It's a spectacular school built on a powerful concept that travel can teach lessons of global importance and activate students to affect meaningful change. Together with students, we travel to four different countries every year to learn about the world.

For seven years, I taught at THINK Global School, first as the Creative Arts teacher, later as the newMedia Lab instructor, and finally as a Changemaker Educator within the new PBL program.

TGS Changemaker Educator positions encompass more than just managing learning with students enrolled at TGS. It is a holistic position designed around the concept of being a mentor/advisor for students. Educators at TGS are assigned an advisory to manage Project Based Learning designed by students and staff. Educators are woven into all aspects of program delivery, often times living with students in communal settings. At TGS learning opportunities can happen at anytime and we consider informal learning situations a valid as formal classes. An educator's primary role will be to help students design a customized individual learning plan that meets TGS’s graduation requirements.

Some of the modules, projects, and courses I've taught:

• Ethnicity & Ethnic Conflict (Greece/Spain 2018)

• Conscious Consumerism w/ article (Japan 2018)

• Zero to Infinity (India 2017)

• newMedia Lab (2011-2016)

• Traveling Shorts Film Festival (2011-2016)

• TGS Symposium 2015/Greece & 2016/Italy

• Srebrenica documentary (Bosnia & Herzegovina 2016)

• Senior Passion Projects (Sweden 2015)

• Reel Deal Film Club (New Zealand 2014)

• Rikuzentakata documentary / BTS (Japan 2014)

• Kashmir Conflict (India 2013)

In many ways, every educator at TGS is a curriculum developer, learning designer, and instructional designer, even if it's not in their job title. But when the school decided to launch the new Changemaker program, they hired four educators to step out of the classroom for a year and work on nothing but building a holistic curriculum.

A Curriculum Developer at THINK Global School is responsible for planning, developing, and proposing a three-year interdisciplinary course of study for students.

On this team, I worked to:

1. Deliver a holistic plan to increase/implement Project Based Learning and Place Based Learning that takes greater advantage of host country’s cultural, historical, political and environmental opportunities.

2. Deliver a plan to increase community connections within designated host countries.

3. Develop and deliver a plan for incorporating thematic threads tied to TGS’s learning standards.

4. Identify and document opportunities for students to develop and create independent Project Based Learning opportunities tied to TGS Learning Targets.

5. Produce professional quality documentation for programs developed.

6. Deliver key pieces of the project within institutional time frame, constraints, and budget.

During my 2016-2017 year as a Curriculum Developer, I traveled 110,745 km around the world to plan curriculum in eight countries. It was the most creative and productive year of my life, filled with incredible encounters with local experts and beautiful countries I would be lucky to visit again.

While working at TGS as the Media Specialist, it became clear that TGS students needed support in order to create new media products in the classroom as well as innovate with their three Apple devices.

I developed this course along with the Head of Technology Mike Hourahine in order to provide a weekly space for students to experiment and create using their technology. This Lab is open to the public on THINK Spot for students, educators, and new media industry people looking for self-development opportunities.

The basic objectives for a learner in this course are:

• to develop skills for effective communication with new media.

• to become an efficient user of tech who exhibits 21st century skills.

The curriculum follows a spiral model, which students circle twice in a year. The content follows a pattern in order to facilitate the students' learning, and these five flexible areas of new communication are written, audio, still visual, video, and social. Units represent skills and proficiencies that can later be added to a student's resume or portfolio. When relevant, we use a problem-based approach to engage with a type of media and build skills.

My big takeaway from running this course was that, more than anything, students really just needed time—and a little bit of introductory support for skill-building—in order to produce incredible work that often rivaled the professionals. I’m so glad we were able to develop this course for the TGS students and give them a chance to develop new media skills, as many of them have written me years later to say they are employed because of these skills, often skills they taught themselves after the primer of the newMedia Lab.

In 2019, I began working in higher education at Community College of Denver. In 2021, I became the Digital Literacy Coordinator, in charge of tutoring services, programming, and services in support of digital literacy for adult learners. Within this position, I’ve become a supervisor of hourly and full-time staff as well as an event manager for the annual Digital Story Festival. I work with faculty, staff, and students to build a culture of digital storytelling at CCD, a powerful PBL product that develops 21st century skills.

As the Coordinator for our Digital Literacy and Digital Storytelling programs at CCD, I oversaw:

• a 166% increase in active users on our video editing software.

• a 4% increase in digital literacy certification pass rates correlating with the implementation of an Adult Learner’s Success Lumina Foundation grant.

training & experience

Master's in Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont

January 2016 - June 2018

Teaching Practicum: Writing Foundations at THINK Global School, online and in Botswana

• Some student work published on Huffington Post and the THINK Global School blog

Educator & Curriculum Developer at a School

• recognized by HundrED as "one of its 100 innovative education projects across the world"

• mentioned in CNN's "How students around the world are learning in new ways"

• selected as an Apple Distinguished School for 2015-2017

• featured by the Times Education Supplement

• featured by Business Insider and included in "...14 most innovative schools in the world"

• listed on Global Citizen's "5 'Weird' Schools That Are Challenging How Students Learn"

• listed by Inverse's "These Are the World's 14 Most Futuristic Schools"

• featured on HLN's Morning Express

• listed as one of Noodle.com's "41 most innovative K-12 Schools in America"

• listed amongst schools that CatchNews.com describes as "How future classrooms would look like"

• recognized within Newsweek’s Private Schools of Distinction in 2018

Apple Teacher 2017-2018

Creative Nonfiction Writer's Workshop

Moniack Mhor in Inverness, Scotland

August 2015

Mentored by authors Robert Twigger and Jason Webster

Filming & Collaborating with Project Zero's Global Thinking Routines

The project was designed to build on Project Zero’s history of developing research-based conceptual frameworks that educators can employ to promote higher order cognition, deeper understanding of complex problems, ethics and effective collaboration. ID/Global researchers designed and TGS teachers tested a preliminary series of “Global Thinking Routines” (GTRs)--adaptable micro-teaching interventions that specifically target thinking processes that foster students’ disposition to think globally and act responsibly in the global sphere.

Boix-Mansilla, Veronica. An ID-Global Bundle to Foster Global Thinking Disposition through Global Thinking Routines. Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. 2017 06 23

Attended the Following Conferences and Training Programs

• Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology (COLTT) with University of Colorado Denver | Aug 2021 in Denver, CO

• Accessibility Basics with Community College of Denver | June 2021 in Denver, CO

• Deeper Learning with High Tech High | March 2017 in San Diego, USA

• The Greater Good Science Center Summer Institute for Educators | June 2016 in Berkeley, USA

• Peer Observation & Coaching Program through Petersen Educational Leadership, LLC | 2015-2016 in Stockholm & Florence

• Web Series development and production at VidCon | July 2015 in Anaheim, California

• Paperless: Innovation & Technology in Education | Feb 2014 in Kanda University of International Studies in Tokyo, Japan

• Innovation Uncensored New York | April 2013 in New York, USA

• Photojournalism with Ernesto Bazan at The Maine Media Workshops | 2005 in Bar Harbor, Maine

• Color Slide Photography with Spoleto Study Abroad | 2003 in Spoleto, Italy