EdTech Adventures: Digital Learning with Joel Kupperstein
[00:00:00] Charlotte Cheng: Welcome to EdTech Adventures. Join us as we explore the role of technology, STEM, and creative play in education. With expert guests, we'll discover how learning is always an adventure. Video, app, website, game... these days there are so many online learning resources and tools available for students that it can be hard to choose. Today, our guest, Joel, will share how he's learned to create quality digital learning content that both students and teachers can enjoy.
Joel Kupperstein is the Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Learning A-Z, a company delivering digital learning resources to teachers and students across the globe. Prior to Learning A-Z, Joel was senior vice president of curriculum at ABCmouse and director of product management for McGraw-Hill School Education Group. Thanks so much for joining our podcast, Joel.
[00:00:49] Joel Kupperstein: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:51] Charlotte Cheng: Now let's start at the beginning of your journey. Could you describe a memorable education experience that you've had as a student?
[00:00:59] Joel Kupperstein: I guess I would focus mostly on stuff that happened to me as I got a little bit older, into high school and into college and into graduate school. I think as a little kid, I really had a love of knowing things as opposed to a love of learning. I don't know why this sticks with me. When I was in high school, we had some amazing English teachers and they asked us to explore a poet, a playwright, and an author of our choosing and do some kind of comparison.
And I'd never had quite such an open invitation. And I still remember who I picked and those are still some of my favorite writers to this day. But as I was thinking about this question, I realized as a kid, I was one of those who read the Guinness Book of World Records. I loved facts, I loved to know things. And then as I got on in age, I really discovered a love for learning in a, in a different way.
[00:01:45] Charlotte Cheng: I'm just curious, who were the three that you picked?
[00:01:48] Joel Kupperstein: So the playwright was Edward Albee, the poet was Dylan Thomas, and the author was Kurt Vonnegut. And to this day, Kurt Vonnegut is one of my heroes. Absolutely.
[00:01:59] Charlotte Cheng: Oh, he's such a fascinating character. And I love how you distinct between knowing and learning. I think especially in this generation of kids where facts are at their fingertips, it's really important to have that distinction, right?
[00:02:11] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah, that's an amazing point. It's one thing to just collect facts. It's not unimportant to do that, it can really help with a lot of things, but also to parse critically what it is that you're learning and hearing about and making sure you're able to synthesize and evaluate information. We've always said that that kind of critical thinking is important, but only more and more and more as time goes on.
[00:02:33] Charlotte Cheng: Agreed. Even more so now. Now you became a learner, I guess, in late high school. Could you share how you went from there to being interested in the world of education?
[00:02:41] Joel Kupperstein: Well, I've always been interested in working with kids since I was a kid. I was a day camp counselor when I was younger. And I kinda come from generations of teachers. My mother taught kindergarten. My grandmother was a math teacher back in the 1930s, which I'm really proud of. And I've always had kind of a natural predilection for working with kids.
I've heard somebody say, uh, painters paint because they have to, not 'cause they want to. And I think teachers are kinda like that. They work with kids, they help people learn 'cause that's just wired into them. And I humbly co- count myself among them. So education was the most natural place for me to take that. And so by the time I hit probably my second year as an undergrad, I said, "All right, that's it. I'm gonna be an elementary school teacher." And that's what I committed to, for not [laughs] as long as I'd expected to.
[00:03:27] Charlotte Cheng: That's so funny. I had a very similar path. Like, both of my grandparents were teachers. And like you said, I could not teach. Like, I was teaching my younger cousins, and same thing sophomore year, I'm like, "This is it."
[00:03:39] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:39] Charlotte Cheng: Like, "This is where I wanna go." So you said you became a teacher. What happened there? Like, you-
[00:03:44] Joel Kupperstein: [laughs]
[00:03:44] Charlotte Cheng: ... were a teacher for a couple years. How'd you make the transition?
[00:03:47] Joel Kupperstein: Uh, well, I'll try to keep it a short story. But, uh, you know, doors open for you when they do. And so early on, I had the opportunity to try something new and I had a support network around me that encouraged me to do it and I just kinda went for it. It was a long time ago now and got into publishing back then and really loved it. And I think the thing that surprised me the most as I got into it after a few years was how interested I was in the business aspect of it. If you had told me when I was young that someday you're gonna have an MBA, I'd have told you you were nuts. Uh, that's icky and I don't want anything to do with that. But I find it important and fascinating and energizing now in a way I never would have thought.
[00:04:26] Charlotte Cheng: That's really interesting. I'm noticing a lot of universities see the benefit of that marriage of education and business acumen.
[00:04:33] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:33] Charlotte Cheng: So they have, like, dual degrees out there as well. So from there, you know, you've worked at McGraw-Hill, you've worked at ABCmouse. What was that experience like?
[00:04:43] Joel Kupperstein: In some ways, very different. In some ways, similar. So I've always thought about my job as making connections between people, between people and markets, between people and products. So when I get to a, a new opportunity, I think, "Okay, where are the connections not happening the way they can and how can I help with that?" Whether that's drawing on my experience as an educator or drawing on my experience as an editor or drawing on my experience as a product person, uh, it really depends.
So at McGraw, I was very much focused on connecting technology, market, and content. At that time, I was working on math materials. And then when I was working on ABCmouse there, my role was one more specific to content, but we had some really amazing learning designers there already. And so my usefulness came in connecting them to the business because that wasn't something they were terribly, terribly familiar with. And frankly, the business wasn't all that sure about how to deal with them. So I tried to add value there by helping to bridge that gap. You know, building bridges and mending fences, that's something I think a lot about.
[00:05:44] Charlotte Cheng: Well, now at Learning A-Z, what are your main priorities and focuses? Is it different than your past positions? It, is it much of the same? Can you describe what it's like?
[00:05:53] Joel Kupperstein: Sure. It's really exciting for me, what we're doing there. My role in the product strategy group is to stitch together all of the aspects of the product development and product lifecycle under one umbrella. So we have what we think of as a seven-stage product development model that takes an idea from inception through to launch and enhancement in the marketplace. And then, of course, it's an iterative thing because once you... That's the beautiful thing about technology, is when you put a digital product out there, you can keep learning about and iterating on it.
But there are lots of contributors, functional contributors to that process. And it's not just the engineers who are writing the code and it's not just the instructional designers who are designing the curriculum. It's also the visual designers, it's also the product managers who are responsible for the intersection of content and marketing technology. It's also the product marketing specialists who understand how to communicate about the product. And it's also about what we call sales enablement and making sure that people who are out there meeting with our customers have what they need in order to be successful. So our group is about bringing together all of those different functions, and it's been an absolute thrill to be part of it for the last several months.
[00:06:59] Charlotte Cheng: It sounds like you're never bored. [laughs]
[00:07:01] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah, [laughs] that's for sure.
[00:07:03] Charlotte Cheng: Um, so in this space, you said product strategy. So for you, what does digital learning look like in your line of work? What is that experience like for kids and teachers and parents?
[00:07:12] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah. This is a really important topic. I, I think we have to keep in mind that digital and technology is a means, it's not an end. And we don't use technology for novelty's sake. We use it for expediency's sake 'cause it can solve problems for us. It can help us meet needs, do jobs, accomplish goals. We never talked about the medium when, when things were typically paper/pencil, but now all of a sudden, we're still talking about technology as a novelty.
And our kids don't see technology as a novelty. This is what they grew up in. It used to be the case maybe 15 years ago or more that computer time or tablet time or whatever it was was something kids love to do for the sake of doing it. You know, like, "Just put me on a screen, I don't care, I'll do anything." And that's not the case anymore. The content has to be compelling. It has to be meaningful.
And so when we talk about digital, what does it actually do for us? This whole thing still has to be about teaching. It still has to be about the art and science of guiding every single kid to maximizing their learning outcome and also building their own positive learner identity. And if you can use technology to do that, then fantastic. But we also know that there are plenty of technologies that don't help with those, and that's what we should be staying away from.
So technology does some great things for us. It can help us create content more efficiently. It can create dynamic content for us. It can give us really precise, real-time information about what kids know and don't know and are ready to learn. But all of that is in service of learning outcomes for kids, or at least it should be. And if it's not, we need to be thinking about it differently.
[00:08:41] Charlotte Cheng: That's true. And sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the purpose because, I don't know about you, but in our company, we, we are constantly grappling, "Is this fun? Is this engaging?" Like you said, kids are now curators. Like, they will instantly tell you, age three-
[00:08:54] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:54] Charlotte Cheng: ... "This is not for me." And so we're constantly leaning towards that. But if we lean too far, you can sort of lose the main objective, which is, "Hey, this is supposed to be a tool, right, for the parents-
[00:09:04] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:04] Charlotte Cheng: ... and the teachers." That's really hard to juggle all of those objectives in mind, right?
[00:09:08] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah, especially when there's a gap between our own experience with technology and young kids' own experience with technology. So, uh, you know, deciding how you're gonna put things in front of them, how much time they're gonna spend matters. You talked about engaging and fun, and engaging is something I think an awful lot about. It's a word that's been pretty much done to death.
But what are we really talking about when we talk about engaging? I don't think we're talking about funny and cute. I think we're talking about "Does it inspire curiosity? Does it make me wanna persist and continue? Is it compelling to me?" Whatever that means. Engaging literally means I'm engaged. It means I wanna stick with something. And that's what technology needs to be. And it doesn't have to be some kind of high-end, polished media to be that, it just needs to be something that puts its hooks in you and makes you wanna stay with it.
[00:09:57] Charlotte Cheng: Right. Agreed. So I know Learning A-Z, you cover so many different topics, but I wanna delve into literacy first because it is now a huge concern given the learning loss students have experienced in the past few years. For you, what makes literacy different than teaching math or science when it comes to digital resources?
[00:10:15] Joel Kupperstein: When it comes to digital resources, I mean, obviously the research that drives the pedagogy is unique to literacy. The application of literacy to other subject areas is really important. You know, there is no proficiency in science without proficiency in literacy, for example. There is no proficiency in social studies without proficiency in literacy. And that's certainly really, really important.
Those foundational skills are critical, making sure kids are proficient with, uh, letter-sound correspondences, phonological awareness, fluency, and those kinds of things. But I think we should be talking more and more about really what the end goal of literacy is, and that's comprehension. We know from the research that having content knowledge about what it is you're reading is a key ingredient to being able to comprehend it.
So, uh, you know, exposure to content, building that knowledge is gonna be really important to driving that kind of robust comprehension we need. And technology can be very useful in that it can provide very efficiently and with a ton of equity access to the kind of array of content, uh, both in difficulty level and in its nature. You know, like, what are you covering fiction, nonfiction across genres and topics? Um, so yeah, technology, I think, uh, I... If it's not clear, I'm staying away from bleeding-edge tech on purpose-
[00:11:33] Charlotte Cheng: [laughs]
[00:11:34] Joel Kupperstein: ... because of bang for the buck issues. I think that's not necessarily what we're after here. I think we're talking about leveraging technology in a classroom, the realities of that paradigm for teachers.
[00:11:45] Charlotte Cheng: Right. I see it as just one tool in a very large toolbox for a teacher, right?
[00:11:50] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:50] Charlotte Cheng: And it doesn't have to be flashy. It needs to be effective. Um, now, you mentioned that, hey, this is crucial for social studies and science, like having that literacy. So how do you fold in literacy when it comes to other subjects with your online digital learning tools? Like, how do you continue to reinforce it as they're exploring these other subject areas?
[00:12:08] Joel Kupperstein: Literacy is not limited to just "Can I read words on a page?" It's "Can listen and comprehend? Can I parse what I'm seeing that's in a particular language? And can I give it back? Can I communicate out to you and understand it?" So how are we going to know what kids know about a science topic or a social studies topic unless they have the literacy chops to communicate about it effectively? It's not really an option to separate the two out. And I think a lot of teachers know that if they're going to effectively build outcomes, drive outcomes for kids across those subject areas, they must be integrated in a lot of, uh, kind of deep and essential ways.
[00:12:47] Charlotte Cheng: Gotcha. And you keep bringing up this comprehension piece, right? Checking to see if they've absorbed it. How have you learned to use digital tools to check for that comprehension to make sure that they're understanding, to make sure that they have the support that they need?
[00:13:03] Joel Kupperstein: I think we knew outside the digital realm generally how to do that as educators, you know, the kinds of questions you ask, the kinds of prompts you put in front of kids. And then the challenge is not losing the nuances of that item design when you go to digital because you may be tempted to reduce these kinds of questions to multiple choice or sorting things that don't really get at the underlying knowledge that you're after.
So we need to make sure that the technology that we build really does represent the knowledge we're trying to assess. Otherwise, you're gonna get all kinds of false information about what kids know and don't know. So in a lot of ways, we have used technology a bit too much as a crutch for collecting data, and we need to demand from it that it does a more authentic job of assessing what it is we want to assess, if you know what I mean.
And the way teachers having a conversation with kids in real-time, in real life can do, technology needs to do the same for us. Now it can scale that for us very, very quickly by enabling multiple kids to be having unique experiences, simultaneously collecting information about those experiences and reporting it back to us. But we just need to make sure that those experiences are legitimate and, uh, useful.
[00:14:18] Charlotte Cheng: Right. And that can be really tricky. Like you said, when you're using technology, the easy road is a multiple choice question 'cause it's a very black and white answer. But a lot of these subject areas, the open-ended questions are where you're gonna get the best understanding of where the kid is at, where their learning point is at. So it's interesting, like, examining how to do so. We struggle with it ourselves. We have these open-ended, like, capstone projects where kids create a coding game-
[00:14:44] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:44] Charlotte Cheng: ... and we give teachers a rubric that they use to evaluate it. So it's not just like a multiple choice question. And a lot of teachers like, "Can you just help me grade? Just give it a grade." And we're just like, "Wait, no, no, no." [laughs]
[00:14:56] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:56] Charlotte Cheng: "We can't replace everything. Let's teach you how to look at your students work so you can evaluate because you have a really important set of skills that technology really cannot and probably should not replace," right?
[00:15:10] Joel Kupperstein: [laughs] That's an interesting thing. You say technology cannot and should not replace things. I think we say those things until it can. And then we're confronted with it and then we say, "Oh, my gosh, maybe we don't need to have this as a critical learning objective anymore." And the technology now has all of a sudden replaced our need to make sure kids know how to do this or that or the other thing.
And a lot of these things are pretty sensitive for people. "What do you mean you don't have to teach that anymore?" Um, and I think it's really a question of matching the task design to the learning objective. Calculators are a good example of this. Like, "Oh, my gosh, is it okay for kids to use calculators in a math class?" Well, certainly not on a math facts fluency type of test, but in other cases, it may be really appropriate for them to do that.
So I think we kind of hold dear that there's this idea that technology can never or should never replace things, but I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it. I think we're going to accept technologies that make us more efficient and we're gonna welcome them and we're gonna embrace them. And then it's gonna change the way we think about what we actually need people to do to learn and to represent that they know as we teach and have them practice and assess.
[00:16:18] Charlotte Cheng: Yeah, no, thanks for making that point. You're right. It's ever evolving. I'm just so hardhearted. [laughs] I'm like, "There needs to be a teacher." But who knows? You don't know where the future is. I'm sure the same thing with the calculator when that-
[00:16:30] Joel Kupperstein: So-
[00:16:30] Charlotte Cheng: ... TI-82 came out. Yeah.
[00:16:31] Joel Kupperstein: Let's be really clear. I am not saying we will never need teachers.
[00:16:34] Charlotte Cheng: [laughs]
[00:16:34] Joel Kupperstein: I think teachers are amazing and indispensable and super important and they're in the mi-, in the middle of everything that I do every single day in my job at Learning A-Z. Teachers are the centerpiece of everything. Our job is to make them able to do their job better, more efficiently, more, in a more empowered way. If I'm not delivering technology to them that helps with that, then I'm, you know, what am I doing? So no interest at all [laughs] in, in replacing them, but I wanna grease the skids for 'em. I wanna be a catalyst. I wanna be their kind of jetpack because, you know, largely, they do know what they're doing and what they're after, and that's what we're here to help with.
[00:17:10] Charlotte Cheng: That's true. It's like trying to remove the grunt work for them so they can really focus on their special skillset. Like, grading papers [laughs] nonstop all day probably is not the best use of their talent or their time really.
[00:17:24] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah. There's an element of efficiency that we wanna help with, and then there's an element of exactitude that we wanna help with.
[00:17:29] Charlotte Cheng: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:29] Joel Kupperstein: So, you know, taking some of the friction out of the work that they do as they plan large chunks of time for their day, the setup they do every morning as they get ready to teach, making those processes easier, more replicable, and then also enabling them to have fine point information about what kids are doing and what they know and what should happen with them next.
Those are great ways to employ technology to help teachers out and in no way suggesting that it's replacing anything they do. It's really, these are really tools that make these professionals. Like, every other professional there is, whether it's a mechanic or a carpenter or a doctor, everybody's got tools that enable them to be more successful at the job they do. And, you know, I'm proud to be a person who's tried to provide those tools for teachers for quite a long time now.
[00:18:17] Charlotte Cheng: Yeah, same here as well. [laughs] Now, how can parents and educators find the digital learning content that is the best match for the needs of their kids or students? Basically, how do they figure out what's the right tool for them when there's so much out there right now?
[00:18:32] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah. Well, I would start by thinking about the categories of the tools. So to me, the world of digital educational resources falls into three buckets. There are utilities, there are repositories, and there are programs, where a utility is a tool you can use to accomplish some kind of goal, but it's really not about content. And there are some blurry lines here. But the Zoom, like we're talking on Zoom right now, that's an example of a utility.
Then there are repositories, and these are, uh, libraries of content that don't necessarily specify exactly when or how you use the content in there, but they can become resources for educators and parents and kids to use in lots and lots of ways. And they tend to be, if they're effective, really, really versatile. Our Raz-Plus prog-, product at Learning A-Z is a really good example of one of those. That's been a tremendous help for teachers for a good long time.
And then the last category is program, and a program also delivers content, but it delivers it with a sequence in mind. And it has a lot more structure to the expectation of how it's going to be employed. We have a program called Foundations A-Z, which is focused obviously on foundational skills and literacy that's more along those lines. So the first step, "Do I need a utility? Do I need a repository? Do I need a program? So what problem am I trying to solve?" Uh, and then, of course, beyond that, you got to ask yourself, "Is it rigorous? Is it engaging? And is it easy to use?"
We kinda talked about that earlier. But rigorous means, you know, does it really foster meaningful and durable learning? Meaningful meaning this is important stuff and durable meaning I retain it over time. We talked about engaging. Is it engaging? Meaning am I really interested in doing this thing? Whatever that means. Am I curious? Am I interested in persisting? Do I really wanna stick with it? And then easy to use is pretty self-explanatory, but we are talking about both the kids and the grown-ups here. We all know that introducing friction into those systems just really quickly gets in the way of them having the impact that we want them to have.
[00:20:30] Charlotte Cheng: No, that's helpful. Like, learning how to assess the problem that you're trying to solve and then matching the correct tool for them. And that's for now, but can you imagine looking into the future, right? How could digital learning content evolve in the future? What could it look like?
[00:20:46] Joel Kupperstein: Well, we're still gonna be trying to solve the same problems, and that's going to be getting learners to learn as much as they can, as deeply as they can, as durably as they can, as fast as they can. And so to the extent that technology can help us with all those things, we're gonna embrace that. So I think technology over time has proven to enable us to have more precise information about what kids know and need to know. They are able to help us find the most accurately targeted content to meet those learning needs, and then maybe, like we talked about a little while ago, potentially shifting what we think of as the critical learning outcomes.
So the things you used to think you had to teach kids to do, maybe you don't need to teach them anymore or you need to focus differently and shift that to new things like, as we talked about toward the beginning of our time together, the importance of teaching kids evaluative skills and critical thinking skills. If you have things like generative AI, for example, now creating content for us, how important is it to make sure that kids can evaluate that content and, uh, represent their understanding of what constitutes good or effective or useful or whatever the parameter is?
So, uh, I'm excited about that because I've known for a long, long time that these kinds of evaluative skills are really critical. I've seen it in my own kids. And when I taught a long, long time ago, they were important then. But it's been a challenge to get our system to carve out the minutes to focus on them in the way they need to. Well, uh, I think this is gonna kinda catalyze that a bit, and I think we're gonna need to spend more time on that. We all know it. And now I think it's more likely to happen than ever as we go forward.
[00:22:25] Charlotte Cheng: I'm excited about that, too, because regardless of, um, what career you go into, what subject you are interested in, you need those evaluative skills to be successful-
[00:22:35] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:35] Charlotte Cheng: ... and to be productive, [laughs] too. Like, if you don't have those skillsets, you might just focus on the knowing and never innovate, never learn.
[00:22:43] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah. Yeah. I'm really, I'm excited when I see learners ask questions. "How do I know this to be true? Is this the right thing? What if I test my assumption about this, that, or the other thing?" In a day and age when so much information is so readily accessible, it's very, very tempting to just take things at face value, assume that they're accurate and useful and correct, and move on with those assumptions. And it takes some work to recognize that that's not always the case.
But, man, is that important work? I think those are some of the skills that, that accelerate people's ability to learn and succeed and accomplish goals and get to where they wanna go to because they recognize that they need to evaluate information that they're given and fit it to the use case that they're chasing or to make sure that it is answering the question that they have in a way that makes sense. All that kind of stuff, I think, is gonna be really important.
[00:23:40] Charlotte Cheng: Yeah. [laughs] It's feeling more like reverse Socrates 'cause, you know, instead of the teacher asking the questions, it's like we're encouraging the students to ask the questions-
[00:23:48] Joel Kupperstein: That's a great point.
[00:23:49] Charlotte Cheng: ... and also to help them answer them on their own. All right. So what advice would you give to someone who's interested in exploring the world of product development and EdTech? What would be a great first step for them?
[00:23:59] Joel Kupperstein: My first answer would be let's talk. I love talking about this. And I've over the years spent a lot of time with people, uh, who are interested in getting into EdTech, but they come from a few different places. So many of them have been coming out of the classroom. And one of the things I talk about with teachers who are considering getting into EdTech is make sure you have the opportunity to continue turning on light bulbs for young people, you know.
I'll ask people, "What's your favorite thing about teaching?" And they'll say, "It's working with kids and seeing them grasp something and seeing that moment is really energizing." And I say, "Okay, how do you think that's gonna change when you get into EdTech?" And I say things inevitably like, "Well, now I'm gonna do that for thousands of kids all over the country." And my first answer to them is not the same feeling you get being in front of one child and seeing that light bulb go on doesn't happen when you're in EdTech. It just doesn't.
And I still miss it. Whenever I'm with young kids, I find myself falling back into it 'cause it's a niche I love to scratch. And you have to know that that's gonna be a change when you get into EdTech and you have to have that outlet. And if you have that, then I think that transition can be really successful. Then once you're in EdTech and once you're thinking about, "This is what I wanna do, this is where I wanna go for my career," I think it's really important to be what I call T-shaped.
So the idea of being T-shaped is I've got something that I'm narrow and deep in. I understand instructional design. I understand curriculum planning. I understand, uh, any one of these job functions. But I'm gonna become facile in lots and lots of different aspects of the business so that I see how things fit together so that I can make connections between the thing I'm narrow and deep on and the other job function.
So get to know a bit about finance and about marketing and engineering and software development. All these things are important and that's where the T comes in. So I've got the one thing I'm narrow and deep in, but I'm conversant in a lot of other things so that I can connect dots. Even if your profession continues to be a narrow and deep profession, your ability to plug into the larger context of the EdTech initiative, the business, the organization, whatever it is, will be accelerated by your ability to understand the other facets of the org.
[00:26:07] Charlotte Cheng: Right. I've never heard the term T-shaped, but truly, EdTech is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It's like a requirement, right? So that's such a great point. And I cannot plus one you enough about staying in the classroom. I do it. I sneak it in with playtesting. I literally go to the school once a month and see those aha moments. I'm like, "I cannot lose this." So if you pivot, make sure you carve out that time. Like, one of our team members still teaches once or twice a week just to get that in. So love that reminder because at the end of the day, we're still educators, right?
[00:26:38] Joel Kupperstein: For sure. You know, an interesting thing about that I found over time as I've gotten opportunities to be a leader in business organizations is that there are a lot of similarities. And so that great energy that, that I got from teaching kids when I was younger, I get a lot of that from being part of a team now and helping a team achieve.
You know, I was talking with one of my colleagues recently about the thing that gets us most excited at work, and we found that we had the same answer to that question, which is winning as a team, you know, succeeding as a team, getting something done as a team. Uh, and that's that collective light bulb going on. So I've found over time that I think there are some similarities between being, you know, a leader in a classroom and being a leader in business. But as you transition over as an educator, you gotta keep that in mind. You've gotta have that outlet. It's just sort of who you are.
[00:27:24] Charlotte Cheng: Yeah. It's like you said, you have to do it.
[00:27:27] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:27] Charlotte Cheng: It's almost like a requirement. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your vast experience, Joel, and thanks for being part of our podcast.
[00:27:33] Joel Kupperstein: Oh, this is really fun, Charlotte. I really enjoyed it.
[00:27:38] Charlotte Cheng: Thanks for listening to EdTech Adventures. Please subscribe to catch more of our episodes and leave a review to support the show. For more resources and info, visit us at codecombat.com/podcast. I'm your host, Charlotte Cheng. We'll see you on our next learning adventure.
[00:00:00] Charlotte Cheng: Welcome to EdTech Adventures. Join us as we explore the role of technology, STEM, and creative play in education. With expert guests, we'll discover how learning is always an adventure. Video, app, website, game... these days there are so many online learning resources and tools available for students that it can be hard to choose. Today, our guest, Joel, will share how he's learned to create quality digital learning content that both students and teachers can enjoy.
Joel Kupperstein is the Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Learning A-Z, a company delivering digital learning resources to teachers and students across the globe. Prior to Learning A-Z, Joel was senior vice president of curriculum at ABCmouse and director of product management for McGraw-Hill School Education Group. Thanks so much for joining our podcast, Joel.
[00:00:49] Joel Kupperstein: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:51] Charlotte Cheng: Now let's start at the beginning of your journey. Could you describe a memorable education experience that you've had as a student?
[00:00:59] Joel Kupperstein: I guess I would focus mostly on stuff that happened to me as I got a little bit older, into high school and into college and into graduate school. I think as a little kid, I really had a love of knowing things as opposed to a love of learning. I don't know why this sticks with me. When I was in high school, we had some amazing English teachers and they asked us to explore a poet, a playwright, and an author of our choosing and do some kind of comparison.
And I'd never had quite such an open invitation. And I still remember who I picked and those are still some of my favorite writers to this day. But as I was thinking about this question, I realized as a kid, I was one of those who read the Guinness Book of World Records. I loved facts, I loved to know things. And then as I got on in age, I really discovered a love for learning in a, in a different way.
[00:01:45] Charlotte Cheng: I'm just curious, who were the three that you picked?
[00:01:48] Joel Kupperstein: So the playwright was Edward Albee, the poet was Dylan Thomas, and the author was Kurt Vonnegut. And to this day, Kurt Vonnegut is one of my heroes. Absolutely.
[00:01:59] Charlotte Cheng: Oh, he's such a fascinating character. And I love how you distinct between knowing and learning. I think especially in this generation of kids where facts are at their fingertips, it's really important to have that distinction, right?
[00:02:11] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah, that's an amazing point. It's one thing to just collect facts. It's not unimportant to do that, it can really help with a lot of things, but also to parse critically what it is that you're learning and hearing about and making sure you're able to synthesize and evaluate information. We've always said that that kind of critical thinking is important, but only more and more and more as time goes on.
[00:02:33] Charlotte Cheng: Agreed. Even more so now. Now you became a learner, I guess, in late high school. Could you share how you went from there to being interested in the world of education?
[00:02:41] Joel Kupperstein: Well, I've always been interested in working with kids since I was a kid. I was a day camp counselor when I was younger. And I kinda come from generations of teachers. My mother taught kindergarten. My grandmother was a math teacher back in the 1930s, which I'm really proud of. And I've always had kind of a natural predilection for working with kids.
I've heard somebody say, uh, painters paint because they have to, not 'cause they want to. And I think teachers are kinda like that. They work with kids, they help people learn 'cause that's just wired into them. And I humbly co- count myself among them. So education was the most natural place for me to take that. And so by the time I hit probably my second year as an undergrad, I said, "All right, that's it. I'm gonna be an elementary school teacher." And that's what I committed to, for not [laughs] as long as I'd expected to.
[00:03:27] Charlotte Cheng: That's so funny. I had a very similar path. Like, both of my grandparents were teachers. And like you said, I could not teach. Like, I was teaching my younger cousins, and same thing sophomore year, I'm like, "This is it."
[00:03:39] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:39] Charlotte Cheng: Like, "This is where I wanna go." So you said you became a teacher. What happened there? Like, you-
[00:03:44] Joel Kupperstein: [laughs]
[00:03:44] Charlotte Cheng: ... were a teacher for a couple years. How'd you make the transition?
[00:03:47] Joel Kupperstein: Uh, well, I'll try to keep it a short story. But, uh, you know, doors open for you when they do. And so early on, I had the opportunity to try something new and I had a support network around me that encouraged me to do it and I just kinda went for it. It was a long time ago now and got into publishing back then and really loved it. And I think the thing that surprised me the most as I got into it after a few years was how interested I was in the business aspect of it. If you had told me when I was young that someday you're gonna have an MBA, I'd have told you you were nuts. Uh, that's icky and I don't want anything to do with that. But I find it important and fascinating and energizing now in a way I never would have thought.
[00:04:26] Charlotte Cheng: That's really interesting. I'm noticing a lot of universities see the benefit of that marriage of education and business acumen.
[00:04:33] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:33] Charlotte Cheng: So they have, like, dual degrees out there as well. So from there, you know, you've worked at McGraw-Hill, you've worked at ABCmouse. What was that experience like?
[00:04:43] Joel Kupperstein: In some ways, very different. In some ways, similar. So I've always thought about my job as making connections between people, between people and markets, between people and products. So when I get to a, a new opportunity, I think, "Okay, where are the connections not happening the way they can and how can I help with that?" Whether that's drawing on my experience as an educator or drawing on my experience as an editor or drawing on my experience as a product person, uh, it really depends.
So at McGraw, I was very much focused on connecting technology, market, and content. At that time, I was working on math materials. And then when I was working on ABCmouse there, my role was one more specific to content, but we had some really amazing learning designers there already. And so my usefulness came in connecting them to the business because that wasn't something they were terribly, terribly familiar with. And frankly, the business wasn't all that sure about how to deal with them. So I tried to add value there by helping to bridge that gap. You know, building bridges and mending fences, that's something I think a lot about.
[00:05:44] Charlotte Cheng: Well, now at Learning A-Z, what are your main priorities and focuses? Is it different than your past positions? It, is it much of the same? Can you describe what it's like?
[00:05:53] Joel Kupperstein: Sure. It's really exciting for me, what we're doing there. My role in the product strategy group is to stitch together all of the aspects of the product development and product lifecycle under one umbrella. So we have what we think of as a seven-stage product development model that takes an idea from inception through to launch and enhancement in the marketplace. And then, of course, it's an iterative thing because once you... That's the beautiful thing about technology, is when you put a digital product out there, you can keep learning about and iterating on it.
But there are lots of contributors, functional contributors to that process. And it's not just the engineers who are writing the code and it's not just the instructional designers who are designing the curriculum. It's also the visual designers, it's also the product managers who are responsible for the intersection of content and marketing technology. It's also the product marketing specialists who understand how to communicate about the product. And it's also about what we call sales enablement and making sure that people who are out there meeting with our customers have what they need in order to be successful. So our group is about bringing together all of those different functions, and it's been an absolute thrill to be part of it for the last several months.
[00:06:59] Charlotte Cheng: It sounds like you're never bored. [laughs]
[00:07:01] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah, [laughs] that's for sure.
[00:07:03] Charlotte Cheng: Um, so in this space, you said product strategy. So for you, what does digital learning look like in your line of work? What is that experience like for kids and teachers and parents?
[00:07:12] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah. This is a really important topic. I, I think we have to keep in mind that digital and technology is a means, it's not an end. And we don't use technology for novelty's sake. We use it for expediency's sake 'cause it can solve problems for us. It can help us meet needs, do jobs, accomplish goals. We never talked about the medium when, when things were typically paper/pencil, but now all of a sudden, we're still talking about technology as a novelty.
And our kids don't see technology as a novelty. This is what they grew up in. It used to be the case maybe 15 years ago or more that computer time or tablet time or whatever it was was something kids love to do for the sake of doing it. You know, like, "Just put me on a screen, I don't care, I'll do anything." And that's not the case anymore. The content has to be compelling. It has to be meaningful.
And so when we talk about digital, what does it actually do for us? This whole thing still has to be about teaching. It still has to be about the art and science of guiding every single kid to maximizing their learning outcome and also building their own positive learner identity. And if you can use technology to do that, then fantastic. But we also know that there are plenty of technologies that don't help with those, and that's what we should be staying away from.
So technology does some great things for us. It can help us create content more efficiently. It can create dynamic content for us. It can give us really precise, real-time information about what kids know and don't know and are ready to learn. But all of that is in service of learning outcomes for kids, or at least it should be. And if it's not, we need to be thinking about it differently.
[00:08:41] Charlotte Cheng: That's true. And sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the purpose because, I don't know about you, but in our company, we, we are constantly grappling, "Is this fun? Is this engaging?" Like you said, kids are now curators. Like, they will instantly tell you, age three-
[00:08:54] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:54] Charlotte Cheng: ... "This is not for me." And so we're constantly leaning towards that. But if we lean too far, you can sort of lose the main objective, which is, "Hey, this is supposed to be a tool, right, for the parents-
[00:09:04] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:04] Charlotte Cheng: ... and the teachers." That's really hard to juggle all of those objectives in mind, right?
[00:09:08] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah, especially when there's a gap between our own experience with technology and young kids' own experience with technology. So, uh, you know, deciding how you're gonna put things in front of them, how much time they're gonna spend matters. You talked about engaging and fun, and engaging is something I think an awful lot about. It's a word that's been pretty much done to death.
But what are we really talking about when we talk about engaging? I don't think we're talking about funny and cute. I think we're talking about "Does it inspire curiosity? Does it make me wanna persist and continue? Is it compelling to me?" Whatever that means. Engaging literally means I'm engaged. It means I wanna stick with something. And that's what technology needs to be. And it doesn't have to be some kind of high-end, polished media to be that, it just needs to be something that puts its hooks in you and makes you wanna stay with it.
[00:09:57] Charlotte Cheng: Right. Agreed. So I know Learning A-Z, you cover so many different topics, but I wanna delve into literacy first because it is now a huge concern given the learning loss students have experienced in the past few years. For you, what makes literacy different than teaching math or science when it comes to digital resources?
[00:10:15] Joel Kupperstein: When it comes to digital resources, I mean, obviously the research that drives the pedagogy is unique to literacy. The application of literacy to other subject areas is really important. You know, there is no proficiency in science without proficiency in literacy, for example. There is no proficiency in social studies without proficiency in literacy. And that's certainly really, really important.
Those foundational skills are critical, making sure kids are proficient with, uh, letter-sound correspondences, phonological awareness, fluency, and those kinds of things. But I think we should be talking more and more about really what the end goal of literacy is, and that's comprehension. We know from the research that having content knowledge about what it is you're reading is a key ingredient to being able to comprehend it.
So, uh, you know, exposure to content, building that knowledge is gonna be really important to driving that kind of robust comprehension we need. And technology can be very useful in that it can provide very efficiently and with a ton of equity access to the kind of array of content, uh, both in difficulty level and in its nature. You know, like, what are you covering fiction, nonfiction across genres and topics? Um, so yeah, technology, I think, uh, I... If it's not clear, I'm staying away from bleeding-edge tech on purpose-
[00:11:33] Charlotte Cheng: [laughs]
[00:11:34] Joel Kupperstein: ... because of bang for the buck issues. I think that's not necessarily what we're after here. I think we're talking about leveraging technology in a classroom, the realities of that paradigm for teachers.
[00:11:45] Charlotte Cheng: Right. I see it as just one tool in a very large toolbox for a teacher, right?
[00:11:50] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:50] Charlotte Cheng: And it doesn't have to be flashy. It needs to be effective. Um, now, you mentioned that, hey, this is crucial for social studies and science, like having that literacy. So how do you fold in literacy when it comes to other subjects with your online digital learning tools? Like, how do you continue to reinforce it as they're exploring these other subject areas?
[00:12:08] Joel Kupperstein: Literacy is not limited to just "Can I read words on a page?" It's "Can listen and comprehend? Can I parse what I'm seeing that's in a particular language? And can I give it back? Can I communicate out to you and understand it?" So how are we going to know what kids know about a science topic or a social studies topic unless they have the literacy chops to communicate about it effectively? It's not really an option to separate the two out. And I think a lot of teachers know that if they're going to effectively build outcomes, drive outcomes for kids across those subject areas, they must be integrated in a lot of, uh, kind of deep and essential ways.
[00:12:47] Charlotte Cheng: Gotcha. And you keep bringing up this comprehension piece, right? Checking to see if they've absorbed it. How have you learned to use digital tools to check for that comprehension to make sure that they're understanding, to make sure that they have the support that they need?
[00:13:03] Joel Kupperstein: I think we knew outside the digital realm generally how to do that as educators, you know, the kinds of questions you ask, the kinds of prompts you put in front of kids. And then the challenge is not losing the nuances of that item design when you go to digital because you may be tempted to reduce these kinds of questions to multiple choice or sorting things that don't really get at the underlying knowledge that you're after.
So we need to make sure that the technology that we build really does represent the knowledge we're trying to assess. Otherwise, you're gonna get all kinds of false information about what kids know and don't know. So in a lot of ways, we have used technology a bit too much as a crutch for collecting data, and we need to demand from it that it does a more authentic job of assessing what it is we want to assess, if you know what I mean.
And the way teachers having a conversation with kids in real-time, in real life can do, technology needs to do the same for us. Now it can scale that for us very, very quickly by enabling multiple kids to be having unique experiences, simultaneously collecting information about those experiences and reporting it back to us. But we just need to make sure that those experiences are legitimate and, uh, useful.
[00:14:18] Charlotte Cheng: Right. And that can be really tricky. Like you said, when you're using technology, the easy road is a multiple choice question 'cause it's a very black and white answer. But a lot of these subject areas, the open-ended questions are where you're gonna get the best understanding of where the kid is at, where their learning point is at. So it's interesting, like, examining how to do so. We struggle with it ourselves. We have these open-ended, like, capstone projects where kids create a coding game-
[00:14:44] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:44] Charlotte Cheng: ... and we give teachers a rubric that they use to evaluate it. So it's not just like a multiple choice question. And a lot of teachers like, "Can you just help me grade? Just give it a grade." And we're just like, "Wait, no, no, no." [laughs]
[00:14:56] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:56] Charlotte Cheng: "We can't replace everything. Let's teach you how to look at your students work so you can evaluate because you have a really important set of skills that technology really cannot and probably should not replace," right?
[00:15:10] Joel Kupperstein: [laughs] That's an interesting thing. You say technology cannot and should not replace things. I think we say those things until it can. And then we're confronted with it and then we say, "Oh, my gosh, maybe we don't need to have this as a critical learning objective anymore." And the technology now has all of a sudden replaced our need to make sure kids know how to do this or that or the other thing.
And a lot of these things are pretty sensitive for people. "What do you mean you don't have to teach that anymore?" Um, and I think it's really a question of matching the task design to the learning objective. Calculators are a good example of this. Like, "Oh, my gosh, is it okay for kids to use calculators in a math class?" Well, certainly not on a math facts fluency type of test, but in other cases, it may be really appropriate for them to do that.
So I think we kind of hold dear that there's this idea that technology can never or should never replace things, but I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it. I think we're going to accept technologies that make us more efficient and we're gonna welcome them and we're gonna embrace them. And then it's gonna change the way we think about what we actually need people to do to learn and to represent that they know as we teach and have them practice and assess.
[00:16:18] Charlotte Cheng: Yeah, no, thanks for making that point. You're right. It's ever evolving. I'm just so hardhearted. [laughs] I'm like, "There needs to be a teacher." But who knows? You don't know where the future is. I'm sure the same thing with the calculator when that-
[00:16:30] Joel Kupperstein: So-
[00:16:30] Charlotte Cheng: ... TI-82 came out. Yeah.
[00:16:31] Joel Kupperstein: Let's be really clear. I am not saying we will never need teachers.
[00:16:34] Charlotte Cheng: [laughs]
[00:16:34] Joel Kupperstein: I think teachers are amazing and indispensable and super important and they're in the mi-, in the middle of everything that I do every single day in my job at Learning A-Z. Teachers are the centerpiece of everything. Our job is to make them able to do their job better, more efficiently, more, in a more empowered way. If I'm not delivering technology to them that helps with that, then I'm, you know, what am I doing? So no interest at all [laughs] in, in replacing them, but I wanna grease the skids for 'em. I wanna be a catalyst. I wanna be their kind of jetpack because, you know, largely, they do know what they're doing and what they're after, and that's what we're here to help with.
[00:17:10] Charlotte Cheng: That's true. It's like trying to remove the grunt work for them so they can really focus on their special skillset. Like, grading papers [laughs] nonstop all day probably is not the best use of their talent or their time really.
[00:17:24] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah. There's an element of efficiency that we wanna help with, and then there's an element of exactitude that we wanna help with.
[00:17:29] Charlotte Cheng: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:29] Joel Kupperstein: So, you know, taking some of the friction out of the work that they do as they plan large chunks of time for their day, the setup they do every morning as they get ready to teach, making those processes easier, more replicable, and then also enabling them to have fine point information about what kids are doing and what they know and what should happen with them next.
Those are great ways to employ technology to help teachers out and in no way suggesting that it's replacing anything they do. It's really, these are really tools that make these professionals. Like, every other professional there is, whether it's a mechanic or a carpenter or a doctor, everybody's got tools that enable them to be more successful at the job they do. And, you know, I'm proud to be a person who's tried to provide those tools for teachers for quite a long time now.
[00:18:17] Charlotte Cheng: Yeah, same here as well. [laughs] Now, how can parents and educators find the digital learning content that is the best match for the needs of their kids or students? Basically, how do they figure out what's the right tool for them when there's so much out there right now?
[00:18:32] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah. Well, I would start by thinking about the categories of the tools. So to me, the world of digital educational resources falls into three buckets. There are utilities, there are repositories, and there are programs, where a utility is a tool you can use to accomplish some kind of goal, but it's really not about content. And there are some blurry lines here. But the Zoom, like we're talking on Zoom right now, that's an example of a utility.
Then there are repositories, and these are, uh, libraries of content that don't necessarily specify exactly when or how you use the content in there, but they can become resources for educators and parents and kids to use in lots and lots of ways. And they tend to be, if they're effective, really, really versatile. Our Raz-Plus prog-, product at Learning A-Z is a really good example of one of those. That's been a tremendous help for teachers for a good long time.
And then the last category is program, and a program also delivers content, but it delivers it with a sequence in mind. And it has a lot more structure to the expectation of how it's going to be employed. We have a program called Foundations A-Z, which is focused obviously on foundational skills and literacy that's more along those lines. So the first step, "Do I need a utility? Do I need a repository? Do I need a program? So what problem am I trying to solve?" Uh, and then, of course, beyond that, you got to ask yourself, "Is it rigorous? Is it engaging? And is it easy to use?"
We kinda talked about that earlier. But rigorous means, you know, does it really foster meaningful and durable learning? Meaningful meaning this is important stuff and durable meaning I retain it over time. We talked about engaging. Is it engaging? Meaning am I really interested in doing this thing? Whatever that means. Am I curious? Am I interested in persisting? Do I really wanna stick with it? And then easy to use is pretty self-explanatory, but we are talking about both the kids and the grown-ups here. We all know that introducing friction into those systems just really quickly gets in the way of them having the impact that we want them to have.
[00:20:30] Charlotte Cheng: No, that's helpful. Like, learning how to assess the problem that you're trying to solve and then matching the correct tool for them. And that's for now, but can you imagine looking into the future, right? How could digital learning content evolve in the future? What could it look like?
[00:20:46] Joel Kupperstein: Well, we're still gonna be trying to solve the same problems, and that's going to be getting learners to learn as much as they can, as deeply as they can, as durably as they can, as fast as they can. And so to the extent that technology can help us with all those things, we're gonna embrace that. So I think technology over time has proven to enable us to have more precise information about what kids know and need to know. They are able to help us find the most accurately targeted content to meet those learning needs, and then maybe, like we talked about a little while ago, potentially shifting what we think of as the critical learning outcomes.
So the things you used to think you had to teach kids to do, maybe you don't need to teach them anymore or you need to focus differently and shift that to new things like, as we talked about toward the beginning of our time together, the importance of teaching kids evaluative skills and critical thinking skills. If you have things like generative AI, for example, now creating content for us, how important is it to make sure that kids can evaluate that content and, uh, represent their understanding of what constitutes good or effective or useful or whatever the parameter is?
So, uh, I'm excited about that because I've known for a long, long time that these kinds of evaluative skills are really critical. I've seen it in my own kids. And when I taught a long, long time ago, they were important then. But it's been a challenge to get our system to carve out the minutes to focus on them in the way they need to. Well, uh, I think this is gonna kinda catalyze that a bit, and I think we're gonna need to spend more time on that. We all know it. And now I think it's more likely to happen than ever as we go forward.
[00:22:25] Charlotte Cheng: I'm excited about that, too, because regardless of, um, what career you go into, what subject you are interested in, you need those evaluative skills to be successful-
[00:22:35] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:35] Charlotte Cheng: ... and to be productive, [laughs] too. Like, if you don't have those skillsets, you might just focus on the knowing and never innovate, never learn.
[00:22:43] Joel Kupperstein: Yeah. Yeah. I'm really, I'm excited when I see learners ask questions. "How do I know this to be true? Is this the right thing? What if I test my assumption about this, that, or the other thing?" In a day and age when so much information is so readily accessible, it's very, very tempting to just take things at face value, assume that they're accurate and useful and correct, and move on with those assumptions. And it takes some work to recognize that that's not always the case.
But, man, is that important work? I think those are some of the skills that, that accelerate people's ability to learn and succeed and accomplish goals and get to where they wanna go to because they recognize that they need to evaluate information that they're given and fit it to the use case that they're chasing or to make sure that it is answering the question that they have in a way that makes sense. All that kind of stuff, I think, is gonna be really important.
[00:23:40] Charlotte Cheng: Yeah. [laughs] It's feeling more like reverse Socrates 'cause, you know, instead of the teacher asking the questions, it's like we're encouraging the students to ask the questions-
[00:23:48] Joel Kupperstein: That's a great point.
[00:23:49] Charlotte Cheng: ... and also to help them answer them on their own. All right. So what advice would you give to someone who's interested in exploring the world of product development and EdTech? What would be a great first step for them?
[00:23:59] Joel Kupperstein: My first answer would be let's talk. I love talking about this. And I've over the years spent a lot of time with people, uh, who are interested in getting into EdTech, but they come from a few different places. So many of them have been coming out of the classroom. And one of the things I talk about with teachers who are considering getting into EdTech is make sure you have the opportunity to continue turning on light bulbs for young people, you know.
I'll ask people, "What's your favorite thing about teaching?" And they'll say, "It's working with kids and seeing them grasp something and seeing that moment is really energizing." And I say, "Okay, how do you think that's gonna change when you get into EdTech?" And I say things inevitably like, "Well, now I'm gonna do that for thousands of kids all over the country." And my first answer to them is not the same feeling you get being in front of one child and seeing that light bulb go on doesn't happen when you're in EdTech. It just doesn't.
And I still miss it. Whenever I'm with young kids, I find myself falling back into it 'cause it's a niche I love to scratch. And you have to know that that's gonna be a change when you get into EdTech and you have to have that outlet. And if you have that, then I think that transition can be really successful. Then once you're in EdTech and once you're thinking about, "This is what I wanna do, this is where I wanna go for my career," I think it's really important to be what I call T-shaped.
So the idea of being T-shaped is I've got something that I'm narrow and deep in. I understand instructional design. I understand curriculum planning. I understand, uh, any one of these job functions. But I'm gonna become facile in lots and lots of different aspects of the business so that I see how things fit together so that I can make connections between the thing I'm narrow and deep on and the other job function.
So get to know a bit about finance and about marketing and engineering and software development. All these things are important and that's where the T comes in. So I've got the one thing I'm narrow and deep in, but I'm conversant in a lot of other things so that I can connect dots. Even if your profession continues to be a narrow and deep profession, your ability to plug into the larger context of the EdTech initiative, the business, the organization, whatever it is, will be accelerated by your ability to understand the other facets of the org.
[00:26:07] Charlotte Cheng: Right. I've never heard the term T-shaped, but truly, EdTech is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It's like a requirement, right? So that's such a great point. And I cannot plus one you enough about staying in the classroom. I do it. I sneak it in with playtesting. I literally go to the school once a month and see those aha moments. I'm like, "I cannot lose this." So if you pivot, make sure you carve out that time. Like, one of our team members still teaches once or twice a week just to get that in. So love that reminder because at the end of the day, we're still educators, right?
[00:26:38] Joel Kupperstein: For sure. You know, an interesting thing about that I found over time as I've gotten opportunities to be a leader in business organizations is that there are a lot of similarities. And so that great energy that, that I got from teaching kids when I was younger, I get a lot of that from being part of a team now and helping a team achieve.
You know, I was talking with one of my colleagues recently about the thing that gets us most excited at work, and we found that we had the same answer to that question, which is winning as a team, you know, succeeding as a team, getting something done as a team. Uh, and that's that collective light bulb going on. So I've found over time that I think there are some similarities between being, you know, a leader in a classroom and being a leader in business. But as you transition over as an educator, you gotta keep that in mind. You've gotta have that outlet. It's just sort of who you are.
[00:27:24] Charlotte Cheng: Yeah. It's like you said, you have to do it.
[00:27:27] Joel Kupperstein: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:27] Charlotte Cheng: It's almost like a requirement. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your vast experience, Joel, and thanks for being part of our podcast.
[00:27:33] Joel Kupperstein: Oh, this is really fun, Charlotte. I really enjoyed it.
[00:27:38] Charlotte Cheng: Thanks for listening to EdTech Adventures. Please subscribe to catch more of our episodes and leave a review to support the show. For more resources and info, visit us at codecombat.com/podcast. I'm your host, Charlotte Cheng. We'll see you on our next learning adventure.
