. And with real estate, our classrooms are just too tiny. We have 30 plus students and it’s just impossible to think about that. So in professional learning, it’s sort of the same way. Just a side story about that. When I was at the county, I was asked to, at a conference in the Disneyland Hotel. I was asked to, design a STEM space where people can explore STEM environments and STEM tools and furniture and so on. And then they also asked me, we want you to do a teacher, a session on STEM design and STEM classes. I said, how about this? I’ll design the STEM space and I’ll teach it in that STEM space. Yes, I did, and it happened. It happened to be in an open area where traffic was traveling through the conference. So every session I did was in that space. It was so much fun because it drew a crowd, because people were not hearing me. They were seeing and hearing me about what I was talking about. And that’s often how I did my professional learning on space design is when I had people come, I would have them experience learning instead of me describing the space I would get them to conclude, okay, tell me what you learned about this space today. And they were able to identify every object in there or every wall and surface and describe what it does. I didn’t have to do any of the teaching of that. They experienced it, and now I was able to do that. But for professional learning, I do wish I could start a company for all conferences, design conference spaces that allow us to teach the way we say anybody and everyone should teach.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, yeah, 100%. I sometimes when I’m in a more traditional space and we have like the lunch break and I’m going to bring them back after I spend that lunch break reorganizing the furniture. Because when we come back, I’m going to facilitate it like a station rotation. And I very intentionally will set up no matter what kind of furniture I’m working with. And often it’s not like super fun flex furniture. I will set up the teacher led station as the horseshoe. If there is a collaborative station, it’s a couple clumps of desks together and then the station that is individual. I do as like rows, two sets of rows facing the back room, not facing me at my teacher led. And so we go through this whole station rotation at the end. One of the things I always pause to do is say, tell me about the furniture. Why did I arrange it this way? What did this, what did this communicate to you? And to your point? It’s like, oh, well, the you the horseshoe, we could all see you in your presentation. You could move around, you could answer questions over here. We’re working on our own. So but sometimes they’ll be like, why was our back facing you? And I’m like, well, you were on screens as a teacher. I want to be able to pop up and scan the room and see, as is my student, are you where I was hoping you would be? Right. So allowing them to come to those conclusions is far more powerful than if I just, you know, explained it. Okay, so I want to talk, I want to transition and I want to talk about the I-4 program I would love. So I love this idea of the inspire innovate implement impact. So what was the inspiration? What were you hoping to kind of achieve with the program? I just want you to kind of share it because I think it’s such a special thing that you’ve created with this. Well, now rolling groups of teachers, I just want you to share it here.
Gerardo Martinez
So in fairness, the that the term I was not my original idea. It actually was there when I got there. But there’s no descriptions, no definitions. And I had to ask, okay, what does each one of these I’s mean? Oh, it’s part of the edtech program. They used to be here and so on. And I thought, okay, I don’t see any evidence of what this was. I’m like, okay, no problem. That’s an opportunity for me to create and brand, but this is going to be so I really studied and looked into those words inspire, innovate, implement, impact. And I gave I gave them meanings. At the time I didn’t have a team yet. And then we put a team together and we started to really look at it. So the idea of inspired, it starts with that because we thought, okay, we need to look at professional learning in a way that gets teachers to think different, to start thinking of problem solving, and in order to get them to problem solve, I mean, it’s it’s it’s overwhelming when you see a problem and all you see is work, right? But then when do you when does one feel challenged to want to tackle a problem. And sometimes you need to inspire them to understand the problem. And so inspiration really begins with that. And also begins by now that we have a new vision and mission. Well, as 2023, how can we connect that vision and mission and inspire them to what we were saying we want to do? And then what are the possibilities? Fortunately, when this program started, again, I had it a few years back before the pandemic and then after the pandemic, I rebooted it to what it is today. And so I thought, okay, let’s, let’s rebrand, let’s rebrand and re-envision what this could be. And this was going to be about human connection. This is going to be about connecting to our professional learning communities. Because of that, that built in collaborative discussions about what do we want students to learn, and then really to empower teachers to really explore technology and artificial intelligence. So we thought, okay, can we use all of those elements to create activities that would inspire teachers so that when they come here, we’re sort of teaching it as the anticipatory set or that provocation or that think, here is let’s think about curiosity. How can I inspire teachers to think the human connection piece was it was important to us. We played videos where teachers were learning that students don’t learn from teachers they don’t like, and we played into those videos about, where a teacher is and a adult is being interviewed, and they just want to thank their former teacher for all that they did for them. Very emotional videos. Well, we found that our teachers, after watching those videos, were very emotional themselves, to the point that we found one teacher really crying kind of uncontrollably. And the reason she was crying, and it was a really great story, is that there was another teacher at that table that was her former student who turned around and said to her, thank you. Thank you for everything you did for me. And I get to sit at this table here with you now as a professional. Wow. So having those moments to inspire people through human connection, through the possibilities of artificial intelligence, it’s what we wanted to do so that we get people inspired and that emotional engagement. Then when we present a problem, do you guys want to tackle this problem together? It’s like, together we can do this. So the model of inspiring is also from the point of view that when I participate, even though I’m a director, I want to be in the professional learning, doing part of it because I want them to see that, hey, I’m going to roll up my sleeves with you, and I want to also attack this problem that I don’t actually have all the answers to either. Just like an architect, we know nothing about what this future building is going to look like, but if we really dig in to understanding the problems together, we can design something that’s incredible. And that’s where the inspired comes from. The innovation comes from that practice in the professional learning. Let’s innovate. Let’s think differently. So we focus on processes. We focus on removing barriers. We talk about, a lot of the universal design for learning without mentioning UDL. We actually talk about how can we access content, what tools do we have available to us. But first, let’s talk about the instructional strategies our PDS people thought we were doing a lot of technology PD and they and they realized that like, wait a minute, they talk a lot about instruction because, we also adopted a little, slogan, learning first, technology second from this book.
Catlin Tucker
Yes. Yeah. Say it again. Okay.
Gerardo Martinez
So learning so it’s technology second. And so we preach that. We say, hey, we’re the educational technology department. We’re not the technology educational department. Listen to what we’re saying. And we’re going to model that. And we’re going to talk instruction first. And the why of learning through every aspect of it. And we’re going to solve problems together, but we’re also going to look at the barriers to that, whether it’s physical, whether it’s a student, whether it’s a learning disability or variability. We’re going to explore as much as we can, and together we’re going to try to tackle and imagine. So once you inspire them, then you can start teaching the processes of innovation. How do you look at a problem? How do you work together? How do you use the room to explore that problem. And then the implementation actually goes into the classroom. I built the program to have instructional coaches, and we got Jim Knight to, data Sue and his organization to do this through training on what is job and better coaching look like and how do you coach teachers. So we created this cycle where we create the PD and we identify three objectives. Objectives for that PD. We want teachers to set a goal from that PD is something that they want to implement from that PD and get the support of their coach to work with them through the next five, six weeks. And then we’ll meet again for another PD and we’ll rinse and repeat. But in that next PD we want to start with reflection also. So we often inspire and then we go straight into reflection. We give three question prompts. They go to the whiteboards. They do some self-reflection. Then they start talking. And we literally move a little herd to each of the whiteboards, and we talk about each of the three reflection practices, about what just happened over the last 5 to 6 weeks. And then we try to make the bridge into the next set of objectives for the next strategies. So the implementation is tied to both the PD and then the 5 or 6 weeks of implementation in the classroom. And then the impact is a real impact for me was really about mindset shifting. Yeah, it’s shifting mindsets where we know with most of us in most classrooms have gone back to the front of the room, lecture, transactional teaching and learning. And it’s like, okay, here we go again. We’ve got to pull it back. We’ve got to like direct people to start thinking of themselves as the one who has to impart knowledge, but that the students are the ones who have to build that understanding of knowledge. So impact first. For me, though, most programs want to see what’s the impact on students. Show me the scores. Show me this class. Yep. And all that. And I said, yeah, that’s that’s great. And I know you’ll probably need that for funding or something. And I hope to get there. But I’m going to tell you right now, my, my goal is to see the mindset shift, the trust built so that teachers want to be part of this program and they want to come back. Yeah, it that’s where the impact came. And so three years into it now we do a reflection activity at the end of the school year is simple question where were you before this I-4 program? Who were you as a teacher? Where are you now in what’s what’s developing? And you and what’s been powerful about that is to hear their mindset shifting, their talk about their empowerment, their talk about their own agency, and then how they’re translating that to students by trying out a small-group instruction, station rotation, building, a choice boards, playlists and so on. Those things we get dig into and we connect them to engagement. We connect them to, we even looked at that self-determination theory that you talk about. We started to look at like, what are the experiences for students that we’re trying to achieve? And last year we started to add, let’s add the assets and strengths. So we had the teachers do strengths assessment with the students right through a program called primary. And then we thought, look a student may have low scores but they also have strengths. How can we feed this information into lesson design with the tools that we have, so that we can start to better understand our students so that we can create that differentiated learning in a more methodical way. And that’s that’s what the program is, is mainly been about three years into it. It has tripled. We’re going into our fourth year. We’re right now we’re recruiting to get teachers. And the challenge has been to scale up their up to the whole district. Yeah. But here’s here’s what I wasn’t I wasn’t concerned about this. And I’ll tell you why. As in the law of innovation, you get those enthusiasts those visionaries in the beginning. Yeah, those are the exact the percentages were almost exact. I said the whole population of teachers in our district, we got exactly those people. And through the PLC process, they go back to their school sites and engage in those questions, and they share the practices from the I-4 to other teachers. And that’s how we have the self recruiting into the program. But that’s been the way to do it. But it’s a very slow process. But I’d rather do it that way. And for a teacher to say, why am I here 100%?
Catlin Tucker
That was the difference. I mean, I mean, just in my experience, those moments when I get to work with teachers who opt in, right, like I’ve chosen to be here versus like the moments when you’re like, oh my gosh, everybody has to be here, right? Is so different. And the momentum clearly is a sign that people are seeing this as valuable. They’re talking about it. You’re getting more people coming in joining. And yeah, it was really it was really exciting to work with them. And I know that the AI piece is now another kind of layer in all of this. And just as we said, it’s learning before tech. It’s like it’s the pedagogy before we’re adding in the tech, the tools, the AI. And that’s a piece of the conversation that definitely like I see a lot of potential to make some of the tasks that we do as educators that are very time intensive and sometimes don’t get done because of that, more manageable designing with higher levels of intentionality, giving students construct specific options, you know, giving them access to more unlimited feedback. But how are you kind of like wrestling with AI and the way teachers are viewing it, how it’s being used in the program?
Gerardo Martinez
Yeah, one of the interesting things about AI as a conclusion, when I do board presentations, I make it a point to at the end of my presentation to tell the board what we’re learning about AI, and I have said it repeatedly, if there’s one thing that I’m learning about AI or that we’re learning as a team, is that we should be focusing more than ever on the instructional practices that we are supposed to be doing anyway, before AI. Yep. And what that means is process over product. And remember what I talked about the high school experience. It’s a process about how do we design our lessons so that this process and this experience is so well planned out, it’s not going to be perfect, but it’s better than what we were doing before because we’ve been intentional of knowing the problem we’re trying to solve with a problem we’re trying to get to. So I know is has become this obviously, this challenge where people want to complain about the cheating and all that. And I’m thinking, well, we’re focused on the wrong part of the problem. You’re focused on the product. Yeah, AI is good at product. Yeah. Right. So I’m seeking I mean these students are going to go to product. And who doesn’t want to take a shortcut, especially when you know it’s due tomorrow for the students and.
Catlin Tucker
Well, not something they’re interested in right. They’re like given a paper topic. They’re like, I don’t care about this. I’m just gonna have AI do it. And if all we look about and you’re. I love that you made that point. Because if all we’re looking at as educators and evaluating is the finished product at the end, then we’re totally missing the opportunity in the in between, you know, where. Yeah. I yeah.
Gerardo Martinez
You hit it on the mark. I was at a conference one time in 2023, and the session gave an example about a student who, had used AI to write an essay, however, they wrote the intro and the conclusion on their own, but they had AI basically create the body. The question to the audience of about 30 people in this session, was this student cheating? And I said, yes, it would you believe it? I was the only one in the room that said yes. Or you know what? Everybody else in the room said, wait, this student is using a tool that’s going to be in her future. That’s going to be something she’s going to have to know how to do. I said, look, I’m not against this. The AI in the in here, but it’s through the process. It’s in the wrong place. If the teacher had said, I want everybody, here’s a prompt that I’m going to give you like a fist, like a teacher prompt for discussion in collaborative groups. We’re going to add AI as another partner at the chair. At your collaborative group, you can engage with the AI and discuss this and look at viewpoints and ask it questions. And as a group, I want you to discuss what you and I. AI is just another partner in the group. If they had done that and then the teacher said, all right, because no more AI. Now write your essays. Then I would say that would be a proper use. And then that student is using it to really for their future. And it was very interesting. And I felt confident. There’s a little bit of doubt in my mind because I’m like, okay, how am I the only one that’s not agreeing with everyone else? But I stick to that to this day because it really has to do with this whole cheating thing. It’s that focus on that product. Like I said. Yeah, it said, let’s think about unpacking a concept, a standard unpacking, and a process. How can we use AI to help me look at something that I’m designing and then partner with the AI to ask it questions like, what am I not thinking? What, what questions do you have for me? If you were a learner, what questions do you have for me if you were going to observe me? So as I prepare for this lesson, coach me through this, and now I can develop something that’s more rich and can take students further than I thought I could do by myself without AI. And that’s where I believe AI has its place. And that’s why, as a district, we took the stance that teachers were going to be the first to learn AI, not students. We’re not opening any AI to students. We’ll eventually start adding the, walled garden. like SchoolAI, Brisk, and so on, but they have to be those walled gardens and we’re going to methodically and at some point we’re going to open it up to the students. But I need teachers to have, wisdom and understanding on what it means to use AI as it’s changing. I want to say daily. Yeah. So it’s it’s too powerful of a tool for us to just kind of go, okay, I’m not in agreement necessarily. What? That red, yellow, green light use of AI. I’m. And that doesn’t tell me anything. I can still do whatever I want. When you give me the green light, I can do whatever I want with this yellow light, but it’s not helping me think. So. How can it become a critical thinking partner in the process of learning one for the teachers as they design their learning? Or how can I ask it to help me remove the barriers in my classroom? When you tell it, here’s the lesson I’m designing. Here’s my room environment. Here’s my student population. Here’s what I know about my students. What are the barriers that I need to consider when designing for this standard? And for this idea and this concept? That’s where I think that’s best. I think in education, and I think we need to keep it there and help it be part of thinking, process, thinking, and not the product. I believe products are directly proportional to the amount that you invest in understanding the problem. If you don’t invest in understanding a problem and designing and ideating for it, if you rush through that like designing a lesson quickly, or just going to some source to give me a lesson, having AI give me the lesson, then the product is going to reflect that. Yeah. I think, the more you invest in it with the students, the better the product is going to be.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. You and I have a similar approach because I definitely I talk about it on two sides and I always start with like again, if we think of a teacher as architect, teachers, designer, now we have this high power tool added to our tool belt that makes it easier than ever to really identify the needs of the group we’re designing for. Think strategically about the modifications that we’re making. And I think all of that was, you know, arguably totally overwhelming before and fair. It was like, it’s all time intensive work. But I do think like helping educators, not just throwing tools at them, but really teaching them how to intentionally design with those tools to leverage them. To your point, as thought partners, to improve their understanding of this work that they’re doing, the population they serve is so incredibly valuable. All right. So I feel like we could talk for another hour but I know we’re out of time. So I want to lob you. My final question which I ask everyone since this is the balance. Just curious if in your very busy life professional personal is there something routine mindset habit. What tip that you have kind of adopted that helps you strive for some semblance of balance?
Gerardo Martinez
Well, I’m probably not the best person to ask about it.
Catlin Tucker
I think most like to say that.
Gerardo Martinez
Yes, I can imagine. I, I’m so committed to the work that I do, and I get excited about being innovative and being a creator. That I take that home sometimes. In other words, when I do interior design work, graphic design work, or architecture work, I often do it at home, and that’s not a good balance. But I’m passionate about being so focused on doing that that’s not something I can do at work. Meetings, interruptions, phone calls. I can never be really intentional and that, that focus. But one thing that I try to remind myself us of is and I’m reminded by my own family as well, it’s like a, you know, time for us, right? And sometimes I will do that. I will just devote to what I’m supposed to be doing here at home, like I’m taking these days off so that I can work on projects at home. I can do that in summer. Even though there’s some busy things to do this summer, I know I need to do this. I need to take time just to be home, be with my wife, go out with her, or just spend time at home and watching Netflix or something. Yeah. So that’s been kind of that. I used to have other hobbies with music. I used to have hobbies with drawing. But I don’t take time for those anymore. Perhaps I do, but I like taking pictures as well. You know, something that I do with my phone. I try to capture moments. I try to capture sunrise or sunset. I try to capture architecture, and I try to just make those as things that I’m capturing for what I enjoy looking at, even though it’s still sounds a little bit academic, but maybe I need to be looking at capturing moments that really describe life. Sunrise is one of the most beautiful things that I enjoy, seeing. I don’t get that much time to see it anymore. I do get up that early often, but my I’m working or I’m or doing something else, but that balance of just, you know, going for a walk and exercising is something that I do sometimes, but not at all, worthy of saying it’s balance.
Catlin Tucker
Well, maybe it’s in the act of taking the photo that is that moment of like pause to recognize those moments. Maybe it’s because life and I don’t know about you, but every year I’m like, I can’t believe how quickly this year flew by. And I think sometimes those moments, those like reminders, whatever it is that causes you to pause and just take something in, like a sunrise or whatever, I think that’s that’s valuable.
Gerardo Martinez
I did that with tomatoes the other day doing tomatoes, and I just loved the way the sun was reflecting on the tomatoes. And you can see every detail of the stem and the little paring it. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is a perfect summer moment. So I just was taking pictures just to capture that. Most people will think, why are you taking pictures of tomatoes? Yeah, I’m like, because it’s the moment. It’s that sunset part. And the way the sun’s reflecting on the tomatoes, it feels like summer. And that’s that was my moment.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, well, I love that. Thank you so much for joining me for this conversation and just sharing your work and your passion. And I’m just like, so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with you and this amazing group of innovators that you have kind of cultivated in this program. So thank you.
Gerardo Martinez
You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Catlin Tucker
I always love getting to talk with somebody who has a real love of instructional design, since that’s an area of passion for me personally and this kind of understanding that Gerardo and I both have about the value and the role of the educator in designing experiences for the specific group of learners that they’re working with is something that I really value. I wish more schools and districts were messaging to teachers about how important that work is, that they do, supporting them in kind of expanding their instructional toolbelt. I love the conversation about spaces. I know it’s really challenging, especially for folks at the secondary level. You have a lot of kids, you have a limited amount of space. But I will say, even as a high school English teacher with a packed room myself, there were things I was able to do to get creative with my space. Having students kind of reconfigure the furniture for certain types of lessons. I remember the day I got rid of my big teacher desk. I just decided this huge behemoth desk was taking up so much room, and I wanted to create more space. I wanted to be able to move around. So I literally just took one of the smaller desks and put retrofitted wheels on it, so I could just kind of scoot around the room and be next to students supporting them, answering questions and, you know, not feeling kind of like I’m one signaling that this is my space and this is my area of the classroom. But really, that my role was to be nimble was to work alongside students, move around the space. So thinking about the new year and if there are any opportunities to kind of reimagine how you use your space. Because truly, when kids walk in the door, when they see the layout of the room, it sends a really clear message about the kind of learning that they’re likely to experience in that space. So kind of taking a step back, look at that classroom you’re setting up and what message is it sending to learners? So I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your week. If you have questions, comments, feedback for me, you can always reach out. I’m easy to find on social wherever you hang out online, or you can leave a question comment directly to me through my website. CatlinTucker.com I will include Gerardo’s LinkedIn profile if you have questions specifically for him. And of course I hope you guys have a great week. I will see you back here next Tuesday.
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