A Digital Perspective on Passion and Purpose

UMMARY KEYWORDS

passion, purpose, digital tools, self-awareness, algorithmic influence, authenticity, teaching methods, student engagement, technology impact, media literacy, critical thinking, social media, educational reform, student agency, learning relevance

SPEAKERS

Michael Hernandez, Terri Novacek

Terri Novacek 

Imagine spending time on something challenging to you, and as challenging as it gets, you just won't stop. You can't stop because, in spite of the challenge and hard work, you love doing it, and then one day, the challenge turns to victory.

Terri Novacek 

Challenges come in many forms, from landing a plane, the lead role, or even a first date to executing the perfect golf swing or business plan or recovering from a setback, whether it's opening a child proof package, navigating technology, picking out that perfect outfit, keeping active when your body says, Please stop getting out of debt solving global issues, each of us has challenges that have meaning to us. While one person is happy to hand the child proof package to someone else to open, others insist on persevering, and while some don't give two thoughts about what they wear. Others spend hours picking out just the right ensemble. You get my point. While we are all driven by interests and values, our interests and values differ. We've been chatting lately about algorithmic influence and authenticity, how digital tools can both help and hinder self awareness and purpose. Michael Hernandez, author of storytelling with purpose states rigor and hard work can be synonymous with passion and purpose. Stating we enjoy working hard to achieve goals that are meaningful and for causes we care about. Back in the 90s, when I was teaching in a conventional classroom, I remember the teacher lounge chatter being around having to compete with the television. What was a teacher to do when all the fast action, special effects and passive participation was much more appealing than the Founding Fathers the area of a circle and an introductory paragraph. Well, what we did, at least those that kept the love of learning alive, was we brought those popular TV characters and movies into our curriculum, because that was what had meaning to them. But was it real? Well, I guess it depends on how you want to look at it. Let's take a math problem, because that's always an easy subject to pick on. If the Red Ranger can defeat five monsters per hour and the Blue Ranger can defeat three monsters per hour, how many monsters can they defeat together in three hours if they each need to take a 30 minute break during that time? While we all know there's no such thing as a real power ranger, it was more appealing than estimating project timelines or Managing Schedules, which are the real world skills being developed with that problem. Now, moving over to English language arts, many students dread writing essays, but if you were a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, you could form and articulate an opinion to construct a persuasive essay all day long. Michael is doing the same thing with modern technology. He uses it to grab attention and make learning and technology meaningful. In his book, storytelling with a purpose, he presents digital projects to ignite student curiosity. Let's meet Michael. You uh, so you're a great person to talk to, because you are not one of the the young crowd. Sorry, I don't mean to offend you, but you know, like people will say, you know, those that are in their their 20s, this is natural for them and us older folks. We're not keeping up with the times, and it's too hard to do and AI and technology is replacing our jobs and all of that. So what are your thoughts on, you know, is technology replacing teachers or just changing the role of the teacher?

Michael Hernandez 

Yeah, that's really fascinating. I mean, that's such a loaded question. Yeah. I mean, I feel like as educators, we should practice what we preach. We should continue to learn, and a lot of people don't. And I think sometimes it's their position, their mindset, and a lot of times it's sort of placed on them by Al. Side forces like standardized test companies, administrators and expectations of parents, who, you know, are thinking about the way they used to learn, and it's got to be this way. It's got to be that way. And now, just listening to a radio show on NPR this this afternoon, driving, driving here to the interview, and they were talking about how colleges are finding that college students are unable to read, you know, and capable of reading longer format, more dense materials, and one of the reasons they think this is happening is because of standardized tests, because we've changed how we teach, instead of teaching students to read in depth novels and spend time doing it. We read excerpts, and it's more of a scavenger hunt for what's the author's meaning and where's the metaphor, rather than the overarching story and purpose of the author. And so I feel like to I think it's wise to avoid cliches and quick, simple answers that a lot of people want to hear or that we see out there, whether it's Jonathan hates book about the anxious generation, we should ban technology in schools, because kids are, kids are, you know, anxious and have depression and all this stuff. But it's really a basic question of causation versus correlation, you know, because two things are happening at once doesn't mean one caused the other. So getting back to your main question about is technology, I don't know, replacing teachers or or causing kids to cheat, or whatever. I feel like the world is what the world is, and we have to adapt, and we have to change, and I think you have to really think hard about what matters most and what is fundamental to being a good learner. It's not the technique or the technology, it's the mindset and what you're doing with that knowledge, information and skills and the purpose behind it. So also part of that conversation was conversation around writing and how writing is a technology. Humans were not evolved to write or to read books, and our brains slowly evolved to make those neural pathways to make that happen. And so writing is a technology because people lamented, if you look back all the philosophers of ancient Greece lamented the invention of writing because they thought it would ruin the minds of the youth, right? You didn't have to memorize everything well. Now most people value books and the ability to store and share information. You know, it used to be a library, and that was very slow and cumbersome, and you had to have money and you had to have training and access to education. Now we're talking about having information at our fingertips, and we just have to keep up with the evolution of speed and connection. And again, go back to the basic fundamentals of what we really mean by being a good consumer, like, how do we analyze and critically think about what we consume and how we consume it. Are we thinking about the impact we have on others when we post and create and like and reshare information, and these are really just fundamental skills to being a good citizen, and we've kind of lost that in our greater society, I think, overall, and we're eager to blame not ourselves, not the test companies or or how we teach, or how we, you know, raise our children, but blaming technology and something else that we were eager to buy into, literally and figuratively. And so I think, you know, I've never been somebody who's into like, I've always been a skeptic, like, well, how come and why is that? And is there a different way to do that, and is this really the cause of it, or is there something else underlying that cause that we need to, like, take a look at? And so again, coming full circle, back to your question. I think you know, good teaching is about good learning, and learning alongside your students, and modeling for our students that we don't know everything and that there's not one right answer, usually, to most situations, to say that there's many ways to look at something. Yes, there are some fundamental facts, like the Earth is round, right? But when it comes to other questions about, How do we solve climate change, and how do we become good citizens? And how do we do all these other things that are important in our world? You know, there's not one right answer at the back of the textbook, and if we train kids to do that, then we open ourselves up to all kinds of problems now in our classrooms, with cheating, because there's one right answer that everybody can copy, but also as citizens that you know, we need to look to other places and other voices and other cultures and other times that we haven't considered to maybe help us find some answers or other ways of solving, solutions and creative ways.

Terri Novacek 

Yeah, well, it isn't a simple answer. You're right about that. In your book, you talk about the process. Miss that social media and digital storytelling once had as like a positive force for democracy and sharing information ideas, and you kind of feel like it might have gone off path a little bit. I don't know if that's accurate to say, but what's your vision of how that could have turned out better, and is there a way to turn the tide? Now, do you think? Yeah,

Michael Hernandez 
So again, I mean, let's look to the reasons why people flock to social media. It's the social part, right? People want connection. And in the early days of Twitter, I was a, I wouldn't say an early adopter, but I started my account in 2009 and that was a great place where I could find and meet colleagues around the world that I didn't have the chance to meet physically, face to face, and that I'm still close friends with. Eventually, years later, met them in person. I was also a great resource, a news feed for me, and I, you know, still, you know, I'm on LinkedIn now, and these other platforms that, you know, I use it as a news feed, but I feel like there's many ways we can think of these tools. And I think what happened, what took them off the rails, was money, right? They're businesses. And so if you think about what's, what affected traditional media platforms like television, which also has a lot of power, is its economics, you know. So if you're driven, if your metric for success is clicks and eyeballs, you're going to put anything on that platform that's going to get more clicks and more eyeballs. And humans are hardwired to like drama and conflict and period interests and things like that. And so, you know, thinking about what the metric is in whatever metric for success, in whatever you're doing, whether it's a business like social media or whether it's your classroom, what do we mean by success? What are we measuring? And you know, how does that measurement? How does that metric change how people behave and how they perform and what they do and what they say to meet that metric and that standard, which is another chapter of my book about assessment. But you know, coming back this idea of social media, I think people do want connection, and I think that's a good thing. That's a healthy thing, you know. And again, I think what happened too is, like so many people are digitally illiterate, because where in school do students learn how to use these tools effectively, and you can't do that when you're banning phones. You can't do that when you're banning all these different accounts like at Michael Instagram is banned from the student Wi Fi network and things like that, and what might have been a well intentioned policy to keep kids from being distracted or sharing answers to tests or or something like that. They just work around that, and it just sets up an antagonistic environment at your school that it's us against them, or the teachers don't know talking about I'm in the know, and all my friends are over here on this platform, so I want to get around the system, and what we end up teaching our students is how to work around rules and break rules, rather than let's work together to learn how to use these tools productively, ethically, professionally and to make good decisions. And I feel like the general population never had that training, and there's nowhere to get it, you know? And so we don't really know how to do that. So sort of the rules of the road, like, if you if you buy a car, you have to go through training, you have to get a license, right? You can buy a car, but you can't drive it unless you have a license. You have this the state has decided that you've gone through training. You know, what's safe? These are the rules of the road. This is how it works, and what happens if you break the rules, you get the car taken away, right, or you lose your license. Where is there a license for social media? Where do we get trained on how to use it properly? And I feel like, so that's sort of like the main thing is, sort of education. And how do we use this, and why would we use it, and then I don't know, I feel like looking back to why people really, really want it, and why they why they're attracted to it's to stay connected. And so, you know, how can we facilitate those experiences of connection to people that we don't usually have access to, or that don't have the power or the money or the clout to get recognition in traditional media forms. And I feel like there's something there in society about that, about access and about visibility, that is kind of brought up in this as well, whatever that means. But anyway, just kind of points out this idea that I was using it, and I try to teach my students how to use it. They're required to have an Instagram account, by the way. Like, how can we use this for research? How can we use it as a public platform for my own personal portfolio? How do I connect to people who might hire me or that can help me out on a journalism project? How do I connect and engage with the audience? And make, in the case of storytelling or being a journalist, like a dynamic, interactive experience, rather than a top down. This is my idea, and you're going to listen to it like the old traditional broadcast, which is earned taken from farming, where you throw seeds out into the field, we broadly cast them, and then they start growing, you know. So I don't know if I'm answering your question, but that's sort of my initial take on it again. It, you know, there's so many, so many parts to that, psychological, economic, political with, you know, what are the again? Going back to this Jonathan hate book about the anxious generation, you know, why are we spending all of our time and energy trying to ban phones when you should be passing legislation to force social media companies to change their algorithm. That's where this comes from. Is the algorithm. If it keeps putting the stuff up in front of you and they know they've done this intentionally to get people addicted to their platform, just change the algorithm. But where's the legislation for that? Right? So if we really cared, we would do the right ask the right question and take the right action,

Terri Novacek 

Right? So I agree with you, like I don't like to see us take a knee jerk reaction and just say I'll ban it, because that just makes the kids smarter about workarounds. And so I have been kind of thinking a lot about, how do you turn that anxious generation into the courageous generation? And if not that one, at least the next one coming up, because all that that made them anxious isn't going to go away. Like I agree with you. It's it wasn't that. It was how they handled it, and it was the lack of support that they had. And I do really agree with Jonathan haidt's comment about we've over protected our kids from the real world, and under protected them from the virtual world. And so kind of going back to what you were just saying, if you were king, what would parents be doing and what would educators be doing? Because, I mean, I know, as an educator, I don't know if you would agree or not, but you know, we're trying to do the best we can, to take that hey, let's learn alongside. Let's show them the good, the bad, the why and all that. But if you don't, if you have certain practices in the home that undoes everything that you're doing at school. Anyways, your thoughts on that?

Michael Hernandez 
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a dad myself. So you know, my daughter grew up, you know, she was in school during the lockdown pandemic, so I saw all of that both sides I could was actually kind of nice, because I could see how she was working on class assignments and things up close. So I totally get it again. It's multiple parts to that I think, like, you're right. We can't just have a knee jerk reaction and look for simple answers. It's complicated and takes time, but we have to ask the right questions. And so going back, that is something that I think I agree with. Jonathan Haidt is like he also is an advocate for play, which is unstructured, unsupervised interaction, where kids can be social without the watchful eye of parents who are snow plowing and getting all the obstacles out of the way. Because now we have kids who are incapable of dealing with conflict, and I'm increasingly noticing because I teach project based learning, student centered types of classes, both with broadcast journalism and cinema and photography, where we ask kids to go out into the world to collect information and interact with people and things like that, and then bring that back and synthesize that into a story. And so this idea of the kids really struggling to project manage and manage their time and have deadlines and do quality work, because someone's always there to rescue them or to make an excuse for them. And I think part of that's coming out of the pandemic. Part of that was like we, you know, made a lot of excuses for kids and gave them a lot of slack, and that just kind of kept going. But even before then, you know, I was noticing that increasingly, there's a lot of pressures, and I can't judge parents for wanting to make sure their kids don't suffer. And who wants their kids to suffer? Nobody does. You know, not intentionally, we want to protect our kids, but sometimes, you know, they need to skin their knee, and sometimes they need to figure it out on their own. You know, you can't learn to swim by reading a book. You're gonna have to swallow some water, right? You know, to learn to swim, and because one day you won't be there, and the floaties aren't going to be inflated, and what's going to happen when they hit the deep end, you know? So I feel like there needs to strike the right balance between guided, scaffolded sets of experiences where students have independence and agency and to let them make mistakes, to when it's safe, when it's you know, in a guided control situation, okay, this didn't work. Why? Or Oh, you came back. You didn't meet your dad. Online. All right, now you suffer the consequences. What happens when you don't meet a deadline is, what do you tell your boss? What do you tell your college professor? Oh, I didn't turn in my paper. All right, am I going to stay enrolled in college? Like, what happens then when we're not around and so, you know, I kind of go back to this ethical mindset, I think I quote in the book as well, which is, how can we help kids learn to be intellectually agile and emotionally resilient? What kind of experiences can we provide them that strengthen those muscles so that they're able to survive and make good decisions when no one's around and there's no one's watching, right? That's our ultimate goal. Is to raise good citizens. And so what does a good citizen mean to you? What does a good co worker mean? What does a good neighbor mean to you? What skills do you expect them to have, what mindsets and tools and behaviors would you want them to exhibit? And how are we scaffolding those skills at home as well as at school to model that in ourselves as well as through our assignments. And so speaking of being a parent, there's no like manual, right? You're kind of figuring it out, but you're going to experts, and you're asking people who have gone through it before, and you're making mistakes. And we need our kids to do the same thing. We need them to have agency, the agency to succeed as well as to fail. And, you know, I don't think the way schools are set up with teacher accountability, teachers don't always have that flexibility, and I realize that it's not always. It's not the teacher's fault necessarily, and the system is kind of set up that way. But, yeah, I totally agree, like we need more courage. I think that's actually one of my grading criteria for my students, is, how are you courageous in what ways were you courageous, not just with the choice of topic, but in your execution of this project? What risks did you take, not safety wise, but intellectually and creatively So again, going back to this idea of what metric are we using to encourage certain kinds of behavior? If I say to kids, and this is going to the assessment part of my book, but if you say to them, okay, you have to play by the rules. You got to color within the lines. You know, there's no revisions. You've got to have a little bit of time to do it, because we got to jam and everything, then you're going to encourage a certain kind of behavior. You can't use social media, you can't do this or whatever. Or instead, you can offer grading criteria that are more flexible and encourage creativity and taking risks and stretching. So when I use criteria like Courage, you know, what does that mean? It's, you know, depends on the situation, depends on the project the kids are doing. And so part of my criteria for assessment is, are you taking creative risks? Are you trying something that is you're reaching, you're reaching as an intellectual, and you're reaching as a as a member of our community, and you're trying to make a difference in a positive way, as opposed to just playing by the rules.

Terri Novacek 
You know, in addition to courage, the critical thinking, which you, you know you've, you're touching on as well, but you made reference to reading a manual, and I was just thinking of how often, I mean, when Wikipedia came out, we just thought, oh my gosh, that's crazy. Like now everybody's looking everything up on Wikipedia and, well, Google just totally took everything off the charts. And, you know, I am always saying today's generation is being raised by tick tock, because moms have to turn to tick tock for everything that they're doing, you know, and I don't know, is that really any different than the What to Expect When You're Expecting book that I read, you know, maybe it's like you were just saying earlier writing as a technology, and Tiktok is this generations what to expect book. But I just see so many people reading something, and the first one that they read is what they believe. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Hernandez 

That's media literacy 101, right. And we're not teaching media literacy either. So what do you expect? I think I've noticed this. There's, like, a greater societal shift in a lot of articles about this that are out there, and I'm working on this with my students right now as we speak, actually, which is credibility and trust, and it's a fundamental skill, because we are affecting other people's lives and other the planet and our future generations lives, and so we really need to go back to helping students understand why expertise is so important. How can we facilitate in our students this idea that, how do we determine and discern who's a credible source and why it's important to gather as much information as we can before we draw conclusions again. It puts out there and assesses students on the values of our school and our institution. What do we really value? And how are you living up to those values? Rather than you? Got this one problem wrong, right? You know. So again, going on a tangent, but I feel like all of these things are interconnected, you know, like, Who do we value, who do we trust? How can we get to the truth? How do we teach our students and model these skills and behaviors through our assignments? And that's why I wrote the book, is to help share some ideas for how we might scaffold all of these mindsets and skills in an organic way that's not a separate add on to what we already have on our plates. It's integrated right into what we do, and just turns out that we're also learning how to do all these other important skills as well. Yeah,

Terri Novacek 
Well, in your point about being credible, you know, I just think of like, what makes an expert, and it used to be title, did give you expertise? I I don't know if it's just my age or if it is really has changed in society, but, you know, there's a lot of people with a lot of letters, fancy letters behind their name that should be considered experts, but, you know, sometimes I have to question their expertise. And you know, in our organization, one of our schools is works with Homeschool families, and I've seen some parents with absolutely no background in education, do phenomenal things with their kids. And you know, in my nearly 40 years of working in education, I've seen a lot of teachers that I've often wondered, Where did you get that teaching credential? So to kind of wrap things up here, like as a parent, you've mentioned a couple of times there's things we have no control over, but as a parent and even as educators, what is within our power to help bring our youth back to being the courageous generation? Yeah?

Michael Hernandez 
So, oh my gosh, there's so many elements in so much of that I'm not qualified. I don't have enough letters next to my names. It's not always about a label, but it is about a mindset, and it is about experience, and it is about the end goal. And I think kids really do want to learn. They are curious, and they really do want to make an impact. And so let's leverage that innate energy and excitement about learning rather than squash it. And so that's in my book, that's what I'm talking about, is how can we leverage the power of curiosity and student passion as the engines for learning to drive that learning? And that means, you know, gently directing that energy and having expectations, and yes, having deadlines and yes, giving grades. I'm not saying kids can do whatever they want. They shouldn't. They we should be we should say no to kids in many cases, right? Having limits is important and boundaries is really important. And yet, at the same time, I think we can create like those inflatable bumpers in the bowling alley so they don't go out of bounds and hurt anybody or themselves, and still give them the chance to kind of explore their own curiosity and scaffold those skills that they're going to need later on. And you know, for me, like especially now, we're talking about having access to all this, all the information, literally in the world, at our fingertips. And we need to think about classrooms and learning, not so much about are we memorizing facts? Are we learning to hand write and cursive? Because those skills don't matter anymore. What matters is, what are we doing with that information? What is the purpose behind learning something, behind figuring things out? And what do we do with that information once we have it? And so I feel like you just look, ask kids they're not excited about school. Why? Because they come and they show up and it's like, this isn't relevant to my life. I don't see the point. And if our only answer, our best answer, is like, well, it's going to be on the test, you've got to learn it, because it's gonna be on the test. That's not a good enough answer for anybody. Like, if your supervisor came to you and said, Well, we're going to make this big report, and you're gonna put all this energy and time into it, and you guys are gonna work as a committee for hours and hours and hours after school. And we're gonna make this big we're gonna print it out and publish. It's gonna be beautiful and colorful. We're gonna bind it and it goes on a shelf and nobody looks at it ever again. You're like, Why did I just waste hours of my life when I could have been spending with my family or reading a book, or, you know, working with my students to develop a new lesson plan, and so we need to make sure that what we do is is relevant. And I don't mean feel good, I don't mean the kids can do what they want, but how can we make space and room for them to have some agency over their learning and responsibility for their learning, so that a voice and choice is agency and responsibility. You can't just say and do what you want. There are repercussions, and there's got to be you've got to argue that there's a good point behind this. And so I think trusting our students to be passionate learners, to treat them like the humans that they are, to give them. Experiences, to let them fail sometimes and make mistakes, and make that okay, that they don't get penalized for making mistakes, but maybe we encourage that, like go It's okay, as long as we're learning from it and to set them up for success in the future. And again, this isn't about memorizing a certain thing right now, because most times you Forget it if it's on a test, but instead rekindle the joy for learning and the excitement about learning, and to realize that learning should be an enjoyable thing that you do all the time, not just from 8am until 3pm on weekdays, nine months out of the year, that this is something you should be doing all the time. You know when you're out at the in the park, or when you're at home on family vacation, or like I'm asking questions, I'm figuring out how to research it because I'm interested in it, and I can find credible sources online on my own because I want to learn more about it. And I learned to talk to other people and in ways that are respectful, and I can listen to them when no one's looking, when it's not structured and there's no grade on the line, I think that's the most important skill we can teach them is the love of learning. Well said, I

Terri Novacek 
Well said I couldn't agree more.

Terri Novacek 
As we wrap up this episode, let's take a moment to reflect on the deep connection between purpose and passion. Passion is the fuel. It's that spark of excitement and energy that makes us come alive, but passion alone can burn out without direction. Purpose gives our passion meaning, guiding it towards something greater than ourselves. When we align our passions with a sense of purpose, we unlock a state of flow, that place where we operate at our best, feeling fulfilled and motivated. This connection isn't just about personal satisfaction, it's about impact. When we pursue what excites us in a way that serves others or contributes to something meaningful, we not only thrive, but we also inspire those around us. So as you go about your day, here's your challenge, think about what excites you, what impact you want to have. The sweet spot between those two answers is where your element lies. Keep exploring, keep growing and keep leaning into what makes you come alive, because that's what puts you in your element. You

Terri Novacek 
I hope you found some value in today's episode. If so, please take a moment to leave a positive review on the podcast. Platform you use and share the episode on social media, if you visit the element is everything website, you'll find additional resources on today's topic, invite friends and family to join our community of listeners as we ponder science perspectives and strategies around personal accountability, courageous learning and clear decision making for a sense of connection to ourselves, others and life you.