Who is Andy?

I am a proud dad, husband, teacher, and coach.  My daughter, Josie, was born summer 2014 and continues to grow and learn every day.  I met my wife Kirsten back in 2nd grade.  We got married in 2011 and moved together to Rochester, MN for graduate school.  She works as a Physician's Assistant at Mayo Clinic and I continued from my internship at Byron High School as a math teacher.

Though years later I found "teacher" on a list of five possible careers I wrote down in high school, I never consciously intended to be a teacher.  I am an engineer to my core.  As a kid, I was always building with K'nex, Legos, and anything I could find.  In high school, I did less physical building and more problem solving with a small team in the Future Problem Solving Program.  Yet, even here, I was trying to learn computer programming and design solutions to the various scenarios we were given.  As I looked towards college, I found my dream school: Olin College.  Thankfully, I was fortunate enough to be admitted, and it led me on an amazing five year adventure.

I loved Olin, the classes, the professors, the students, the culture, the activities.  I thought I was turning into a real engineer, yet more than anything, I found myself more excited about HOW I was learning than WHAT I was learning.  After an amazing group independent study (we called them student-designed courses) and a class focused on improving schools at neighboring Wellesley College, I was fully hooked on education.  I took a leave of absence for one year from college, joined by five other Olin students who wanted to work together to start a business.  We eventually got a software-based startup off the ground focused on online collaboration experiences.  I finished my final two years at Olin, continuing to learn engineering and design, but spending a large fraction of my time studying schools and effective teaching.

After graduation, my wife and I got married back at our hometown, Appleton, WI, and moved to Rochester, MN for graduate school.  At the end of our year, we both took jobs that kept us in town.  At Byron High School, I continued to learn so much more about teaching while trying out a number of new ideas.

Like every class, there are still the less-exciting days, but I do what I can to keep those at a minimum.  Over the past eight iterations of my Statistics class, I integrated a number of project experiences to bring the course concepts to life.  The pictures below include experimental design in the kitchen and a feedback session on student infographics.  Other projects are based around Minute to Win It games, Ultimate Frisbee, proving teachers wrong, and Gapminder.org videos.

My Algebra and Geometry classes, when I'm teaching them, use a blend of teacher-produced videos (flipped learning) and mastery-based quizzing (students retake assessments until they show a high level of understanding.).  Our department built our own curriculum, allowing us to easily adapt any component as we learn what helps students learn.  We keep detailed records on all of our assessment data and analyze it together as a department PLC (Professional Learning Community).  This is the baseline that drives our efforts for course improvement.

I also teach a course called Independent Math.  This is the one-room schoolhouse model of education supported with online instruction and assessment through ALEKS.com.  This started as a few courses for both struggling 9th graders to get extra remediation before Algebra 1 and a review course for seniors headed to college.  It has morphed into a single course that allows students to either prepare for college (with the option to work some days off-campus if progress meets a given threshold) or meet graduation requirements in an alternative, self-paced environment.  I have students working on eight different courses at the same time in the same room.  The picture on the right is a typical workspace.

Whenever possible, I am excited to go beyond the world of math to have creative learning experiences with students.  My favorite course is The Art of Game Design.  In this game (of course, the class is a game too), students level up by designing and play-testing their games with family, classmates, middle school students, and anyone they can find.  They also reflect on their games with the help of a number of design "lenses" that we use to study the games.  By the end, teams are creating and polishing some very awesome experiences for their players.  We make heavy use of Photoshop and the 3D printer to increase the cool factor of the games.

I continue the exciting learning after school with robotics!  Our team started in January 2013 in the middle of the season thanks to a sudden interest from students and a fortunate grant left unclaimed by another team.  Since that first year, we expanded our team so much that we had to break off our 9th graders into a new team.  The FIRST Robotics Competition is a well-design program that focuses on teamwork, collaboration, and friendly competition.  Students have a ton of fun, the adult mentors and I have a ton of fun, and we all get to learn together as we design and build a giant machine for competition.

The Innovative Instructional Leadership Certificate Program is helping me continue my path forward as an educator and learner.  This portfolio will capture the key milestones of this program and the things that I learn along the journey.  I will never stop learning!