Rob’s current professional curiosities are:

•  Which social, cultural, pedagogical, and curricular factors contribute to the higher achievement levels of New Zealand students than U.S. students as measured by PISA?
• What are effective and not effective elements of digital pedagogies in various grade levels and content areas?

Rob’s background

Rob started his adult life as an engineer.  After training adults and tutoring students for years, he realized that education was a field that he was most interested in.  He earned a masters degree in teaching and started working as a science and engineering teacher.  During his years of teaching, Rob redesigned his science curricula and instructional practices to reflect the Modeling Method of science teaching.  During this time, Rob also earned National Board Certification and was a finalist for the Illinois Teacher of the Year.  Rob was also highly involved in the evaluation and adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards in Illinois.  After 7 years of teaching, Rob earned his second masters degree (Educational Leadership) and moved into a leadership position as the Director of Instructional Technology for a large, suburban secondary school district that was just starting a 1:1 mobile learning program.  In that role, Rob led an amazing team of Instructional Technology Specialists who designed and delivered mobile device teaching training for 550+ teachers.  The team also designed and led the effort to train all students new to 1:1 devices every year (2,000+ students).  Rob’s other duties included organizing district-wide professional learning days and working with vendors to digitize curricula.  Rob participated in Curriculum & Instruction teams as well as Operations teams during his time as director.  Also, during this time, Rob completed his doctoral degree (Ed.D.) in Leadership in Curriculum and Instruction with his dissertation topic being related to teacher instructional technology beliefs and their relation to teacher pedagogical beliefs.

Rob is currently in New Zealand working as a Research Fellow investigating how mobile device programs are impacting the learning of underperforming students in both urban and rural low-income schools.  This role is giving Rob the opportunity to observe many and varied models of digital pedagogy in authentic teaching settings in schools with different cultural communities.  Rob is also learning a lot about literacy from a global perspective from his mentors within the research center.