Can you tell me and tell us a little bit about yourself?

Lauren: Sure. I'm from New Jersey where I've lived most of my whole life with the exception of doing an undergraduate degree in Boston. I am a classroom teacher and when I discovered the DMDL program, I was teaching English and Language Arts classes to middle schoolers. I had become sort of like the tech savvy person in my group of teacher friends so I decided since I was already using that knowledge in my school space, that I would head over and try to see if I could get some kind of certificate. That brought me to DMDL. I figured it was doable while living in New Jersey, since so many people in my community were already commuters into the city anyways. I was part-time in the program from 2014 to 2016.

My principal actually likes to joke that he's never met a tech teacher who started as a tech teacher, you know, like there's no ticket or pathway to it from undergrad. He says every tech teacher he's always met, has always taught something else, like the techie social studies teacher or like, you know, the computer savvy math teacher. And then somehow they just kind of fall into becoming like the computer person of their building.

What is your educational background?

Lauren: I have a bachelor's degree from Boston University's School of Education, which is an elementary education degree, and then I have a Master's degree from NYU DMDL.

How did the two of you meet?

Lauren: My first year.... so Chad and I met in 2014. We took Ralph's class on our very first day together. And then I mentioned Professor Ricki Goldman who used to teach all of the cognitive classes tending more toward psychology. She made us project partners, which I was not interested in that time because Chad had just moved to New York from Florida. He was having that whole city experience. He was doing his work the day before it was due and he was more concerned with, you know, exploring and sightseeing. But we wound up getting an A that semester. The harsh feelings and judgmental feelings I had at first (like, is this person really gonna pull their weight?) started to dissipate. We got together and we partnered on quite a number of projects over our time at DMDL. He finished much earlier than others in our cohort. He came in as a transfer student from a program at Florida State University, which I think already qualified him to have some classes covered that transferred over to the DMDL program.

What made you go into the DMDL program?

Chad: I wanted to leave Florida, my heart really felt it, something was tugging me. It said sell everything, leave Florida. Hello, New York City.

Has New York City meet your expectations?

Chad: It's expensive. I was living in Bed-Stuy. I remember living the NY dream of hanging til late in the evening and then waking up and going to my afternoon classes. I also worked with Russell Neumann for a bit working on his project. So it was kind of like the college experience that I never really had.

So what was your goal when pursuing your DMDL degree?

Lauren: Oh, I kind of came in with two vastly different ideas of what could happen. When I started applying to the program, we had a governor at the time who was changing a lot of laws reflective to public education. And we were going to be implementing new standardized tests the very next year. That standardized test was going to be a big percentage of teacher evaluation and teacher rehire. I worked in a community where the majority of my students were not high readers. I was getting students who are about four or five years below reading level and then trying to figure out how I could get them to pass this test. So one side of this for me was almost like a backup plan. I figured, you know, next year my kids may fail this test and I may not be rehired in my school district. And if that's the case... what else do you do with a teaching degree? So getting something a little bit more versatile was kind of like a safety net. And then luckily, I did wind up staying in my district and I never left. But, it was nice to transition. I went from being an English Language Arts teacher to being a technology electives teacher. I teach seventh and eighth grade computer classes. I actually teach a class called Introduction to Digital Design, which is a very similar class to a lot of what we've done at the DMDL, although a bit more watered down for them.

How did your schooling at NYU helped you with your current position?

Lauren: Getting a master's degree, as a teacher, is a pay raise in the public education system. So that was nice. I was teaching language arts, which I mentioned was a bit of a struggle given the reading levels of my students. A lot of grading, a lot of pressure from the standardized test. I was able to transition into the role as the computer teacher and teach the elective courses, which has been gratifying and a nice sort of change of career without actually leaving my job. So I was able to kind of carve out a nice little niche for myself.

It also qualified me to be a technology coach in my building, which means I get more oversight into budget decisions about what platforms to purchase and things of that nature. So it's exciting in the way that I get to guide what my classroom looks like, but also make recommendations for the building as a whole. I spent a little bit of time looking into leaving the classroom, but didn't pursue that seriously when I was at DMDL. After hearing from my classmates about their first job offers, I found that the pay was similar for a starting interaction designer versus what I was making in the classroom. So I decided to stay in the classroom where I had my pension hopefully coming my way, fair benefits, and I have summers off.

One thing that I have done additionally is work as a teacher consultant for Ed Tech tools. I do that on the evenings and weekends as a secondary form of income. I work right now for a reading company called Squiggle Park Dreamscape. They make reading games for students between Pre-K and eighth grade. I'm their teacher on staff. I help them determine if their curriculum is aligned and things of that nature.

Have you stay in contact with the faculty or fellow students from the DMDL ?And has this helped you with your career goals or support?

Lauren :I would say that I haven't stayed as close with fellow students as I would've liked. I think that's because I went part-time and my cohorts outpaced me. Students were finishing and moving on while I was still enrolled; I was a part of two or three different cohorts of students at DMDL while I was there. I have some nice LinkedIn connections. I would say the closest people I've been with are people that are on the Facebook group. I was able to work with Elana Blinder. This year we did an IDEO challenge together, and she was not even the same cohort as me. She just happened to be active on the Facebook group.

Another connection is with current students through my work with Squiggle Park . We had NYU DMDL interns beginning maybe two years ago, and that partnership has stayed active. Every semester since then we've had one or two NYU students come aboard to do some of our user experience work. And that's been nice.

DMDL also seems to have changed quite a bit. I think Maaike is the only faculty from the staff that I know who is still at NYU. Maaike is definitely my point person if I had to reach out and she's great.

What did you do your thesis on?

Lauren: My thesis was called, “We're Done With The Writer's Notebook, Digital Alternatives for Language Arts." It was something that I was looking into, because as you were just asking me about educational tools, almost everything that we saw as an example at DMDL seems to be geared towards math or science. We saw a whole bunch of online activities for those subject areas, but not so much for the more liberal arts kinds of courses. As an English teacher at the time, I was wondering, like, what can I possibly use in my classroom? So I did a deep dive into what was out there and made some recommendations about what I thought would be good for future projects. Ultimately I wrote a paper.

Is there something out there now that would fit that need?

It's starting, I would say you're starting to see some stealth assessment and some gamification move into the English Language Arts world. I presented at conferences this year on that topic. I presented at FETC in Florida and I presented just recently at TCCA in Texas about how to look for things of that nature. It's mostly role-playing games, like immersive experiences .

Can you tell me a little bit about what you've been doing since you graduated?

Chad : Sure. Following NYU's degree, I went to Teachers College and got a Masters in Learning Analytics and started working at a startup in the educational tech space called BrightBytes, who partnered with K12 school districts and aggregated all the different data sources together in order to drive insight. My role there was research data scientist where I was modelling the likelihood of high-school dropout for all students all the way down to first grade.

Following that, I continued on to IBM where I worked as a data scientist in the Cognitive People Solutions Department conducting workforce analysis across the entire global population, which is about 330,000 employees. There I was looking at learning data that was extracted from our learning management system, identifying the key skills and roles within a specific job function, and then determining the likelihood of an employee leveraging those professional development opportunities in terms of their overall career success.

I worked at IBM for about a year before I transitioned over to R B (Reckitt Benckiser), which is where I work now. I am the Global Leader of People Analytics where I'm now developing the people strategy across the whole organization. So at RB, part of my role entails working closely with the Learning and Development Department to develop taxonomies around our learning and curriculum and using that data to inform our strategy across the entire human capital; everything from career mobility, professional development, to identifying a gap in our skills and workforce capabilities. These insights allow us to identify opportunities where where we can up-skill or reskill the existing employee population in order to improve our overall Talent Strategy while also reducing our overall employee attrition.

How do you find that DMDL helped you prepare for that?

Chad: My career is very data-driven,. Yeah, I do lean heavily on my data science background and I am still a part-time PhD student at Teachers College in Cognitive Science but I will say my experience in DMDL has really informed my ability to work with those learning stakeholders across industries. So whether I was working in the educational sector, whether I was working in a non-profit, working in big tech, or a CPG consumer products and goods company like RB (you probably haven't heard of them, but we make Lysol-we're killing it right now), learning is a key piece, regardless of the industry or sector, right? So in education, all you need to understand is how learning is delivered in order to better understand what interventions and potential affordances you can provide for learners in terms of mitigating any sort of at-risk student learning outcome.

Same thing happens in professional development at the corporate level where you need to understand how the professional development is delivered and how that content structured. Doing so enables you to better inform and iterate on that content in order to improve not only the experience from the employee perspective (because if you have learning in place then the employee feels like they can learn new skills that can help transition them into a better position at the company, rather than having to look for external competitors), but it also helps a company, understand where the deficiencies lie in terms of our capabilities, right?

As just as an example; here at RB our HR function is going through a data transformation right now. Making data-driven decisions gives us a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace for us to not only identify potential new key-talent but also improve and grow our existing talent capital. Learning is really the best way to understand how to deliver those new skills to the individual. It's a great way to understand the deficiencies (gaps in knowledge) that are in place and ultimately enable us to adjust the culture and content around a specific topic.

I leverage a lot of my knowledge from the DMDL program whenever I speak to high level stakeholders such as the top executive leadership. They understand we need to continuously improve the experience around learning and will often ask questions like is there is anyway we can add some sort of a gamification element? I would say definitely my experience in DMDL has afforded me the capability to not only be hyper focused in the data space, but also kind of be a generalist across the organization. So whether I am speaking to the director of learning or an executive, I can speak to her as an equal in terms of my knowledge and content area.

Has COVID affected your workforce? If so, how and has your experience at DMDL helped prepare you for this challenge?

Lauren: That's a great question. We went fully remote as a school district on March 12th. I think that compared to most teachers, it was an extremely easy transition for me because DMDL was constantly exposing us to different educational games and offerings. So much of what I did with my students were actually things that I drew from professors, coworkers. I went back and looked at all the activities that we had done and so many of those things were things I was able to harness.

Can you give me an example?

Lauren: Yeah, sure. So last year I worked with Tunan Guo who was a recent graduate. Tunan was an intern at Squiggle Park with me. He also did internships in other places, like with a company called MissionUS. They make immersive online social studies, role-playing experiences. As he was talking about his internship with them, I was able to take that tool and recommend it to social studies teachers who made use of it. I think as a whole--our internships, the places that people land for work, as well as the resources that we were looking at in classes-- are great.

When I was attending DMDL, there was a class where we basically played games for a full semester and talked about their latent educational value: ways you could tie them to curriculum, ways that you could look for stealth assessment in them. I don't know if that class is still taught. It was taught by Professor Ralph Vacca who's not with the program anymore. He's now at Fordham University. So much of his syllabus became great classroom activities.

What would you recommend? What platforms are using today?

Lauren : Oh, my school highly recommends either Nearpod or Pear Deck, which are interactive programs where you can add polls, drag and drop questions, drawing questions or other activities into a slideshow. We're using that from Pre-k through grade 12. It's excellent because the students can use their Chromebook or their phone to see the slides right on their screen. It's easy for them to follow along and see the presentation. Every couple of slides, teachers can add in some kind of formative assessment so it really is a nice jumping-off point for discussions. It's a great way to check in and see if students are following.

We've been using Quizizz a lot, which has been rolling out a whole bunch of new features. I teach middle school and I think it's great for the upper elementary and middle school grades when they're taking quizzes. Quizizz has completely gamified the experience. There's rewards, there's redemption questions, there are leaderboards. They have a whole bunch of gamified features within there that make it engaging. We use that for homework or study guides before a test. Nearpod, Peardeck, and Quizizz would be the big ones I would recommend!

Do you have any words of advice for those in the middle of pursuing a degree or for those who are just about to start the program?

Lauren: I would definitely say Adobe Photoshop and coding were two things in which I did not invest enough of my time. Based on the few interviews that I did go on, those are things that the average hiring manager is looking to hear about when hiring a designer. Those are skills that they imagine are going to be in that person's skill set. As we already mentioned, I was working full-time and going to school at night so I really just did the coursework and left it at that. I wish I had explored those areas more thoroughly because those are things where I feel like my portfolio didn't stand up as well as it could have. Or if there were questions during an interview, I couldn't speak from personal experience. I can show a great deliverable that somebody in a group project had designed. And if they were like, "Oh, how did you do this?", I could only give credit to my group member.