Candidate Statement

Candidate Statement

I've been in public education for over 25 years - all thanks to Steven Speilberg. You see, for most of my young life I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist and study dolphins or whales. And then I saw Jaws. I was traumatized. The movie scared me so badly that I don't swim in the ocean (ever) and swimming in a pool at night that doesn't have lights is a sketchy proposition at best (yes - I know sharks can live in swimming pools - I told you I was traumatized). So, since I had to ditch the idea of spending my life scuba diving with marine mammals thanks to my irrational fear of sharks, I started wondering what I wanted to be if I ever bothered to grow up. I love people and learning, and I'd watched my mother teach my whole life (in school settings and out of them) and decided that I should be a teacher. My senior English teacher, Dr. Fishman solidified the content area - she was the first person to tell me I was a talented writer (well...besides my parents) and she influenced the direction of my entire career. 

I went to college, a couple of them since we were a military family and traveled a lot, and got my degree in English. But I didn't enter education right away. I worked for a major insurance company as an office manager and database manager. It paid the bills as my new husband and I figured out the whole adulting thing (I would like to state for the record here that adulting is highly overrated). While my husband was touring the Mediterranean courtesy of the U.S. Navy, I moved in with my parents and got a job in the Prairie View A&M University Alternative Teacher Certification program. I handled recruitment, general office work, and taught some courses on technology (back in those days it was PowerPoint 0.0). I realized that it would be a great time to get my certification, so I signed up.

My husband got stationed at Joint Reserve Base Ft. Worth and, due to our son's Autism diagnosis, we were given Exceptional Family Member Status and were able to stay there until the end of my husband's career in 2006. I got my teaching certification and my first job at Alvarado High School. I taught English, sponsored Yearbook and Prom, and was a UIL State-Competing One Act Play director. I'd found my niche and I worked hard to hone my craft. I won Teacher of the Year in 2005.

A funny thing happened a couple of years into my teaching career...computers became the hot new thing to teach with. I was instantly hooked and found that my happiness in my academic career existed at the intersection of teaching/learning and technology. I haven't looked back. I got a job in Burleson ISD and within a year was a Learning Technologist for the district. I got my Masters' Degree in Curriulum and Instruction with an Emphasis on Technology Education and later a Masters' in Educational Technology Leadership while simultaneously working toward my Principal certification. Technology and education were my jam! I won the TCEA Instructonal Technologist of the Year award in 2015.

I went back into the classroom in 2019. In the midst of finishing the year online and losing my father to Covid, I earned Teacher of the Year for my high school and Secondary Teacher of the Year for the district in 2020. I still loved teaching despite my time away from the classroom. I started the next year at the Remote Learning Center, teaching students who didn't want to come back to face-to-face learning so soon after the pandemic had hit us. With a special needs son and brother to take care of, I was okay with not coming back right away. By November, the number of students failing and having to return to face-to-face became so great that I had to head back to in-person teaching to help alleviate the class sizes. I taught both face-to-face and online for the remainder of the year. I realized how much I love online learning and designing engaging lessons for my students in that modality, so when the position of Senior Instructional Designer for Tarrant County College came open, I applied. And I got the job! 

Now I'm working on a ridiculously large number of projects to help my campus and my district support faculty and students. But my motivation hasn't changed.  I've worked hard to learn, teach, share, and do it all with my eyes on what matters most - supporting teachers and students so they can THRIVE - both academically and personally. Through all of the ups, downs, and plot twists in my career, I have tried to never lose sight of that purpose. That's why I'm at SHSU now...to keep learning, growing, teaching, sharing, and helping teachers and students to THRIVE! I'm a practical person, so working on skills that can have an immediate, practical application in my work is very appealing to me. I learn well in an online environment, and I want to take everything I'm learning here and implement it in my current role.

Over the years, my professional goals have shifted as I have learned more about education and how it works in both K-12 and Higher Education in Texas. It would take another Google Site to cover the shifts that got me to where I am, so we'll just pick up the book in this chapter. We'll call it Chapter 4: The One Where My Left Eye Twitches All Day At Work. I'll explain:

I spent 25 years in K-12 public education in Texas, and while I could write a novel about the issues in the field...I loved it. I learned so much about learning, teaching, leading, and who I am as a person in those years. I learned about students first, differentiation and diversification, engagement versus compliance, and I attended professional development...hours and hours and hours of professional development. I learned about Professional Learning Communities, Learning Networks, Data-Informed Decision Making, and I learned how to play professional development BINGO with my friends using BingoBaker and NOT get caught doing it (Hint: Don't ACTUALLY yell out BINGO when you win)! All joking aside (temporarily anyway), I learned so very much in those years and am grateful to the people who taught me who I did (or didn't) want to be by their example. I learned that I believe in action...beautiful, simple, data-informed ACTION that moves us, hopefully, in the direction we want to go. And I learned that I believe in reflection, evaluation, continuous improvement and using what we learn to make a difference. There's a lot more there, but you do have a lot more to read here, so I'll move it along.

My move to Higher Education, to a campus still closed due to the Pandemic, was an eye opener. I, like many people, believed that Higher Education was the next step "up" from K-12 in terms of teaching and learning. I'm not saying that it's not, but after coming from an environment where for 25 years I was held accountable for creating learning experiences that enhance student learning, improving my skills through my own professional learning, working collaboratively with my colleagues, integrating technology effectively, meeting high standards, and collecting, dissagregating, and making decisions based on more data than one person should ever have to track...I found Higher Education to be...well, disappointing. I found faculty with no education training, low digital literacy (even at my online campus), no data-informed decision making because no one was even looking at the data, a lack of focus on the student, and an elitism that had one faculty member telling me to go home to K-12 because I obviously didn't know what I was talking about in regards to education. My left eye hasn't stopped twitching. I started taking notes and those notes have turned into goals (and the start of a book).  Let's break those goals down:

The Room Where It Happens (Change Leader)

My first goal is to advance my position to that of Director of Instructional Design and Technology Integration. I run a department of eight people who work on instructional design, graphic design, professional development, program creation and implementation, and a whole lot more that falls outside of our area (the reward for doing good work is to get more work). I have come to realize that despite the amount of work I am currently responsible for, titles matter. Titles get you into (to quote Lin Manuel Miranda) the room where it happens. I want to be able to work with those who set the culture and the policy of our institution, to not only advocate (or outright fight) for those things that will best support our faculty and students, but to implement them. And I want to help tear down the inefficient, ineffectual processes that exist simply because they always have - to replace them with self-adjusting models that change with the needs of those they support.  A study about staff impact in higher education by Briody, Rodríguez‑Mejía,  and Berger "resulted in the discovery of two distinct cultural models of staff work: 1) A focused team collaboration balancing input from multiple stakeholders 2) A leader-driven initiative informed by a cooperative expert network. Both cultural models enhance our understanding of staff involvement in and impact on organizational-culture change. As a result, we know that the collective work of these teams led to program and policy changes...in the university." (2021) I feel that by advancing to the level of Director, I can help to shift the culture of the institution and affect change that will better serve our students, improve our academic offerings, and further expand the reach of our online campus.

Elevating Online Educational Experiences (Designer)

The move to emergency online teaching during the Covid 19 shutdown dragged online teaching into the spotlight (whether it wanted it or not), and some of the things we found there were not good: absentee instructors, busy work and cognitive loads twice that of face-to-face courses, digital literacy gaps,  inequity in access, and a lack of rigor, relevance, and consistency. The pandemic also drew attention to how unprepared educators were to teach in the online environment. The Department of Education attempted to address the clarity of it's regulations to give online instructors and institutions VERY SPECIFIC guidance on what MUST happen in the online classroom to keep financial aid funding for those courses. However, these regulations do not cover all aspects of quality online course design and instruction. Part of my departmental charge is to manage/instruct the Online Instructor Certification course for Tarrant County College. All instructors who wish to teach blended or online courses for the district must successfully complete the course. In this course we teach faculty about The Community of Inquiry model. Quayson et al. address the model as "significant for the online learning environment in terms of the emphasis placed on cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. Garrison et al. (2000) developed the Community of Inquiry (CoI) based on the concept of “presence” in online education. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model encourages online and blended courses that are design as active learning environments or communities dependent on instructors and students sharing ideas, information, and opinions (Picciano, 2017)." (2022) My goal is to share the model and research-based, data-driven strategies that improve the learning environment and success rates for students who attend our online courses while addressing regular and substantive interaction, accessibility, and inclusivity. 

Share All The Things (Collaborator)

My team will tell you that one of the things I repeat often is "Sharing is not our motto, it's our mandate." I firmly believe in sharing everything that we do (the good, the bad, the ugly) with our stakeholders, our peers, and the educational community in general. Siloing in Higher Education will be the death of post-secondary education in the post-pandemic world. With Texas House Bill 8, approved during the 88th legislative session, community college funding "would be tied to student success metrics, including the number of degrees and certificates awarded, the number of credentials earned in high-demand fields, transfer rates to four-year universities, and the number of students completing dual-credit courses." (Weissman, 2022) With the shift in funding requirements, it seems as if the grab for transfer partnerships, certificate completions, tuition dollars, and finding those high-profile programs that bring in the students makes me think of the seagulls in Disney's movie "Finding Nemo" - everyone is running around shouting "Mine. Mine. Mine." If we are really going to focus on creating an educated populace that can solve the problems we're facing in the world (cue up a waving American flag and the National Anthem) we're going to need to work together to meet the needs of our students. If we've paved a road at our institution, we should share with those still struggling through the weeds. We are all in the boat, so we need to get everyone rowing together...more oars, fewer anchors. My goal will be to share our experiences and resources through presentations, publications, and our Instructional Resource Hub, to learn from those who will share with us, and to build partnerships with other departments, campuses, institutions, and community programs to move forward together.  #UBUNTU

Research and Data Analysis: In order to affect real change at my institution, I will have to learn how to build a case for what we need that is research-based and written in the language that leadership in Higher Education expect and appreciate. I want to be able to offer solutions and build bridges in the language of the people I am trying to persuade. I need lessons in literature review writing, research, data collection and analysis, and scholarly writing so that I can get the message to the people who can help me to affect change. I cannot do it alone and I need to be able to convey my passion, our needs, and offer solutions in the currency of my institution: research, data, and scholarly writing.

Leadership, Collaboration, and Continuous Improvement: While the Online Instructor Certification Course, in it's current iteration, has introduced over 435+ faculty to the Community of Inquiry Model and had them practicing concepts in the performance-based asynchronous training course, there are almost 600 additional faculty members who earned their certification prior to the inclusion of the model in the training course. We need to create a recertification course that intoduces the concept to those faculty while providing them with the same hands-on, practical application practice their peers have received. To do this, I will need to partner with our Organizational Excellence and Development (OED) Department to create the district-wide course. This will require me to be able to explain the value of the model for online learning to a department that primarily serves face-to-face instructors and who have only recently begun working with blended learning instructors. I will need to be able to provide research, examples, and testimonials from currently trained online faculty into presentations and resources that will help OED recognize the value of a district-wide model for consistency and quality assurance. Finally, my team and I will need to build healthy, collaborative relationships with those in the department who will be working on the project with us, to ensure that the focus is on creating the best possible learning environments possible for our faculty and students.

Sharing Information: Through participation in organizations that seek to improve collaboration and information sharing between institutions, conference presentations, publications of our journey, and providing open access to our resources I believe we can help to elevate all community college experiences across the state, nation, and the world. By actively sharing out our experiences and learning and encouraging others to do the same, by partnering with other schools rather than competing with them, we can build an educational network that moves students forward in their academic and work careers. Instead of everyone fighting for their small piece of the pie, we can just bake a bigger pie together. To reach this goal I will need the time, opportunity, and support of my institution to share our journey, write for publication, travel to conferences to learn and share, and a willingness to move from "Mine, Mine, Mine" to "Ours, Our, Ours." This is a culture shift that will take some time to accomplish, but I am hopeful that it can be done with the right leadership, outreach, and intentional effort.

I have been fortunate to gain years of experience in teaching, lesson and course design, educational theory, and professional development in my educational career. I have planned, hosted, and spoken at large educational events, presented at conferences at the state, national, and international level, and have taught for 26 years. I am familiar with face-to-face and online instructional strategies, course design, and have had extensive experience with using data to make decisions, assess programs and learning, and find areas of need that should be addressed. I hold several certifications, have won awards for instruction and for instructional technology, and have earned grants from the state and from NASA. I have experienced online learning through two Masters' degrees and my current doctoral program, so I bring the student perspective to the work that I do. And finally, I have supervised a team for the last 16 years, so working collaboratively, reaching consensus, and project management are skills I've used in my daily work. My resume provides a brief summary of my work over the last decade and a half.

I am eager to improve my statistics ability and work on writing about research throughout the remainder of this program. The ability to collect research data, share it out, and provide context to the academic conversations regarding the work I'm asked to do is exciting and motivates me to find ways to apply all that I am learning to my day-to-day assignments.  I am improving my skills in this area through courses in this program, specifically:

• ISDT 7372 Statistical Methods

• EDLD 7362 Methods of Educational Research

• EDER 7372 Qualitative Inquiry

• EDER 7374 Advanced Statistical Methods

• ISDT 7391 Application of Research

Examples of the learning and work completed in these courses are included on the remaining pages of this dossier. I find that I am already applying my learning in my position, as proposal for new programs I submit now include information from research on the topic and statistical information to support the proposal.

As someone who is all about the practical application of learning, I am also eager to work with my committee chair throughout the dissertation process to understand the process, and to best ascertain how to make sure I'm investing my time and energy on research  that will benefit me in my current position, add value to my campus  and district, and further understanding of my topic in the field of education. As I wait to begin this process, I am excited to review the work of previous ISDT program scholars through their dossiers so that I may explore the varied journeys of previous participants while I map my own course through the process.

I am currently expanding my instructional design skills through extensive reading, professional development, and I've received approval for one-on-one training for my team by Dr. Luke Hobson, Senior Instructional Designer and Program Manager at MIT. I hope that this combination of reading, practicing, and discussing our processes with experts in the field will help me (and my entire team) to stay relevant, well-versed, and innovative as we work to create courses and training for our faculty.

As I further my abilities as a team member and leader, I have been fortunate to receive training through my district with Shola Richards, and am currently reading the book Leader Credibility: The Essential Traits of Those Who Engage, Inspire, and Transform by Fisher, Frey, Lassiter, and Smith.

I am also continuing to present for and attend industry conferences to increase my learning in instructional design, educational technology, microcredentialling, and education. While family obligations have lessened my ability to travel, I will be attending the following conferences in the next year:

• Texas Computer Educators Association

• Texas Digital Learning Association

• Instructional Technology Council 

• National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development

These activities, coupled with my coursework and daily work responsibilities will help me to reach my goals to be a change leader, designer, and collaborator through a focus on research and data analysis, leadership, collaboration, and continuous improvement, and sharing information to advance my field.

Briody, E. K., Rodríguez-Mejía, F. R., & Berger, E. J. (2021). Professional staff making a difference: Cultural change in higher education. 

Innovative Higher Education, 47(2), 297–325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-021-09577-3

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher

 education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2), 87-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(00)00016-6

Picciano, A. G. (2017). Theories and frameworks for online education: Seeking an integrated model. Online Learning, 21(3), 166-190.

doi:10.24059/olj.v21i3.1225

Quayson, F., & Zirkle, C. (2022). Ten best practices for designing an online course. The Interdisciplinary Journal of Advances in

Research in Education, 5(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.55138/oh104284fcz

Weissman, S. (2022, November 21). Texas moves toward tying community college funds to outcomes. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved

from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/22/texas-moves-toward-tying-community-college-funds-outcomes