By Mary Worrell

The last few years of my life have been chocked full of more change than one would want to digest in a decade. From changing careers and running my own freelancing business while getting a teaching license to student teaching, various temporary contracts and moving across the Atlantic to start a new life in The Netherlands with my partner. There have been few dull moments. I arrived in The Netherlands without a job, but I had to work. I provided English tutoring lessons, cleaned a few houses, washed some windows and even did some transatlantic freelance work that had me up in the middle of the night over Skype.

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In the midst of this flux and adjustment, I decided to pursue my master’s degree and submitted my application to MSU in March of 2011. I wanted to cultivate and prune my immature philosophies of education and technology. I felt pretty isolated in my new home thanks to a mix of language barriers and my own fears and I knew I wasn’t going to grow professionally without some discussion and further education. I wanted to learn how to help schools and colleagues integrate technology in ways that deepened learning. If I wasn’t teaching, I wanted to grow beyond where I was and figure out where to go next.

Once I decided to pursue my master’s, I was hired to join a team starting up a brand new international school in Breda. Before I could take a breath, I was back to the high-wire juggling act of working and teaching that I’ve come to know well over the last 10 years. Looking back, maybe it wasn’t the wisest decision to begin graduate school while also beginning a new, incredibly challenging job. However, I’m not sure I could have weathered the challenges of the new job without the inspiration and learning I received through my MAET courses.

I learned what true leadership looks like and sounds like. I learned to communicate effectively and recognize that “my way” is just one way. Through my overseas program in Dublin in the summer of 2012, I learned how to discuss and explore ideas and plan large projects effectively – to avoid the “circle of death” that many meetings can devolve into. I learned that putting on a free conference and presenting at it is the quickest way to uncover your own strengths and shortcomings.

I learned what good teaching looks like. The binary of good and bad teaching is a false binary, the definitions of each depending greatly on each school’s culture and leadership. We know it when we see it, but that always depends on who is doing the looking. From my vantage point as an MAET student, I saw incredible teaching as a student of this program and as a result I have implemented many of the strategies that were delivered to me by my professors. Quickfire challenges, for example, are a common element of my classroom these days.

While I wish I could say I have it all figured out, I have not. My teaching practice is challenged now more than ever. My new knowledge and understandings confront me daily as I teach, provide feedback, collaborate, assess and observe. I can see when I haven’t anticipated challenges or misunderstandings enough. When I recognize this common, new-teacher misstep, I fall back on the strategies I gathered through my MAET courses, such as using the TPACK model to plan and reflect on the choices I’ve made.

This reflection could never be a clear-cut report of what I’ve learned and how I’ve changed, because my practice is an iterative process that changes daily with each bit of reflection. The MAET program did not provide me with a handbook for teaching and integrating technology, but rather gave me the skills to approach new situations, be they isolated moments in my curriculum planning to school-wide initiatives. Experts and researchers are still debating how people learn best and the impact of technologies on this natural process, and so I continue moving forward, rolling with the punches and changing and shifting to meet the needs of my students. My Master of Arts in Educational Technology is a tightly-woven net that I fall back on daily and which I know will support my career as a teacher moving forward.