What brought you to Primary Education and your role here at The City School?

Originally my background is in outdoor education with primary-age children in Canada. I was torn between my passion for the outdoors and my love of technology at this time, and then the opportunity came up for me to make a transition. Twelve years ago, I interviewed with Jackie (Founder of ELC Family of International Schools) and fell in love with the philosophy of The City School and the Reggio Emilia approach. I began as a Year 3 teacher, a role I held for 5 years. At this time, technology was just starting to be integrated into some of the Projects and I was curious about how they used robotics and other technology tools. I started to integrate technology year on year, which became a wider mission to expand technology and incorporate it into learning across the school.

2. Could you describe your role?

The role of Head of Technology and Innovation is a new one. In previous years, our pedagogical consultant, Giovanni Piazza, drove much of our approach, and this responsibility has now been disseminated to me and some other long-standing members of staff. My role covers technology integration from the classroom to the curriculum – it is pretty wide in scope! We have organically built up a lot of the systems and technology pieces that we have, whether robotics, digital citizenship, or 3D printing. These elements have naturally connected with and facilitated learning, especially with our Project work, and the ‘innovation’ component which is inherently part of the learning process is now being more explicitly and systematically integrated into the curriculum. We have made great headway in the last few years in terms of building up both our digital literacy and digital citizenship curriculum, and now we are empowering teachers and coordinators to take ownership of all these elements of technology and innovation knowledge and practicum – it is not just an isolated subject but a necessary and important part of everybody’s lives. My main goal right now is to find innovative tools that we can inject into our learning processes and our forward-thinking Ontario Curriculum. 

3. How has your philosophy of teaching/approach developed over the years? 

The commitment to project work at The City School has really helped to define the way I view children approaching their learning. When children drive the Projects they are intrinsically motivated; there is empowerment, autonomy, and ownership built in when the children create meaningful artifacts, drawing on our technology kits and tools. Personally, I am continually navigating if, when, and how to integrate what I am learning from external accreditations or courses in technology with the unique needs of the The City School’s teaching and learning context and the curriculum expectations. This really encourages an openness and flexibility in my approach. Whilst it is of course critical to innovate and stay relevant, I am always mindful that we are a low technology school by design and this is something upon which we have always prided ourselves. For example, the natural world features in so much of what we do as we ‘bring the outside in’, we refrain from implementing one-to-one devices, and above all, we want the learning to be very human-driven, with interaction at the heart of what we do. So, a big part of my role is folding in the technology meaningfully in ways that prepare your children for their next school and for navigating the 21^st century successfully. Being at The City School, we re-commit each day to setting children up for success, and this is about nurturing and building those transferable skills of knowing how to construct, create, and critique, to plan, design and engineer. Regardless of the technologies in their future, we always want the children to see themselves as creators. 

4. How is Technology and Innovation integrated into curriculum here at The City School? Can you give an example?

I think the way we’ve been utilizing Microbits, which is one of our microcontrollers used typically from Year 4 onwards, is a good illustration of how technology and innovation is integrated in our learning programmes; it can be utilized with Project, with digital literacy, and ties well with the Math and Literacy curriculum expectations inside the classroom. We give children the space and means to naturally integrate technology and innovation into their creative process: children are learning how to code their own inventions; they’re able to write out instructions for how they did it; they’re able to create a ‘how to’ of its operations; and they can build and design in the atelier. For me, it is these personally meaningful artifacts, that have travelled in and across disciplines, and can be shared with their peers, which captures the ‘magic’ of our learning.

5. Broadly speaking, I think parents have concerns with technology and

their child for two reasons. Firstly, the pitfalls in overuse and security/safety and secondly, with the arrival of generative AI, and more generally the speed with which technology is advancing, parents consider how to ‘future-proof’ their children. Could you say a little about how you navigate these issues in school? 

With regards to AI, we are still very much at the ‘talking points’ stage, both as a school and directly with the children. Whilst we haven’t developed any specific policies or lesson on AI yet, largely because of the speed at which they’re evolving, with the older years we do talk about machine learning and how these AI large language models have been built and we talk about how bias can be injected into this. We discuss issues of privacy and security in our digital citizenship lessons across Years 1-6, including the importance of securing personal information and the concept of a digital footprint. In Media Literacy we have the help of Rachel Wright, Head Librarian, and Rachael Foster, Head of Literacy, to address issues of fact and opinion, algorithmic searches, and the importance of developing a hypercritical eye online. In a post-pandemic world, a lot of the research has shifted away from screentime as such, and is focusing more on what we are doing on the screens – are we being hypervigilant, critical, creative, or are we just consuming? As educators, we are trying to ensure our use of technology is all creator-driven with very little consumption. Of course, it might not be so easy at home! Our advice would be to try to use screens for as much creative content as possible, which could include your child coding, or even making their own Youtube videos as they get older!

6. Arguably the most in-demand skill for the future is ‘innovation’ and creativity.

How do you teach innovation?

I don’t think you teach innovation I think you inspire innovation. Specifically in my role, I am tasked with pushing the boundaries of what the best education for children can look like and thinking of new ways we can approach learning tasks that may or may not include technology. Innovation involves creating a space in which we encourage risk-taking and divergent thinking, and developing a mindset whereby children don’t feel constrained by conventional structures or materials. I think it is an inspirational role: I’m not going to be the educator who will introduce what follows AI – newer staff members will come along and generate new ideas, but rather I see my role as interweaving all these ideas together and being able to disseminate the information to everybody. So, in this way, I am trying to build and promote a culture of innovation.

7. Who or what inspires you?

There are a few I can mention! Mark Rober and Casey Neistat come to mind first. As Youtubers, vloggers, educators, and what I’d call ‘tinkerers’, I admire the way they experiment, learn, and create things; the processes aren’t perfect or beautiful, but rather they are transparent and they invite us to witness the challenges, messiness, and learning inherently built in. When I’m working in the atelier with the children it’s so important to show the ‘behind the scenes’; I welcome the aesthetic of the ‘imperfect’ – the crossings out, duct tape fixups, all those things that show how children work upon things, in essence, making their learning visible. My daily inspiration is really a rich blend of all the things I have learnt from The City School, from Giovanni, from the Reggio approach, and folding into this my own 21^st century external inputs.