Rebecka Peterson: 2023 National Teacher of the Year on Celebrating Classroom Joy

Rebecka Peterson, the 2023 National Teacher of the Year, is a math teacher who loves stories.

Rebecka has taught high school math classes ranging from intermediate algebra to Advanced Placement calculus, for 11 years at Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Amid a difficult first year of high school teaching, she found the “One Good Thing” blog. She credits daily posting there to helping her recognize the beautiful and positive experiences occurring in her classroom, which inspired her to stay in the profession. She has since contributed 1,400 posts to the blog. As Oklahoma Teacher of the Year, she has visited teachers across the state to highlight their important work through the Teachers of Oklahoma campaign. 

As National Teacher of the Year, Rebecka plans to use her platform to highlight teachers’ stories of the good that’s happening in education. Teaching is a profession that affords creativity, autonomy and purpose, and Rebecka believes that highlighting the stories of joy happening in classrooms across the country will help encourage current teachers and attract new educators to the profession.

Rebecka is a proud immigrant of Swedish-Iranian descent and lived in several countries around the world as her parents traveled as medical missionaries. Her own experience with supportive teachers who celebrated her diversity and math abilities informs Rebecka’s efforts to create a supportive and accessible classroom for students. She values listening to students’ stories as a way to better understand them and elevate their voice. 

Before joining the faculty at Union High School, Rebecka taught for three years at the collegiate level. She holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oklahoma Wesleyan University and a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of South Dakota. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband, Brett, and son, Jonas, and she enjoys reading, crafting and playing board games.

This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for Education Entrepreneurs.  Founded by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work just as hard as you do.

Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 0:26

Welcome to Season Eight of Edtech Insiders where we speak to educators, founders, investors, thought leaders and the industry experts who are shaping the global education technology industry. Every week, we bring you the week in edtech. important updates from the EdTech field, including news about core technologies and issues we know will influence the sector like artificial intelligence, extended reality, education, politics, and more. We also conduct an in depth interview with a wide variety of EdTech thought leaders, and bring you insights and conversations from edtech conferences all around the world. Remember to subscribe, follow and tell your ed tech friends about the podcast and to check out the EdTech Insiders substack newsletter. Thanks for being part of the EdTech insiders community enjoy the show. Rebecka Peterson that 2023 National Teacher of the Year is a math teacher who loves stories. Rebecka has taught high school math classes ranging from intermediate algebra to Advanced Placement calculus for 11 years at Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Amid a difficult first year of high school teaching, she found the one good thing blog. She credits daily posting there to helping her recognize the beautiful and positive experiences occurring in her classroom, which inspired her to stay in the profession. She has since contributed 1400 posts to the blog. As Oklahoma Teacher of the Year, she has visited teachers across the state to highlight their important work through the teachers of Oklahoma campaign. As National Teacher of the Year, Rebecka plans to use her platform to highlight teacher stories of the good that's happening in education. Teaching is a profession that affords creativity, autonomy and purpose. And Rebecka believes that highlighting the stories of joy happening in classrooms across the country will help encourage current teachers and attract new educators to the profession. Rebecka is a proud immigrant of Swedish Iranian descent and lived in several countries around the world as her parents traveled as medical missionaries. Her own experience with supportive teachers who celebrated her diversity and math abilities in forms Rebecka's efforts to create a supportive and accessible classroom for students. She values listening to student stories as a way to better understand them and elevate their voice. Before joining the faculty at Union High School Rebecka taught for three years at the collegiate level. She holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oklahoma Wesleyan University and a master's degree in mathematics from the University of South Dakota. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with her husband, Brett and son Jonas. And she enjoys reading, crafting and playing board games.

Rebecka Peterson: 3:14

All right, EdTech Insider listeners. It's an incredible honor to have Rebecka Peterson, the 2023-24, National Teacher of the Year here on EdTech insiders with us today. Thanks so much for joining us, Rebecka. Oh, my goodness, thank you for having me. So first, let's just start with your journey. Tell us about your path to becoming the 2023-24, National Teacher of the Year. What inspired you to pursue a career in education? And how did that lead us to where we are today? Yeah, yeah, well, I think you know, the same goes for me, as with so many teachers, that it was my own teachers that inspired me to go into education, I kind of grew up all over the world. I'm an immigrant. I'm the daughter of my dad is Iranian. My mom is Swedish, so daughter of two medical missionaries, actually. So while we are immigrants, I'm like upfront about the fact that as a privileged immigrant, if that makes sense. But we moved a whole lot growing up. And my parents really use their medical background to travel and to help people all over the world. And so by the time I was 16 years old, I lived in four different countries. And, you know, some of those years I attended school in the United States. Other years, we were overseas, and I was homeschooled. But when I did attend school, I realized that teachers held such power, the power to turn a bad day into a good one, the power to reveal, you know, a passion or a talent in me that I didn't know existed before the power to speak life into me. And to be honest, I didn't consider high school teaching for quite a while. I didn't attend a regular high school myself because at that point, we were overseas or by my last few years of high school, we had traveled so much, and I think my parents thought maybe continuing to homeschool me would be sort of a softer landing back into the states. And there's probably a bit of truth to that. So I I plan to be a college mathematics professor have both a Bachelor's and Master's in theoretical mathematics, which just means that I love math for math. Like it doesn't have to be useful for me. To find it beautiful. I'm really, really, really grateful for applied mathematicians, I am just, I'm just not one of them. So I think that sort of played into my desire or my thought that like, I wasn't quite cut out to be a high school, math teacher a because I had never attended American High School and V because I couldn't quite wrap my head around this question of like, when are we ever going to use this? I'm like, why do we need to use this? Like, don't you just see the beauty in this elegant proof I just showed you of deriving like the product rule from the formal definition of a derivative, right? So yeah, I had a lot of learning and a lot of listening and thinking to do, I taught at the college level for three years as a TA, and then as an adjunct, and truly, like loved my time in the college classroom. But something was always missing for me. And I often felt kind of like a dispenser of information instead of a guide who came alongside my students and their educational journey. And I think having moved, you know, so much as a child, as an adult, there is something that kind of stirring in me, I wasn't going to be satisfied until I was on a roll. And that was like, highly, highly relational. So I made the plunge, I became alternatively certified, and I switched from college teaching to high school teaching and 2012. And I will never say that it was or is easy, but it was absolutely one of the very best decisions I've ever made in my life. I love who I am. When I'm in the classroom, I love who I am when I'm with my students, they bring out the best in me.

Alexander Sarlin: 7:02

I love that answer. You know, why do you have to use this they went into in people. I've never heard that one before. But I love that, you know, we you started in 2012. And immediately inserting your high school teaching career, you've also started a blog, where you are capturing some of your experiences and what it was like to sort of move forward as a teacher and you've kept it for, you know, 10 plus years. Tell us about that decision and what impact it had sort of being reflective in that way throughout your teaching career.

Rebecka Peterson: 7:30

And the blog title one good thing like what inspired that too? Yeah, I actually did not start the blog, a blog. It was an infant blog. And when I stumbled upon it, that very first year of teaching high school math, yeah, it was called One good thing. And it was a collective block actually, of math teachers at the time that lived by this quote by Alice Morse, Earl, and she said everyday may not be good, but there's something good in every day. And something about that, quote, just hit me so viscerally because I didn't ignore the demands of my job, right? Everyday may not be good, but it did insist on taking ownership of my day. And so to be honest, I was hanging on by a thread like I, I went, I mean, I went from this classroom space where students were like, hanging on every word, right? Because they were paying to hear what I had to say, to this classroom space where students were like, more or less forced by the government to hear what I had to say. And I just really was not convinced that I had what it took to be a high school teacher. And I really was I was hanging on by a thread. And I thought, like, what do I have to lose, I have like four months left of this contract. Like, I can quit in four months, but like, I have to make it through these last four months. And so I decided to join that infant blog. And one day, you know, just logged into the blogs platform, wrote one good thing and hit publish. And the next day, I wrote something good again, and hit Publish again. And the third day, I did the same and I just kept going and going and going. And like when I think about it, I was just like, writing and writing, like my career depended on it, because maybe it did. There was quite, I think, the transformation, because when I first started writing, I was in a really like reactive frame of mind, I would flip the blocks platform, think of something kind of, like halfway good. That happened in the classroom that day, do you know write it down and move on and it was in everything was sort of in the past, right. But then at some point, there was this turning point, and I found myself actively noticing good things in the present, like my brain would be like, Oh, my gosh, one good thing like Jose asked me to come to his soccer game today, right? Or one good thing like a Maggie asked a question that was not can I go to the bathroom? And so like I went from reactive to active searching for these good things, but you know, now having had this year of service where I've talked about the power of one good, thanks so much. I've had a lot of time to sort of like reflect on my reflection, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of times, this sort of gets confused as, like gratitude journaling or are like looking for the silver lining. And to me, that's not what this is, to me this is cultivating like a practice of noticing. And it is standing so firmly in the present and it takes, it takes a lot of courage to be in the present. And it's about like following your curiosity. And to me, it's saying like, yes. And like, yes, this work is hard. And this work is meaningful, right? Like, yes, I am exhausted. And I am invigorated, right? Like, yes, I am tired. And you better believe that I'm going to be back again tomorrow to give my whole heart and soul to these kids again, like, Yes, this is a job. And it is so much more than that. And so to me, like that sort of encapsulates what one good thing is. And I've recently said, like, if I could be so bold as to change, like, just that little conjunction in the quote, and change it to everyday may not be good. And there's something good in every day, because this is like the willingness to go into each moment, even the dark moments, right. And to then insist that even in the dark times, eventually, even if it is not today, even if it is not tomorrow, but eventually, you insist that the light is going to have the final word, guys, that resonates with me so much, I remember my mantra when I was teaching was the bell always rings. And it was this idea that even if you had the best class ever, the bell rings and the new start all over again. Or if you had the worst, a the bell rings, and especially with middle schoolers, one thing I had to realize is that for them, it was a cognitive new slate each day. And yet they weren't carrying everything over. And then I needed to let go for good or for bad of what happened in the past class, and give every learner a fresh start. So really inspired by the one good thing, quote, as the National Teacher of the Year your reign is wrapping up here on June 30. And you've used this platform to highlight positive stories in education. What have been some of the highlights from this year? What are some of the things you will remember and also, much has been made about the status of teaching and the teacher shortage and burnout? What is your sense of the state of teaching today, given your national purview and this perspective you've had? Yeah, I think, now more than ever, like, I believe that everything comes down to our teachers and to the people supporting our teachers, I get to be in a lot of conversations about, you know, policy and systems and procedures and technology, and buildings and platforms and all the things right, and every conversation really can be distilled to, well, who's going to implement this, right. And that comes down to our faculty and staff. And so I will say, after this year, I have never been prouder, never been prouder to be a teacher and to belong to this collective of people who work tirelessly. On behalf of our nation's children, our nation's students. That said, like, I believe supporting teachers is supporting students. And we you know, we say all the time, like the teachers working conditions are our students learning conditions. And we have got to figure out how to hold our teachers, like our teachers hold our students how to hold our teachers stories, like our teachers hold our students stories. When I got to travel all over my state, one of the teachers said something so profound, she said, you know, we're trauma informed for students, but we're not always trauma informed for teachers. And I think about that. So often, this was a teacher who had lost 25 students in her 25 years of teaching. And, you know, the secondary trauma that we have as teachers is really, really real. When we go through when our community like goes through some kind of hurdle or tragedy, like we're often the ones who are like on the front lines, right. And oftentimes, we're asked to sort of put our needs our emotions sort of on the back burner, because we have children in front of us, right? But then like, then what, what next for our teachers for those of us who are in it day in and day out. So what I really hope to see is that we build capacity, first of all, and we have to have a highly trained and passionate teacher workforce. Like for me, everything hinges on that. So that looks like paying teachers at a rate that's comparable to other four year you know, degree careers and looks like fully funding public education that look Like imagining different OnRamps into the profession. And that looks like all of us talking about education, including those of us who are educators, as the great equalizer that we know, it's meant to be, again, all hinges, it all hinges on having a qualified and passionate educator workforce. But once that pipeline is filled, then I think it's time to start investing in our teacher leaders. And this is where you see great work happening and where I hope we capitalize on that momentum. And we need teacher leaders, these like instructional architects, right? In more spaces and education, we have got to figure out how to create room for teachers to support teachers, because if we don't take care of each other, who will write but if we do take care of each other, if we lock arms, if we do this work together, our students are going to thrive like that is something I'm certain of,

Alexander Sarlin: 16:41

it's so powerful, the idea of holding our teachers the way they hold their students or, you know, knowing their stories, the way they know their students stories, I feel like, you know, anybody who spent time with educators knows how closely you know how much they care about their students, and expanding out and seeing the whole system through that lens is really powerful. You've lived in several countries, you mentioned that, you know, being an immigrant, having traveled a lot, and you come from a diverse background, you've obviously seen a lot of different different education systems, you've seen a lot of different ways in which people approach the profession of teaching. For example, can you talk to us a little bit about how you hope that here in the US, we're going to evolve the education world, so that we might see some of the beautiful parts of the vision that you just laid out where teachers can support each other and be supported and make, you know, a salary that is commensurate to their, their impact? And all of those things? What have you learned globally that you think, may we may borrow or use here?

Rebecka Peterson: 17:38

Yeah, you know, I think like, interestingly, the global experiences actually come like become very local. For me, it's kind of like as a zoom out to zoom in, because moving so much, like, I often felt like I was on the outside, right. And if you've ever been on the outside, you know, we watch the inside really closely. And so I came to the realization that like, the inside needs to be bigger, you know, like, it needs to include all of us. To me, that's the heartbeat of public education and why I am such a passionate advocate for public education, because it is for all of us. It's supposed to be for for all of us, right? I say like it was very untethering moving from continent to continent as a child. But what was untethering for me as a kid really tethers me to my students now, because I teach in a really diverse and culturally rich district, we have 62 languages represented. And we really like believe that our diversity is our strength. And that to me, like is what like we have to continue to lean into. Yes, like as an educational system, I think even more so like as a nation, right? Like, in our classrooms, like all cultures, all people are honored in their their welcome, right, like on on our best days, like, that's what happens, right? And that is, what has to happen in our nation as well. Like, what happens in our classroom is, it should be like a microcosm of the best of democracy. I say all the time, like teachers hold our democracy, because what happens inside our classrooms inside our schools, is that we're learning from each other. We're learning from people with different backgrounds, we're learning from people who may not look like us talk, like us believe, like us worship like us vote like us. And yet, we're coming together to solve math problems, right? We're coming together to write like authors are coming together to hypothesize like scientists to reason like historians. And so to me, like public education is what's still right with our society. And my hope is that we continue to view it that way. And that, in viewing it that way, we also learn, like we learned what Mother Teresa said, which is that we belong to each other. And that, to me, is the heartbeat of being a teacher. This is such a great grounding. And I think the children of Tulsa are so lucky to have you as one of one of their advocates. You know, I think, also maybe how we might stereotype high school math teacher might need some revising, because Rebecka, you're bringing us back to a lot of the why we got into this work in the first place. One of the areas that animates the work of Alex and me and as part of Ed Tech insiders is really thinking about that intersection of technology and learning. And of course, AI is the hot topic. These days, and we're stuck in a binary debate of, do we have teachers? Or do we replace them with AI? And clearly there's a lot of one reality is outside of that binary poll. But also, there's so much nuance in how technology intersects. How do you see technology tools being integrated in the classroom, to enhance learning experiences, and also support teachers? And just love to hear your thoughts? Yeah, I'm super passionate about intersecting technology, with innovation with instruction. So interestingly, I think math teachers have had to grapple with AI for quite some time now, because we've had apps you know, like, Photomath, that could work a problem out for kids in a matter of seconds. I have been around for a while. Yeah, I think Photomath like seven, eight years old, they were acquired by Google, people don't realize that they were acquired by Google, like three years ago. So are, you know, pretty good distribution? Totally. Right. So like assigning homework, sort of, in the traditional sense of the word started feeling pretty outdated for me, like a handful of years ago, like, how did I know if a kid was doing the work? Or if photo math was right, essentially, if AI was, which, let's be honest, has always been a question because they have friends. But now it's like, and now we have AI, which is like, like a secret friend, that is going to have the answer. Correct, right. And so actually, with the pandemic, I decided to flip my classroom. And what I did was I created videos like I harness technology to create videos for my students that they interact with at home with built in questions. So they can't just like push, play and leave. But they interacted with the lesson at home. And then when they came to class, they would work on what would typically be the homework, right, but with each other, and with me, right there. So it's flipped in that sense, instead of doing the passive part really the lesson in class, and really the active part that doing out of class, I flipped that. So they interact with this kind of introduction of the lesson at home, through technology, you can really say through AI in a way. And then when we're together, that's sort of when the magic happens, right? And they get to, you know, ask questions with me and their peers right there. And we got to really dive into like, richer questions. Their understanding was so much deeper. And of course, I mean, I knew exactly where everyone was all the time, like I, I assessed, you know, because we had an AP exam to work towards, and that sort of, you know, we did we still need to assess, but like a form informally. We had, like, I was formatively, assessing all the time, right? Like, I always knew where every kid was. And so it was such a beautiful way to harness technology, where I felt like I was doing math with my students instead of my students. Right. And so yeah, harness ed tech, like a great deal and, and making those videos I got to, you know, embed questions into the videos, and you're having like technology, basically artificial intelligence, right, like, score those questions for me, but this is what I come back to. Every time we talk about AI, I have one and only one litmus test. And that is, is it connecting me to kids more or less? And if the answer is less than it is not right for kids, like If we learned anything from the pandemic, from pandemic teaching, that is it right technology is not a savior. But it can be a really powerful tool, and in the hands of an innovative teacher, beautiful things can happen. I mean, my students absolutely thrived when I flipped the classroom. And that was all thanks to technology. But it's also really important to remember what the a an AI stands for. Right? But artificial, and we tend not replace human connection. Like we have to guard that part of education with everything we have. We need connection now more than ever, like, we are still feeling the aftermath of pandemic teaching. But I believe like, with every fiber of my being that connection is how we heal. And so it is incumbent upon us to answer that question every time we talk about technology, is that connecting us more or less to our students, because there's a way to harness it for connection. That's exactly what the flipped classroom did for me, where I got to do the best part of teaching with my students, right? But we have to view technology through the lens of connection. Always.

Alexander Sarlin: 25:27

That's such a powerful message. I'm just, I'm pulling out all these you know, you know, when we're together, the magic happens and you know, connection is how we heal. It's such a powerful philosophy through which to see teaching, but also through which to see technology in

Rebecka Peterson: 25:43

100% 100%

Alexander Sarlin: 25:45

This has been really inspiring conversation. Thank you so much for being with us. Rebecka Peterson, National Teacher of the Year 2023. We really appreciate everything you're doing. And I think this is really informative about how technology and teaching can be collaborators in this world and not on opposite sides. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you.

Rebecka Peterson: 26:07

Thanks so much for having me.

Alexander Sarlin: 26:10

Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more Edtech Insider subscribe to the free Edtech Insiders newsletter on substack.