Hello, and welcome to Episode 75 of the Planning Period Podcast, your #EdBreakroom. I'm your host, Brad Shreffler.
This week on the show, it's just me. If you've been listening to the show for any amount of time, you've probably heard me say I would never go back to school, never get my masters. And yet, last week, I completed my application and signed the paperwork to get my Masters In Educational Leadership from National Louis University. Given that this is Episode 75 of my podcast (that is still insane for me to believe) and that this big thing is happening, I thought I'd take this opportunity to explain my decision, and go solo talking about what it means for me and the future of this show. I want to start by reading my entrance essay that I wrote for NLU. It outlines a good bit of my journey and explains how I was pushed to this point. I am a professional educator that has spent the last ten years of my life dedicated to education and the advancement of not only students but teachers. Out of the last ten years of my career I have spent four of them outside of the classroom supporting the development of teachers. I have spent the last four years of my nearly ten year teaching career out of the classroom. During that time, I have been the Digital Instruction Coach, or Digital Integration Specialist, at a high school and middle school. I started this journey as an English teacher at a large high school in Central Florida, as a member of the Digital Curriculum Leadership team the year before we launched one-to-one digital program. Without being asked I became the unofficial leader of that team. My peers realized quickly I not only had a clear vision for what a successful launch would look like, but that I had the ability to plan for that and make it a reality. If I am being truthful, it was the first time I realized that I had the right mindset, expertise, and passion to handle a leadership role in a school. After the first few months of attending district trainings and building professional developments to deliver back to the staff, I began to realize that this initiative wouldn’t be successful without someone on the school level dedicated to making this initiative happen. I expressed this belief to my principal and added that I felt like I was the right person for that role for the following school year. He agreed, and we created the role of Digital Instructional Coach. During that first year, I successfully launched a one-to-one program from the ground up with the largest high school in the state, and one of the top ten largest high schools in the country. To date, it is one of the greatest accomplishments of my professional career. In my three years at that high school I built and ran professional developments on all instructional aspects (not just technology), ran new teacher mentorship, built a student-run technology support program that is now replicated in many high and middle schools in the county, presented at multiple conferences, including the largest technology conference in the world (ISTE), and was heavily courted to bring my skills to a middle school nearby to help launch their one-to-one initiative. This is how I ended up being at the middle school I am at now, the largest middle school in the country, with nearly 3000 students. Coming to middle school has certainly had its challenges, but the majority of the time has been filled with hard work and a genuine sense of accomplishment. I work with an amazing leadership team, great APs and the best principal I’ve had the privilege of working for. They are a huge driving force for why I have decided to