About Us

I strive to help educators find harmony between challenge and fun, improving student engagement, long-term retention of skills and knowledge, and the overall learning environment.

On my first day of teaching, I stepped into a classroom filled with teenagers looking at me expectantly. The degree of responsibility overwhelmed me, a 22-year-old teacher entrusted with the care and learning of all these kids. I felt totally unequipped to lead them, and unsure exactly how I would build the skills I needed.

I was a lucky first-year teacher, in that I had a wonderful mentor teacher to guide me. She reminded me to think about joy and long-term impact amidst the immediate challenge, and I spent a lot of time reflecting on my own learning experiences and what knowledge and skills had stood the test of time. When I thought back, a handful of moments stood out to me. They were moments of authenticity, excitement, and connection with my teachers, classmates, and others.

There were a couple of simulation-style, immersive activities my teachers designed and facilitated: the age-old Constitutional Convention and a trial of FDR on the constitutionality of his actions as president. I remember feeling released from normal restrictions during these activities; there was no set structure for where my classmates and I could take them. There were creative projects–a Mini Olympics in math, an interdisciplinary research project with an open-ended format, and parody songwriting in Spanish. There was one particular memorable learning experience that completely changed my perspective on education at the age of sixteen: a trip to Obama’s first inauguration with a dozen other students. We were handed Flip cameras and acted as journalists amongst the crowd, reporting live back to our classmates at school via the nascent platforms of Skype, Twitter, and Tumblr.

I was always a dedicated student, but I worked harder than I ever had before on that trip. The big difference was that I did it because I wanted to, not because I felt I had to. I remember looking around the living room of the home we stayed in at 3am, all of us crammed on couches and spread on the floor. Laptop screens lit  our faces from below as we compiled and edited our footage and wrote articles about our experiences. We hadn’t been told to do this–in fact, I remember distinctly being told we should really stop and go to bed–but we were so excited by what we were doing and the real stakes of it (we had an audience waiting for what we created!), we didn’t want to put it down. When I got back to school, I had such a hard time transitioning back to my teacher-centered classrooms that I ended up writing an article about student-driven, interdisciplinary, authentic learning experiences being a far superior form of education on our Tumblr blog. This was the beginning of my teaching philosophy.

As a teacher, I brought as much of this excitement and inspiration to my students as I could. I started with creative projects–my mentor teacher introduced me to RAFT (role, audience, format, topic), which has served as a helpful frame for projects ever since. I moved on to simulations, crafting a highly differentiated, immersive project involving using investigative journalism to uncover the truth behind U.S. covert actions. I attended professional development on creating games for history classrooms put on by the Institute of Play and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and my days of educational game design began in earnest. I created escape rooms, board games, card games, role-playing games, simulations, and more for my students over the next couple of years. I partnered with outside organizations to create projects for my students that would have a real impact, and I encouraged my students to take the lead in the classroom whenever possible. I saw student buy-in soar. Students became more and more engaged even outside of the context of a game or project, because they knew they would apply the knowledge and skills they gained to something exciting and authentic.

During my time as a teacher and later as an instructional coach, I noticed that many people struggled at the secondary level to find or generate exciting projects and games for older students. I also noticed a disconnect between people’s understanding of what made learning challenging and what made learning fun–though they can and should be one and the same, often they were placed as polar opposites. 

Students are willing to take on more of a challenge the more engaged they are, giving them the chance to surprise themselves with their own capabilities and remember what they’ve learned in the long term. I started CreatED to bring these experiences to more students and teachers, with the goal of increasing learning and joy for both.