Introductory Essay

I'm Andy Pethan, an engineer by training, a problem solver by nature, and now a teacher by day. I spent my undergraduate years at Olin College of Engineering, an innovative school of engineering and design located near Boston. Though I came into Olin with a deep love for the engineering and the design process, I left with an even deeper appreciation of the approach used by my professors to create meaningful and engaging learning experiences. I fed on this energy to create change in education by co-creating the Olin STEM Academy for Boston-area high schoolers, volunteering with math and science programs for elementary and middle schoolers, and taking a full year away from school to create an educational software start-up with a group of friends. Olin provided me with an incredible set of experiences that developed my teamwork, design, and communication skills, gave me the technical training required to be an effective software developer, and exposed me to the forefront of effective pedagogy.

After graduation, I was ready to formally enter the teaching profession. After acceptance into Winona State University-Rochester's Teacher Preparation Collaborative (TPC) program, I started a rigorous set of summer courses to prepare for the internship component of the program. My coursework strengthened my understanding of learning styles and strategies, literacy and vocabulary development, classroom management, unit and lesson planning, diversity, and special needs using a variety of reading assignments, written reflections, group projects, and actual lesson or unit plans. In the fall, I started the larger component of the TPC program, the internship, at Byron High School. I worked with two excellent mentor teachers, Troy Faulkner and Rob Warneke, who gave me an excellent starting point with which I could jump into teaching my own classes. I was welcomed into the math PLC (professional learning community), introduced to the district's continuous innovation practices, taught how to track and use data to guide my teaching, and shown different approaches to classroom management that could be used with my very different groups of kids. Once I started teaching on my own, Rob and Troy served as mentors and guides as I started to innovate on my own, create new projects, and develop new curriculum.