A Better Question

Why mattering changed the way I think about achievement, technology and learning

For most of my career, I asked how I could make learning matter to students. It was a good question, or at least I thought it was. As a chemistry teacher, I wanted students to see that science was not a collection of equations and vocabulary terms trapped inside a textbook. It explained the color of fireworks, the behavior of medicines, the energy stored in food and the strange invisible forces holding the world together. Chemistry was fascinating. It was useful and it mattered. It explains so much of the world around us. In my mind, I simply needed to convince them.

Jennifer Wallace’s work in Never Enough and Mattering, along with a talk she gave to our faculty, inverted that question. Instead of asking how I could make a subject matter to my students, I began asking how I could help my students understand that they matter to the subject and to the world beyond my classroom.

Although chemistry made this shift visible to me, the idea is not specific to science. Students enter every classroom carrying questions they may never ask aloud: Am I capable of doing this? Is there a place for me here? Does anyone notice what I can contribute? Could anything I do make a meaningful difference?

As educators, we often answer with relevance. We explain how students will use algebra, why history is important or how strong writing will help them in college. Those explanations have value, but relevance only tells students why the content matters. Mattering helps them understand why they belong within it.

I began to hear my students’ ambitions differently. So many of them tell me they want to become doctors. I used to respond with a private, affectionate eye roll, you know, the kind reserved for hearing your own seventeen-year-old self echo from across the lab table. I also wanted to become a doctor in high school, as did half the students in nearly every advanced science class I have ever taught.

I assumed their answers reflected a narrow understanding of what people can do with science. Now I think many of them are expressing something deeper. Medicine may be the clearest model of mattering they can see. Doctors visibly relieve suffering, solve urgent problems and change the course of people’s lives. Their value feels immediate and undeniable, often because a doctor has already mattered personally to a student or to someone that student loves.

Perhaps “I want to be a doctor” does not always mean “I understand medicine and have chosen it above every other path.” Sometimes it means, “I want my life to be useful. I want to do work that matters. I want to become someone who can help.” That is an ambition I want to expand.

Education should widen the field of meaningful contribution students can imagine for themselves. A learner might matter by designing safer infrastructure, explaining complex ideas clearly, improving a manufacturing process, creating accessible technology, conducting research, teaching a child, analyzing public-health data or recognizing a problem everyone else has learned to overlook. Our students cannot aspire to roles they have never seen, and they cannot recognize their potential contribution if school presents knowledge as something to collect rather than something to use.

This does not require us to lower expectations or retreat from academic achievement. I remain deeply invested in rigor and high-level learning. Students can be ambitious and successful without being taught that achievement is proof of their worth. Rigor can become preparation for contribution rather than a relentless test of whether someone deserves to belong.

That distinction is part of what led me toward my current work on critical thinking and skill transfer. It is not enough for students to perform well within the familiar boundaries of a lesson. They need to recognize when their knowledge applies, decide how to use it, adapt when the problem changes, and explain why their choices make sense. A student can earn an excellent grade on a unit and still struggle to use the same knowledge when the context no longer resembles the practice set.

Critical thinking is what happens when a learner encounters a problem that refuses to look exactly like the example. Skill transfer occupies that difficult space between knowing and doing. It asks whether learning survives beyond the quiz, the course or the training module. Can learners carry what they know into an unfamiliar situation? Can they determine which knowledge is relevant, select an appropriate strategy, recognize when it is failing and adjust? Can they perform when there is no answer key sitting at the back of the book or a chatbot to ask?

These questions are why I am increasingly interested in blended and flipped learning when incorporated with interactive learning. I am not interested in recording a lecture, assigning it as homework and declaring the educational revolution complete. At their best, blended and flipped models place each part of learning in the environment best suited to support it. Initial exposure, foundational explanations and routine practice can sometimes happen through flexible, technology-supported experiences. Our limited time together can then be protected for application, discussion, feedback, collaboration and the productive struggle through which deeper learning develops.

Interactive learning adds another essential layer. Learners should not only receive information; they should make choices with it. They should predict, test, compare, explain, revise and try again. Simulations and scenario-based activities can give novices a place to rehearse complicated thinking before the stakes become real. Instead of merely being told what an expert would do, learners begin practicing how an expert notices, decides and responds, getting low stakes feedback that doesn’t feel threatening.

Educational technology can support that process, but the technology is not the point. A digital tool can provide accessible explanations, repeated practice, immediate low-stakes feedback and opportunities to explore situations that would be impractical or unsafe to recreate in person. It can also carry some of the repetitive instructional burden that consumes teachers’ time.

The instructor or facilitator remains essential. Technology can deliver an explanation; it cannot fully replace the person who notices hesitation, asks the question that unsettles an easy answer, recognizes unexpected potential or helps a learner recover after failure. The goal is to return time and capacity to instructors so they can perform the human work no platform can automate.

This is the work that led me to begin a practice-focused Ed.D. in Educational Technology at the University of Florida. I am pursuing the doctorate because I want the research skills and theoretical grounding to design these learning experiences deliberately, evaluate them honestly and understand when they produce genuine transfer rather than the appearance of engagement.

I am especially interested in how interactive, technology-supported prelearning can prepare novices to perform complex skills in authentic situations. How can we help learners develop not only procedural knowledge of what to do, but conditional knowledge: when, why and under what circumstances to do it? How does scenario-based practice affect their ability to make decisions when a new problem does not resemble the one they rehearsed? How can technology offer useful structure without removing the uncertainty and judgment that make authentic performance difficult?

Although these questions grew from my classroom, they extend into higher education, professional learning and technical workforce development. Every field struggles with the distance between completing training and performing competently in the real world. I want to explore how thoughtfully designed learning can narrow that distance while remaining accessible, scalable and human.

I also want this work to matter to educators at all levels. When educators spend their limited energy repeating directions, managing routine tasks and recreating resources that could be supported more efficiently, they have less capacity for the work that drew many of them to teaching in the first place. If technology can carry more of the repeatable load, teachers can spend more time giving meaningful feedback, designing authentic challenges, building relationships, and helping students recognize their own capacity to contribute.

That is not using technology to make education less human. It is using technology to reclaim the human parts of education.

I began as a teacher who wanted students to love chemistry. I still do. Chemistry is strange and elegant, and I will probably never stop trying to convince teenagers that intermolecular forces are more exciting than they initially appear. But love of a subject is no longer my highest goal.

I want learners to leave knowing what they can do with what they have learned. I want them to think when no solution has been supplied, transfer their knowledge when the context changes, and recognize places where their abilities could serve someone beyond themselves. I want them to understand that achievement is not the source of their value, but it can become one way they prepare to offer that value to the world.

My doctorate is an opportunity to learn how to build those experiences intentionally, study them rigorously, and help effective ideas travel beyond my own classroom. I am no longer asking only how to make learning matter.