Ethan Delavan, TLIS, Director of IT at the Northwest School, joins the podcast to discuss managing "relevance creep" in independent schools. He shares his unique approach to technology leadership, including the development of a "Technology and Society" academic pathway and the intentional use of a parent tech advisory board to gain industry insights while maintaining curricular boundaries.

1. Ethan Delavan, LinkedIn profile
2. The Northwest School, independent day and boarding school serving students in grades 6 to 12 on an urban campus in Seattle, WA
3. Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (TLIS) certification program, credential that validates the leadership, technical expertise, and strategic judgment required to lead technology in an independent school environment

Dan, welcome to Talking technology with ATLIS,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host, Christina Lewellen,

Hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with ATLIS. I'm Christina Lewellen, the

President and CEO of the Association of technology

leaders in independent schools.

And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey.

Hey, good morning, Bill. We're starting

out today, just you and me. How are you doing this morning?

That's a great way to start things off. I think,

you know, yeah, just me and you hanging out, just without Hiram,

or with me, with you and without Hiram, you know, it's just, oh

no. I'm just kidding. Of course,

I wanted to follow up with you. For those of

our listeners who kind of follow our life stories and our

journeys together, you had mentioned at one point in the

pod that you were moving Sean, he was heading down to warmer

weather to start his first job. So now I feel like we need a

real quick Sean Stites update. How's he doing?

So interestingly, I literally just got off a

FaceTime call with him just before we jumped on here, and he

informed me that he just got a call from his boss, and they

want to move up his arrival. We were supposed to get him down to

Florida the end of February. Now we need to get him down to

Florida by the beginning of February. So I've got to make a

few calls please. I got to start rearranging some things, because

I'm going to be driving the boys south, and need to make sure

things are going well. But it's ever evolving. Getting that

first one out the door,

it's exciting. I'll tell you. Over

the winter break, we moved my daughter from one apartment to

another in the same complex. It was a different building, so

essentially we had to put everything in a truck and drive

it around the block. And there were reasons for all of that,

but we got her moved to a new apartment within the same

complex, and as we were driving home, my husband and I said, Is

this the era that we're in where we're just like the movers, and

really it's like a little bit of karma, right? Because I probably

have made my parents move me about a billion times throughout

my life, and so now I'm in this era where all I do is pick up my

children's stuff and either move it in and out of a dorm room,

now in and out of apartments and now in and out of big girl

apartments, like it's just,

I can remember that era. What from my junior year of

college until I think I was three or four years out of

school? I moved every year for six years.

It's that era. Yep. 100% my daughter, who

goes to j mu, has been in the same apartment for two years,

but she has to move out of it in the summer. Yeah, even though

it's not like a dorm, like she has to move out of the apartment

and then go straight back to the same exact apartment. It's just

crazy pants. All I do is move children. Yeah, 100% Thank

goodness for those big storage bags. They used to call them the

IKEA bags. Right now they're everywhere on Amazon, and

they're these huge plastic bags. Oh, yep, those things are a gift

that just keeps on giving.

We have the IKEA branded versions of those.

That's how Sean went from room to room within the same

fraternity house for three years. It's just throw it all in

the IKEA bags, load it up in their basement, and then bring

it all back up once he moves back in. So know it well,

you know, as we wrap up this little

conversation about children moving, I got to give one big

shout out to I have a friend that I've known for probably 15

plus years. We used to work together, and she, at one point,

left her apartment in Northern Virginia to move home to care

for her parent, who was getting older, so she moved back,

basically to her childhood area and to her childhood home, and

so she had a whole apartment full of stuff she did not need,

but she knew I had four girls in high school, and this woman,

bless her heart, put all of her apartment stuff in a storage

unit, and my children shop out of the storage unit. Every time

they have a new apartment set up, they're like, does Sarah

have any stands? Does she have any lamps? And Sarah's like,

Yep, go ahead. It was literally one of the kindest things anyone

has ever done for my girls is basically put all her apartment

in a storage unit, and then the girls just kind of pick at it

every time they need something for a new apartment. It's

amazing.

It's better than having to order it up on Amazon

and hope it gets to them when they need it.

Well. Best wishes to Sean as he continues

to now move even faster, and best wishes to you, dad and also

mom with this transition. Hope it goes really well. Yeah, I

appreciate it. So today we are pivoting now to our guest. I'm

super excited about this one, Bill a good friend of Atlas,

someone who has been as I think of my early days coming into the

Atlas community. Ethan Delevan is like a bright bundle of

sunshine from day one, always a smile, always willing to help.

And so I am thrilled to welcome Ethan to our podcast. Ethan,

hello. Hello and welcome to talk and tech with ATLIS. So glad to

have you here.

Hello, Hello, thanks for having me on it's

pleasure. So Ethan,

you are the director of it at the Northwest

school, and you've generally been a Pacific Northwest person

at least as long as I've known you. And I'm not sure if that is

a full journey placement in this country, but we're about to find

out. I would love to learn a little bit about your journey.

Have you always been out in the Seattle area, or is that a

relocation thing for you?

Well, that's complicated. I was born in

Seattle. Actually, the last school I worked at was down the

hill from the house I was born to. Oh, but my family moved away

when I was little, so I don't have many memories of Seattle,

and then I came back to the Evergreen State College for

undergrad, went to Boston, so round about your neck of the

woods, Bill realized I just not an East Coast kid, and moved

back to the Pacific Northwest, and have not looked back so here

permanently since 1995

the East Coast, West Coast thing is a

thing, Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Sometimes you meet people from

who are not from the States, and they're like, oh, America is

weird. Like, you guys are very diverse. I grew up on the East

Coast, and I married a West Coast guy, and so every time I

would go back to see his parents when they were still alive,

like, even the ocean being on the left when you were heading

north, right, you know, was super weird to me. I'm like, Are

We Going south right now? I think you're one or the other.

So I appreciate that you came out here. My husband also went

to Boston, being a West Coast guy, and he was not having it.

Yeah, it's a really different culture. I

mean, I loved Boston, I loved being there, I loved everything

I learned. Love the city, but it was just sort of long term, not

where I live. There's definitely a pace

difference. There's a pace

difference, there's a basic sort of

appearance difference, and there's, like, some background

assumptions that are really different. And I just the trees

out here. I just got back. We were in the mountains for three

days, which is, you know, an hour away. Stunningly beautiful

mountains, incredibly tall trees, just amazing, amazing

outdoor activities that I couldn't stay away from.

Well, I'm definitely a fan of Seattle.

We've talked about that for sure, and I like the baseball

stadium. Bill loves the baseball stadium out there, even though

you're with East Coasters today, we are big fans of the Seattle

area. Tell me a little bit about how you got into independent

schools. Everyone has kind of an interesting path and lands in

indie schools. So how did you find yourself in this space?

You know, I was in undergrad for computer

science, essentially psychology and computer science, then did

this very interesting left turn into theater, and just blossomed

tremendously in theater. So stuck with that. That's what I'm

to grad school for in Boston, is theater education, which is sort

of how I got into education and then got an internship at the

Seattle Children's Theater. There are a few big, well known

children's theaters in the country, and Seattle is one of

them. So I got an internship here at Seattle Children's

Theater. Knew I love the West Coast, moved back and because I

didn't have a teaching certification, the theater

teaching jobs through the children's theater and

independent schools were the ones that were open to me. So I

started a residency at a little Elementary School here in

Seattle, many, many years ago, fell in love with the job, ended

up liking teaching more that I liked Theater, which was a huge

surprise to me. And then there were these Macintosh computers

off to the side, and they could do video. And I was like, You're

kidding? Me, a computer that does video and just got more and

more involved, ended up teaching acting for the camera, ended up

teaching filmmaking, ended up teaching web design to post the

films. Ended up teaching special effects, and it just snowballed

from there. I'm sort of in that era where the school said, Okay,

you're the techiest person around. Get over here, show us

how all this works, fix it and make everything okay. So that

was how I fell into that role. They said, just please stop

teaching theater and teach tech. So I did, and then they said,

Okay, stop teaching tech and teach all the teachers how to

teach tech. That's how I ended up doing what I'm doing, and

it's been an incredible evolution.

That's really cool. So do you still get

a chance to spend some time in theater in some capacity?

Because I feel like once a theater person, always a theater

person?

Oh, yes, you are not wrong about that. My kid got

in a theater. Was actually in a program for technical theater

right now, and so I got a chance to design sets for a couple of

musicals at their high school a few years ago. And that was an

incredible amount of work for no money and so much fun

you are currently at the Northwest

school. Tell us a little bit about that school. Who goes

there and why?

Yeah, we are a middle school, Upper School, so

six through 12, we have about 360 students, and we also have a

boarding program, which is really amazing. So that's my

first time I've been at a school with a boarding program that's.

Wonderful. So a lot of diversity, very artsy School,

which is wonderful, and a very humanities oriented school. I'm

new there, so as of September, so I think it's the Northwest

School for the Humanities, Arts and environmental

sustainability. So a lot of environmental studies at the

school, a lot of amazing art teachers, and there are a lot of

distribution requirements just in the arts. So approaching

technology through the arts is a big deal there. But it's an

amazing school, really dynamic group of kids.

Given your background, is that what drew

you to that school or what brought you there?

I think so the two things that brought me there

were, first of all, they had technology education in their

strategic plan. And during the interview process, I asked them

about that part of the strategic plan and and I said, Well, what

have you done on this? And they said, we could use your help.

That was thing one. I was hooked. And then they said,

Well, we have this new program called Academic pathways that

were spinning up, and they described it, and I said, Well,

that's like majors, but for high school kids. And they said,

Yeah, these pathways, most of them are interdisciplinary. So

for the pathway, you have a little foundation you have to

take, and then you take some scholarly connections, and then

some explorations around that particular pathway. So things

like environmental sustainability is one of the

pathways, and a student doesn't have to choose a pathway, but

might choose their way into environmental sustainability. Or

excellence in the visual arts is the second one. Or social

justice is a third one, the one that got me hooked technology

and society when they said that, I was like, I'm in. I want to be

a part of that development. That's cool. Oh, it's amazing.

So we have our ed tech manager is also doing the coordination

for the development of the Pathways Program. She is off the

charts amazing, and has just done a great job with Ed Tech

and also developing the pathways. So it's a really

unique program, and it was really interesting to be in the

room to talk about this particular technology and

society pathway and be the tech person saying, don't forget the

and society part. It's the and society part that makes this the

right thing for our school, because it connects technology

and culture, and it brings in things like human centered

design. It brings in things like user experience design. And so

it gives the school a way to pull in technology education at

a school that is not known for that. It gives the school a way

to pull it in, in a way that's mission appropriate in a way

that's aligned with culture and in a way that a lot of faculty

are really excited about that pathway, not just the Tech

faculty.

That's interesting. So let's park there

for just a second. This pathway, this major, if you will, for

high school students, has given the school an opportunity to

kind of open the door to more technology than has been its

tradition in the past. It's kind of like a great way to have the

school evolve down a technological path that maybe

they weren't as comfortable with, familiar with et cetera.

Is that accurate? Do you think?

Yeah, absolutely. I think so. How are we going to

pull technology into curriculum and program in a way that honors

environmental sustainability, that honors the humanities, that

honors how much arts education we do. And so finding a way to

not just go into STEM, one of the things I talked about early

on in developing this with the school, is STEM is a framing for

how you might approach technology education. It's not a

framing that we need to adopt. It's not a thing we need to say.

It's not a thing we necessarily need to get better at. But we do

need to think about what is the environment, the workplace

environment, the cultural environment that we're sending

young people into, it's highly technologized. So what do we owe

them? You know, as a school for the Humanities, for the arts,

for the environment, who are attracting those kinds of young

people who really care about those issues, what do we owe

them about the technologist environment they're going to be

going into? And the answer to that is we need to help them

understand how technology impacts culture.

This sounds absolutely incredible. I mean,

it sounds like a really interesting way to tackle and to

be completely frank, one I haven't heard of really done in

this way before. So it sounds like a great place to go. And I

can see why it would draw you there, in terms of what you do

there? You mentioned your ed tech team. What does the

department look like? What does your day to day look like? I

mean, one of the things Christina always wants to dig

into is what's in a title, what does it mean to be you there,

and what does it look like there with your support staff.

When I applied for the job, the job description

was, do you know TCP? IP, do you know servers? And I was like,

Well, yeah, but that's not really what gets me out of bed

in the morning. So in talking to the hiring team, I realized, oh,

there's a lot more to do here than just keep DNS running. I am

responsible for the network, backbone, the back end, all the

cloud services. At the same time, they hired a gentleman,

Omar Khan, who's amazing at having a great time working with

him, and he is the Assistant Director of IT for

infrastructure, so he does a lot of the back end stuff that's

really his passion. And we work together really well as a team.

We also have a computer technician and a database

coordinator, and that forms the core IT team. Then we have some

ed tech folks. Our ed tech manager was a long term sub.

She's done tremendous work. Our long term ed tech manager has

returned. She's an amazing computer science educator and a

really great thinker around how we might pull teachers into new

experiences and new ways of doing things, and then we have

one of our music teachers who also supports ed tech,

specifically in the media arts area, and I supervise a piece of

each of their jobs. And so that matrix reporting, where they

report to a division director for part of their job, and they

report to me for part of their job, it gets complex, and it

really requires me and the division directors to be on the

same page about what some of the organizational priorities are.

So that's a really big deal. That's important, that I work in

partnership with them and understand them as curricular

leaders. I've made a lot of efforts to make sure I

understand where they're coming from and what their goals are.

That's largely my team. This Head of School in Northwest I've

known him for a long time. We're friends. So when I was in the

interview process, I said, Well, you know how much I love

curriculum? You know how much I love organizational change and

organizational development? How is it I'm going to have an

impact here if my job description says director of it,

and he had a really good answer. He said, This is the kind of

school where you can have an impact in all different aspects

of the school if you show up in a way that's collaborative and

supportive. And I said

that I can do, yeah. So basically, the

title didn't really matter, right?

I mean, it is a school where collaboration is

absolutely key, and understanding colleagues and

where they're coming from, and being able to stay in discussion

in the long term matters.

It's so interesting because it sounds

like you guys are being super intentional in this moment that

we're in like, regardless of whether or not the school was

tech heavy to begin with, if that was one of its hallmarks,

it's moving that way, especially given that, like you said, we're

preparing kids to move out into a world that is very much shaped

by technology and AI and so it sounds like there's a lot of

intentionality around these discussions. So I'm curious if I

could just give you the mic for a second, tell us a little bit

about how you personally are sitting in this moment. I'd like

to know what you're thinking about it. You know, are you guys

focused primarily on AI? Are you taking a step back and saying,

Yeah, it's a lot more than just AI that we need to be thinking

and talking about. Where does your brain go in a lot of the

work that you've been doing in this new role,

I think AI was really the clarion call for

Northwest, in particular where they realized, Oh, we haven't

really been staying abreast of things as they change, and

Northwest did a pretty good job of addressing issues around AI

and appropriate uses of AI, and that's something that we're

still being really intentional about. We have a few different

committees addressing it right now, and some tremendous work

from our ed tech managers. But really what drew me to the

school was its readiness to address what I call relevance

creep, and we've all heard like mission creep, where the mission

of an organization, especially a nonprofit organization, can

creep away from its original stance because there's more

money just off in this direction, or that's the

preference of the individuals at that organization. And what I

realized after several different schools, I think I've been at

five different schools in the Seattle area since 1996 when I

started. And what I realized is that at each of the schools,

I've been helping them manage relevance creep, which is to say

that the school is a certain way. This is how we do it. This

is who we are. This is what we emphasize. This is our program.

But the world kind of creeps out from under them and makes a

change that's toward coding, or that's toward multimedia, or in

most recent case, that's toward AI. And then the school doesn't

have necessarily a really cogent way of staying abreast of those

changes, and they don't realize that. That the relevance of

their program is creeping away from where the world is going,

and so that it's been that difference that I've been

helping a lot of schools manage over the years, and that's the

mindset I came in to Northwest with, and it's something that I

think has resonated pretty well. I've talked to a lot of folks

there about relevance and how easily it can creep out from

under us. To your point about intentionality, we have several

different committees there that are addressing this. We're

building a student committee around AI use. We have a couple

of students, couple of juniors, that came to us with some real

concerns about how we've been addressing AI. And they a lot of

really good points to make. A lot of really good points about

student leadership as well. And so it's been really exciting to

be able to meet with them, bring them in, find out what their

thoughts are, find out how young people are thinking about AI and

thinking about technological change. That's been a really

exciting facet to the intentionality. The other piece

is that we have a parent tech advisory board, and in an

independent school, you've got to be a little careful about

that. That can easily get away from you. And this board predate

this advisory committee predates me at the school. What I made

clear to them at the beginning of this year is you don't write

curriculum. You don't tell us what to teach. You're bad at

that. We're good at it. What you do is you tell us what you see

from your vantage point. What is changing? What have you had to

learn in the past few years that you didn't learn in school? What

do you see coming down the pike? That is surprising, that is

concerning, that is exciting from where you are. So we have

folks from Microsoft, of course. We have folks from Amazon, of

course, and we have a really good mix of folks who have a

really different points of view about how urgent is this, which

direction should we go? How important will AI be? That's

been a really amazing perspective to have the student

perspective and the parent perspective at the same time.

Then we have several internal committees, with curricular

leadership, with Ed Tech leadership, and with a variety

of teachers who are willing to pilot new technologies. So yeah,

trying to bring real intentionality to let's not lose

our DNA. Let's be the school that we are, because we know

that we serve kids really well. But let's find out how we can be

relevant in a changing world, which is the core question that

I love answering with schools.

Ethan, I got to tell you, when you mentioned the

parent tech advisory board, I don't know whether I was going

to, like, gasp or like, drop my pen from notes that I was

taking. Yep, I was thinking about that. And, you know, it

was like, what would that look like here? And I'm like, Man, if

I brought this up now, I don't even know what direction it

would go in. I just want to dig in slightly on that. How many

people do you have on that? How frequently do you meet? Do those

parents become ambassadors for you to get out there? I mean, we

use students in that role early on, when we were launching our

one to one program, you know, to be like the myth busters and

really sell the message. What does that group look like in a

little bit more detail, if you don't

mind, yeah, I think we have to go into it,

because our listeners are all having a heart attack, like they

probably drove off the road Exactly. We're gonna have to

micromanage this a tiny bit. You're gonna have to have to

unpack it.

I'm there, and I was when I came to the school

and I heard they had such a board, I was like, Oh, that

could catch fire fast. Which is why I was really clear in our

first meeting that I need to hear about what you see. I don't

need to hear about what you think we should do. We're better

at that. And so bringing that clarity to the table allowed me

the space to just listen to what they were saying.

So it's really like a true Advisory

Committee, especially given where you are in the country,

like you're in a technological hotbed. And so it kind of makes

sense, oh yes, but do they stay in the lane of advising?

No, oh no. Did they cross the lane? You bet

they do. I mean, their parents at the school, they care about

what we teach. They have opinions about what the program

ought to look like. All parents at independent schools have

that, which is one of the things I love about independent

schools. So what I try to do is pre frame the discussion for

them. So for example, the last meeting was about the ISTE

standards, which is something that we're doing a fairly

intentional job of pulling in, along with global perspective

standards and social justice standards at the same time. So

we're weaving the ISTE standards into the DNA of the school. The

ISTE standards are really constructivist, pedagogically

speaking, and so they work well. And a lot of teachers are

saying, Wait, we already do this, but not necessarily with

computers. And so it's worked well. But what I wanted to hear

from the tech advisory board was, from where you are as

professional technologists, is this what you do? You are these

the cognitive habits you actually need to get your job

done. And so that frames the discussion around something that

isn't what the school teaches and allows them to stay in the

lane of I manage coders, or I have moved on to developing AI,

one of the folks on the panel is in higher education, and does

maker and Human Centered Design and Engineering at University of

Washington. So that's an amazing perspective to have as well. And

I tend to ignore the well, you should have more this, and you

should do that instead, and really listen for what is it

you're seeing that's surprising you, because those are the

signals that I'm after.

Yeah, that's really interesting. So it sounds

like you do a pretty good job of keeping the cats corralled, if

not herded, I guess. Oh yeah. So it leads me to the question,

then, what do you think? Or what are you hearing about? Critical

thinking? Because I think so often the media headlines are

capturing everyone's attention, which is, AI equals we're not

going to think anymore, which, by the way, is exactly the same

set of headlines we had when the internet came on the scene. And

so I'm curious what you're thinking or what you're hearing

around what critical thinking looks like in this current era

that we sit in.

I'm really glad you asked that, because that

came up in one of the early meetings we had with the tech

advisory board this year. Let me back up a little bit. The

question I asked is, What are some of the key skills you use

in your job, or that you ask your direct reports to use in

their job? What are some of the key cognitive skills? Well, they

said critical thinking, of course, and our ed tech manager

had the presence of mind to say, Hang on, when you say critical

thinking, What do you mean? And we had a discussion around what

is their definition of critical thinking, and so we could

contrast it to our definition as educators of critical thinking,

the piece that jumped out to me as a key difference and kind of

a bell weather of the time that we're living in, is they said,

Can you choose the right tool to get done what you need to get

done, which is not an aspect of critical thinking that I would

have surfaced as an educator or that I was told as a student,

right? I was told, here's your pencil, here's your piece of

paper. Now think critically, and then we're going to talk about

your writing, and whether it shows that you've thought

through the issue or the symbolism or the reasoning, this

whole new facet of can you choose the right tool to achieve

your goal? Is a major facet of critical thought that wasn't

really as important before, but is critical at this juncture.

That's super interesting, and that also makes

a lot of sense sitting where I'm sitting, when I speak to

schools, a lot of times I represent what a CEO or a

business would want to hire from their student population, like,

what is it that we're looking for? So it's kind of cool that

you actually have a formal advisory committee that's

helping you sift through some of these things. Do you think that

that feedback is making it into this other thing we talked about

earlier, which is that you're trying to walk this path of

being a more technologically driven, responsive adapt school.

Is it helping kind of answer that question around what

schools need to be adaptable in this moment? Does that kind of

inform that? Or are those two relevant and adjacent

conversations, but they're, you know, at least informing the

work you're doing. Yeah, I

wouldn't be continuing with the tech

advisory board if it weren't helping us be intentional. I

mean, the three major pieces that have come out for me are

the critical thinking piece and the sort of, can you choose the

right tool the speed at which project management has

increased. One of the questions we asked them, I think it was

the second meeting, is what will be obsolete in five years? And

they said, five years, try six months. And we were like, oh,

okay, that changes the discussion. And then finally,

the sense of urgency that some of them, not all of them, but

some of them, feel about how quickly things change in the

world, especially in the workplace, how quickly they're

going to keep changing, and how adaptable young people need to

be. And then some of them have opinions about, well, we should

be teaching this instead of that, which we take with a grain

of salt. We know that we teach critical thought really, really

well. We've had colleges tell us that about our students after

they've been in college for a bit. So we know that we do that

well. We know that there aren't major underlying changes. Need

to make as a school, but that parent perspective about

workplaces, especially technically driven workplaces,

is really valuable to us in terms of how we can be

intentional about addressing technology curriculum early on,

when I started the school and started talking to the

curricular leaders, I said not every school has to be the tech

school. We can be the kind of school we want to be and still

prepare our students for a highly technical future, or a

future that's built on a lot of technology, and we can choose to

do that in a way that we think is collaborative, humane,

supportive, and honors the whole child, and not just their

ability to earn money or get a job or be an effective worker.

So Ethan, one of the questions that I have is

about the makeup of that advisory board, and I just want

to dig in just a little bit more on that membership, because I'm

wondering whether all of those people are in the field of

technology, or do you have people that are, you know,

parents, that are in other areas of work, that are really just

concerned about things and may not necessarily have the level

of expertise that others on The board, again, particularly given

the area in which you exist, that are contributing to those

conversations, either in a positive sense, or because

they're like, No, I heard this or saw this on the internet, and

I think we should be stopping that, like, what's the makeup of

that look like? I think it's a

great question, and that's something that I gave

some thought to early on and made sure that we had as many

voices in the room as possible. I mean, not a lot of parents can

commit to a monthly meeting. And we do it hybrid. So we do it

part online. You can zoom in, or you can attend at the school a

lot of and we hold it at a time 330 when the parents, a lot of

parents are there picking up their students anyway. So it

just makes sense. So we tried to make the logistics as easy as

possible, to get as much diversity as possible, and made

it hybrid, to get as much actual attendance as possible. And

definitely at the meetings where there are more of the parents

there, the discussion is a lot more nuanced, and they can

really push and pull each other, and I don't have to do quite as

much redirection. So that's really nice. And I think you

make a good point about thinking intentionally about, do we just

want the techie parents here? I'd mentioned that we do have

someone from higher education on the board, and then most of the

rest of the parents are in technology. They're at Microsoft

or Amazon or companies like that, even though they may not

be in coding. So business development is one of the

things, one of the areas that has come up for us recently

where it may make sense to have someone on that advisory board.

I'm always to your point, Bill thinking about the development

of that board. Do I have diversity? When I started at the

school, I think there was one woman on the board who came

every so often, so I made an intentional effort to reach out

to a lot of our female parents, to round out the perspective a

little bit, and also working on, you know, we don't have enough

people of color on that board, and that's another facet of

diversity that's really important to us at Northwest so

I think that the More you can have diversity on that advisory

board, the less redirecting them back to don't tell us how to

design curriculum I would need to do right because then they're

playing off of each other, and they are offering each other a

bit of perspective that mitigates a little bit of the

you ought to do it my way, feel in the room and really helps

them understand. Just because we do it that way at Amazon doesn't

mean it's right. Doesn't mean that's what we should teach

everybody.

I'm not sure that you realized when you

hopped on this podcast today, Ethan, that there was a hornet's

nest you were about to step into, yeah, with this parent

advisory idea, but I will do a call to arms for our listeners.

Y'all, if you guys have this type of group that a parent

advisory, especially in the realm of technology, you must

reach out to us. Please, please, please, when you get to a safe

spot and you can pull your car over, shoot us an email at

ATLIS, because I really want to know about this. I'm wondering

if maybe we should have a separate, like panel

conversation about this. Because at first it gave me a heart

attack, and I'm not even a tech director, certainly gave Bill

one. But then, the more that you talk about it, the more it makes

a lot of sense. You know, everybody wants to be consulted

and have buy in, and if you give them the framework in which they

can operate, which is, ie, you don't get to do curriculum, you

might end up with some really great feedback. And sometimes I

do think that we lose sight of the fact that we work at

schools, but we are educating our little humans to go out into

the world. And schools are a weird environment. Sometimes it

doesn't always mirror what's happening in corporate. It in

the working world. So I love all of this. We will pivot away from

the parent advisory so that everyone's blood pressure can

just go back down. But I do love the idea of talking to more

people who do it. What I'd like to ask about Ethan, if I can

pivot us away, is that you obviously were already here in

the ATLIS community when I showed up seven years ago, and

you obviously are part of what I lovingly call the first gen,

which is that you're a tech director who taught himself how

to be a tech director, because that's not what was in your

world, right? So I'm curious about your early days, your

involvement with finding the community. So I know that there

were these ad hoc gatherings in different places of finding

other tech directors, until Atlas really put a stake in the

ground on that front. But you've been around since early days of

Atlas, and I'm sure even before that, with other ad hoc groups.

So tell us about how you became involved in this broader tech

director community.

Yeah, as you were talking, I was thinking back,

like, who was I involved with, and this was at a time where a

lot of schools had a contracted it person, so they had some

managed service provider who came in and made sure the

network was running, but didn't really offer a lot of guidance

around how to design curriculum, around technology, or how

technology impacts classroom management, and a lot of those

really educational issues that come up when technology comes

into the picture. So I really got into technology through the

media arts. And the first technology curriculum I had the

chance to kind of single handedly design was a media

production a media literacy, media production curriculum. And

it was at this I don't know if you all remember cable access.

Did you all have that? Like Open Access cable? Like cable TV

companies had to have one channel that was open to the

community, right? Like that went the way of the dodo, as far as I

know. But it was

epic in its time. Yes, just for you young

listeners, it was iconically terrible.

Yes, it was iconically terrible, but it was

there. It created access, right? And it created the possibility

that anybody could pick up a camera and tell their own story.

And so I got involved with what was called youth media at the

time. And there was a group in Seattle called 911, Media Art

Center that had been around for a long time. Got involved with

the board, got involved with developing some of their

education programs. And that's kind of how I cut my teeth as a

program designer, a curriculum designer, and then ended up

building that for a couple different schools, where they

could create multimedia literacies with Video Editing,

Sound Editing, electronic music, that I actually did some media

production myself. I had a documentary that was on our

local PBS station, as well as a few other markets around the

country, and that was my foot in the door. I got involved with

the National Association for media literacy, education. I was

coming at it from the production side, where I was like, Hey,

let's go make a movie, and they were coming at it from the

critical media literacy side, hey, let's understand the

messages that we're seeing on television, because they got it

started the television era where the messages were coming at you

and you couldn't pause and you Couldn't search you had

essentially three choices in the television pick one, and it's

just this stream of information that you need to critique as

it's happening. And so those critical media literacies ended

up informing how I taught media production. So I taught a lot of

how do you craft a world? How do you create images that are

persuasive. How do you know that it's persuasive? How do you

deconstruct an image and how it persuades you into thinking a

particular reality about the world? What are media as

constructed world views got into a lot of that stuff and then

broadened out into coding, game design, web design, and that

national media literacy Association and the 911 Media

Arts Center and cable access were some of those early

incubators for my thinking and my community. And then I went to

ISTE. I can't remember exactly what year it was. I think it was

the year before ATLIS formed, and it was this, like temporary

city in the middle of Chicago. It was so overwhelming, I had a

hard time finding my people there. But once ATLIS formed in

2014 in the Bay Area, I was one of two Seattle people there. The

other Seattle person was from the northwest Association of

Independent Schools. He was their Tech coordinator at the

time. He sent an email out to the listserv, and I was like,

oh, I need to be there. And got a ticket, got a hotel room, and

have not looked back since it is the go to organization for

people in my position. And it has just been incredibly

supportive. And I thank my lucky stars for ATLIS every

day, when you talk about community, and

particularly the ISTE conference, I mean, I've gone to

a number of those conferences. I think we may have been at the

same Chicago one, because I took a whole crew of people to that

one when we went, and it was very informative. You can learn

a lot. You know, it sounds like with what you're doing with the

ISTE standards and trying to adopt those in it's definitely a

good connecting place. But you know, it was the idea of finding

your people and finding those that are really supporting the

work that we're doing in independent schools, focusing in

on that, which is where ATLIS really shines. And what I'll say

Ethan is, I think our community, you and I, when you jumped on a

plane and came out to the East Coast, and we hunkered down here

at MKA, and we started working on the T list program, and

that's where, again, you talk about supporting the community

and the work that we do. I think the T list is an excellent

example of that, and I just like to get what you think about the

participation in that process, and really what that brings to

independent school. It directors technologists, ed tech people,

and helps us to achieve in developing our relevance in

schools. Absolutely.

And I remember that first meeting around

developing the T list exam very fondly when I thought about

going out there and doing this, I was like, Wait, we're gonna

sit in a room. Oh my gosh. So there it is.

Phil is showing us his little fidget

toys from that meeting. I still have some on my desk too. Yeah,

I

remember the little unicorns. The unicorn was the

question that was composed where the answers were all like,

nothing needed to get changed. Like we all wrote the question.

We heard the question. We were like, we don't need to do

anything with this one, because that was always our writing

process. Was trying to figure out what are the distractors,

and what was going to be the main answer and what we needed

to do there. And it was the unicorn.

We got a unicorn. Yeah. So basically,

when you nailed it, that was a unicorn, Yes, yep. When we

started that process, I was like, Okay, we

sit around in a room and we talk about questions, okay, I'll do

it, but this isn't going to be very much fun. And then I got

there and I was like, This is awesome. Just digging into what

is my process and really thinking through, what are my

steps when someone comes to me with this kind of question, or

when this sort of line gets breached, or when one of the

curricular leaders or the head of school says we have to go

this direction, what's my process? What do I have to do to

maintain student privacy and cyber security. What do I have

to do to maintain the integrity of the department? What do I

have to do to be true to the mission of the school? And so

thinking through all of those things really brought home that

being a technology leader in schools is different than just

being an IT director, and that being a technology leader in

independent schools is different still, and just going through

that process of designing the assessment for the T list really

brought home and helped structure my thinking around how

am I going to approach this and Help Me form committees like we

have a data flow committee at Northwest, which is composed of

several different departments, because one, the IT department

can't do it alone. And I would not have thought of convening a

data flow committee before I went through the exercise around

the T list, because it gave me the sense of, oh, I'm

structuring process around effective technology

implementation, and who do I need to bring in? What do I need

to explain? What do I need to listen for? What do I need to

identify that I don't know, and how I'm going to find it out so

that I can come to a decision and an implementation plan

that's right for this particular school at this particular time.

I loved that with the T list. I was there too

that weekend for a bit, and I believe I had to jet off to

something else when I left you guys to do some item writing.

But what was really cool about it, and it was very disciplined,

obviously, we had a psychometrician firm on board,

and they walked us through it. They taught us how to do it.

This was the first certification we had, started from the ground

up. But what you're talking about Ethan, I think, happened

to everyone who was in the room that day, and then happened

later to all the people who sat for the exam, which is that you

walked in going, Wait a minute, what is it that I do and in the

process of actually thinking through those steps and

wrestling, what are the best practices here? What is the

better approach? What is the first step versus the second

versus the fourth? That scenario based test writing is the

hardest work to do in industry. So I give you guys a lot of

credit, because you just. Jumped in, and you were like, Sure,

we'll figure this out. And with a great guide, you guys got down

the path. But what was different is that when y'all walked out of

that room, I think that everyone's head was just a

little bit higher in that you were like, yeah, actually, this

is a profession. We have professionalized this in the

process of writing this exam, and now everyone who sits for it

is also kind of walking away from it going, man, yeah, I do

do all that, and it's not the kind of exam you can study out

of a book, right? Tlis. You have to have the breadth of knowledge

and experience. It's a combination of the two, because

it's a scenario based exam. So you can't just wing it. You

definitely have to have your process and your strategy

grounded in the foundation of what we teach at ATLIS and what

our body of knowledge says is best practices. But I just love

that you highlighted how even walking out of it, you stumbled

into it right, as all of you did, and then you walked out of

it with a new lens on the work that you do and that you now

apply that to your work every day. I think that that is quite

common in the realm of T list, and it's still in its early

days, which is just a testament to you and Bill and everyone who

was in that room. It was pretty incredible to watch, definitely

a highlight of my career. And I know of Peter's too. Peter Frank

on the team. He was right there shoulder to shoulder with you

guys. And we talk about it all the time, how proud we are of

that project, because it's just really game changing.

Yeah, Peter was wonderful. I just loved working

with him. The group was amazing. When you talked about scenario

planning, I really felt more and more at home in that group the

more we talked through the scenarios, because I realized,

oh, I can be vulnerable here. I can bring up something that I

did wrong, where I really bombed that one, that'll make a good

scenario, right? Yeah, and it was okay in that group that we

brought up things that we had really fumbled and then talk

through. Well, then how would we approach this that is a good

catch, right? That really helps the organization land it well.

And so the ability to be vulnerable in that group and

just talk through some of the real struggles and some of the

failures we've had, helped us arrive at those best practices.

Helped us put our finger on that key answer. It's like, yes,

that's the right process. That'll actually get the school

where it's trying to go.

I love that you guys. It was very special to

watch, so I am forever grateful that you guys were willing to do

that. You know, Ethan, I just want to circle back on one thing

before we wrap up. You've just gone through what is the

equivalent in the business world of your first 90 days you

started a new school in the fall. You made it through your

first half of the school year. And so since it's so fresh,

could I ask you what you think about or how you approach your

first 90 days? So if folks are thinking about making that

career change and maybe in August, they find themselves at

a new school. How do you do that? You know, after you move

into a new community, and even if you knew the head of school,

I'm certain there's still a lot of analysis and listening tour

that has to happen. But you know, I'm just curious, what are

your thoughts about the first few months on the job when you

change schools?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I had

the advantage at Northwest that I knew of the school a lot. I'd

worked with folks who still work there, and I did find myself

doing a lot of listening. I attended a lot of faculty

meetings they didn't on paper need to attend. I did a lot of

talking to faculty in the lunchroom and just listening to

how they talked about their students, how they talked about

their curriculum, how they spoke about their time at the school,

their relationship with their curricular leaders, just to get

the vibe of the school, if you will. How do these folks like to

collaborate? What does technology mean to them? What

experiences have they had around technology implementations in

the past. How do they use technology in their classes?

What do they expect of the technology that they have in

place? Just to get a sense of what are some of the ways I need

to show up for this faculty and these students that they've

perhaps been yearning for or that they have come to expect.

What shoes Am I filling? My predecessor did a great job,

really stable network, and I'm really grateful for that aspect,

because it has allowed me to turn my priorities toward how

are we preparing young people for a quickly changing world, so

I've been doing a lot of listening, which isn't

necessarily structured, but really being aware of what am I

hearing that can give me clues about what the priorities are

going to be. And so that's been a big part of this transition,

creating a rapport with my. Team, making sure I understand

why they took this job, making sure I understand how they like

to work, where they might need support, and what gets them

excited about being at an independent school, what maybe

rubs them the wrong way with some of their colleagues with

certain policies for how things have been done, so that I can

get a sense of what those next items on the to do list are

going to be.

The National Association of Independent

Schools is heading to Seattle for its annual conference. So if

folks are coming into town for NAIS and they want to play

tourist for a hot second, what's your favorite

Pike Place Market is, of course, the obvious thing

to say. It's going to be really close to the conference. So

that's great. We've recently taken down the freeway overpass,

the viaduct that kind of cut the waterfront off of downtown. So

that's all down. The bike lane is open. The walking paths are

open. The aquarium has a huge new tank, which I haven't even

been to see. And if you walk to kind of the north end of Pike

Place, and walk down out of that upper level, there is a gorgeous

staircase that looks off toward the Olympic Mountains. So if

it's a sunny day, I would definitely, definitely recommend

that I'm

going to jump in Ethan, because I got to ask you

about two things, because I loved Seattle. Been out there a

couple times. Absolutely loved Seattle. One thing, and it's

probably a total tourist trap, but I absolutely loved with my

boys, was a Space Needle. We actually were looking to go to

the top of it, and then we saw how much it cost, yeah, but then

we did it because we were like, wait a minute, if you eat in the

restaurant, you get to go to the top for free, so why not just

eat the meal and put the money towards the meal and then pay a

little extra and go to the top. So that was absolutely fabulous.

And the one thing I loved when I was there was the EMP center. Is

that still there as a music lover, I absolutely loved it.

Yeah, it's called the MO pop now it's right at the

base of the Space Needle. It's as weird looking as ever, and it

is amazing. It's wonderful. I've been there for a lot of

different events, a lot of different exhibits. Great place.

Yeah, my kids went there. When the

Coraline exhibit was there, they loved it because they grew up

with that, and they're big fans of the Chihuly Museum, which is

gorgeous and breathtaking.

Yeah, it's lovely. It's right there, like

you could do all three in one day. Space Needle. Chihuly,

MOPA, boom, well.

Ethan, thank you for those recommendations,

because those who are heading to the NAIS event, it's a beautiful

city. Bill and I are huge fans of the city, so you'll have to

forgive our fan girling over Seattle, because we love it out

there. I'm addicted too. So we're all good.

Thank you so much for making the time for us

today. Ethan, it's been a pleasure to dig into your

journey and all of your thoughts a little bit. So I really

appreciate your time and thanks for joining us pleasure.

This has been talking technology with ATLIS,

produced by the Association of technology leaders in

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