The MCIULearns Podcast

A Conversation with ChangeEd's Patrice Semicek and Andrew Kuhn

• Montgomery County Intermediate Unit • Season 6 • Episode 10

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Join us as we feature the dynamic duo, Patrice Semicek and Andrew Kuhn, who are working with their colleague Tony Mirabito (CLIU) to creatively drive the messaging and way we approach STEELS standards, gifted education, and the latest trends like AI. Through this engaging episode, you'll understand how a podcast was born out of the desire to share rich educational conversations and provide educators with micro-professional development that seamlessly fits into their hectic schedules.

Learn more at https://Learn.mciu.org/ChangEd

Andrew Kuhn:

One of the challenges we saw was that, as Patrice said, that there are conversations happening, but they can be very disjointed or it depends on who you talk to what day you talk to them, to what you're hearing. So we thought if we could record this, we would then be able to share it out with everyone.

Patrice Semicek:

But for us to be able to be in the spaces and then say, oh my gosh, that's amazing, come tell us about it has been something that's been really, really cool for us to be able to shed light on the amazing things that people are doing.

Brandon Langer:

Hello Montgomery County and welcome to the MCIU Learns Podcast. My name is Brandon Langer. I'm the Director of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit in Norristown, pennsylvania, and today I am joined by the esteemed ChangeEd team here at Montgomery County Intermediate Unit in Norristown, pennsylvania, and today I am joined by the esteemed Change Ed team here at Montgomery County Intermediate Unit, which is led by well, I'm actually going to say someone's name's first year. I'm going to say this is a team effort with Patrice Semicek and Andrew Kuhn.

Brandon Langer:

I was first Dang it. She has seniority.

Patrice Semicek:

In time here, not in reality. I gotcha.

Brandon Langer:

We're already stepping on ourselves here and we're only 30 seconds in.

Andrew Kuhn:

Best podcast all day.

Brandon Langer:

As you know, this is our conversation with leaders in the areas of education. We cover all things from MSAU programs to thought leaders that come in and present. I'm really excited to sit down with these two, though, and discuss their work with ChangeEd, which launched last year in the form of a magazine and a podcast. I know there's other elements to it we're going to dive into today, but, patrice, sandra, you guys want to introduce yourself and your role at the IU.

Patrice Semicek:

So my name is Patrice Simicek. I work out of the Office of Organizational and Professional Learning, and I've been there for 12 years. I work a lot in the field of gifted and now steel, so I do a lot of work in math, up to now too.

Andrew Kuhn:

Yeah, this is a true role reversal.

Patrice Semicek:

It's very weird to go second.

Andrew Kuhn:

My name is Andrew Kuhn. I am an education consultant in the Office of Organizational and Professional Learning in Montgomery County Intermediate Unit. I've been here, for this is my fourth year.

Patrice Semicek:

You're starting your fourth year. Let's not give you more time than you have.

Andrew Kuhn:

Yeah, starting my fourth year, I also work in Steeles and Gifted. We dabbled in AI. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. There's like a lot of things in education that we're curious about and we're very interested in, so we always like to keep kind of our eyes on the horizon and see how it can integrate with the work that we're doing, because there's, you know, a lot of things. You know we always talk about this in education, how they end up in silos, but really they all can integrate and help each other out so much so we do it. You know we're always doing something doing something.

Andrew Kuhn:

There you go.

Brandon Langer:

Well, one of the things you've been doing I mean to start, we'll get into the magazine here a second but one of the things you've been doing is your own podcast. So those that have followed this one for a while know this was formerly the opl podcast and we converted it to the mcu learns podcast with a little bit broader focus. But the two of you like didn't just hit the ground running, you hit the the ground at a full sprint last year with well over 50 episodes to my count. I don't know where we are at this point, but in that time also hit, you know, a pretty large amount of followership and people tuning in to your point, Andrew. There's so many things to focus on.

Andrew Kuhn:

We when the.

Brandon Langer:

IUs were constantly at the forefront of different things across education, but I love the themes that you guys have pulled in, not just because of the content you're talking about, but the way and approach we're going about it and what we need to be doing. So what is the podcast about? Where do you center that? Because it does cover so many different topics.

Patrice Semicek:

It started out at this level in the IU, we're able to have all these amazing conversations with people across the state or even nationally or internationally, and so where it kind of formed for us was we're having all these conversations, but no one's really in the room or in the space to hear all this stuff.

Patrice Semicek:

So we wanted to be able to basically capture the cool things we were hearing about and then be able to disseminate information in a bite-sized chunk so that people could listen on their commute in or out of work and it can be something that people are talking about in the office or in their building or at their school or something like that. And with the new STEEL standards, we've been focusing a lot on the pedagogy shifts that come along with the STEEL standards, and it started out with us just really heavily focusing on the steel standards, but what we really realized was that the standards are, yeah, about the science content, but actually about the way kids learn, and so if we shift our instruction to help kids learn differently, then we can talk about all kinds of things like curiosity and creativity and um, just thinking outside of the box really as it ties into the magazine as well.

Andrew Kuhn:

When ChangeEd developed, as Patricia was saying, we started with the Steeles focus but that whole integration piece that really you know these are best practices and we're finding them in science, t&e, environmental literacy and sustainability, but they're across the board.

Andrew Kuhn:

So that's how we came up with let's call it ChangeEd, like we want to help be part of the change that is happening in education. And really the idea as well as for the podcast and the magazine, came from this, from Patrice saying you know, we need micro PD. How can we offer professional development, professional learning? That's not, you know, has to be a day or half a day or, you know, even an hour. It's just let's give them micro bits of information. And our desire is that and our hope is that we're number one, we're modeling the things that we're. You know we're seeing in education that we're kind of facing forward best practices and with that we're hoping that discourse comes out of that, that we we want people to be able to listen to our episodes. We try to keep the the them short ish we used to say 15 minutes ish and now they're maybe longer ish.

Andrew Kuhn:

So we're always leaning into the ish, but we want them to be able to almost monday morning quarterback that they go into just their school after listening this episode, and we're hoping there's a pot of them that are listening to it and that, you know, they walk down the hall and they can start a conversation. You know that was, that was complete garbage, or, wow, you know, somebody sees me or they. They know what we're doing, but we want them to be able to have conversations and really that's one of the challenges we saw was that, as Patrice said, that there are conversations happening but they can be very disjointed or it depends on who you talk to, what day you talk to them, to what you're hearing. So we thought if we could record this, it would be able to. We would then be able to share it out with everyone so that we're just exposing them to the conversations that we were fortunate enough to be part of.

Brandon Langer:

Well, and I think to that point, one thing that's become apparent in my time through working at the IU once I got, once I, my wife and I moved here from New Jersey and stepping into this role from the outside, looking in, or even when you're living this every day, it feels like changes are glacial in education and in government in general, but especially in education, it feels like things just move so slow.

Brandon Langer:

But something I have seen is there are these pockets of innovation, there are these pockets of people changing up practices and doing awesome things. Now they're not waiting for a wide scale mandated policy to go through before they do something awesome with kids in the classroom and that happens daily.

Brandon Langer:

But the challenge is one telling people about it because it's happening in a corner of a building somewhere. And then two, even if you are aware of it happening, how do we share that out? And I think that's what you're both alluding to is OK. Well, we hear good conversations, we see good examples. Let's bring those to the spotlight and make them evident for those to tap into. And I think that that's something that has translated over with the magazine that I've seen is just the breadth of opportunities that exist right. So, just as we have a breadth of opportunities to share about great things going on in schools and change and help move the needle on practice, we also have a breadth of opportunities to continue to expand that power. So I'm going to talk about the magazine at all and kind of how you. That's how I've seen it. I don't know if you guys have a different approach.

Patrice Semicek:

Do you want to start, since I started last time.

Andrew Kuhn:

Yes, I do, senior notepad, senior notepad.

Patrice Semicek:

Mr Post-it For those that don't know.

Brandon Langer:

Andrew is generally the host or the co-host.

Patrice Semicek:

No, he claims to be the host.

Brandon Langer:

He does kick off the episodes. He plays the role of host. So he's here with his notepad and I think he feels a little bit of a fish out of water. You're like, you're not sure what I'm going to ask you are you? You don't know where we're going, you can't lead this.

Andrew Kuhn:

I'm the asker, I'm like the lawyer who asks the questions so I don't have to give the answers. The magazine was designed as a tool and really again, you know it's kind of, I think, a theme for us is the integrative piece.

Brandon Langer:

How can we?

Andrew Kuhn:

bring together the work that we're doing. So we started to create these podcasts and we're like how can we share this? So I want to give Patricia credit for this again. Clearly, she's the brains of the operation. That you know. She. She always says you know, learn something, do something.

Andrew Kuhn:

But also, in this concept of micro PD, that we want to have different ways that people can access this information.

Andrew Kuhn:

So the goal for our magazine was that we present a topic or a concept and we want to have something that you could read, something that you watch or something that you could listen to, and the something that you listen to could happen to be something that we've curated. And then we're not just putting out other people's thoughts, we're also putting out things that we're developing in-house. We'd love to be able to expand that further so that the things that are being written are coming from our direction, or things, you know, videos that we're creating. We're not there yet, but there's so much possibility and potential. But even within our connections right, if someone that we talk to has an article, or they want to write an article or they have a video, so we're looking at you know, how can we help create real, alive content that people can interact with, versus something that's stagnant, that you know is is old, or you know old videos and, honestly, this is a really good example of of the learning process. When we started, our very first thing that we put out was a newsletter.

Patrice Semicek:

It was bad.

Andrew Kuhn:

It was bad. It was was good, it wasn't good bad it was good, bad yeah and we, we worked on it.

Andrew Kuhn:

We worked really hard on it. We put it out and then we were both like we're not happy, right, I don't like that. We wanted it to be interactive. So that's how we got to the spot where we created this magazine. We wanted whoever was interacting, whoever was looking at, to be able to interact with it right, to be able to flip the page and move it, move around, get to where you want to be, instead of you know something. That was kind of a long flat yeah, flat, but also like a long laundry list, right, and you're just kind of like buzzing through everything. We wanted to be able to move around and almost have that 3d effect and 3d feel on a flat screen.

Brandon Langer:

Well, I think what you're sharing in that example, though, is where I'm hearing this term more and more, which kind of scares me, because things eventually get captured and thrown into the sphere of becoming cliche and just being a buzzword, but I am hearing the word storytelling pop up a lot this year in my work, not just because of the marketing focus, actually like in education conversations and uh and in video right Cause it's point over videos to tell a story.

Brandon Langer:

Uh, and I think you're just articulating, though, a very clear desire to help tell not just your individual personal educator story, but everyone's, and how we need to evolve this together and how you know we can go, Patrice, what you were saying earlier we can go to amazing opportunities and learn. What are we doing with that?

Brandon Langer:

to pass, it on to make sure it gets into the hands of those that need it and in those in a digestible medium to do so. What stands out right now. As you see, as you look at that breadth of things you covered whether it's steals or AI, or you know, all the things that we're regularly bombarded with in these roles what gives you hope in terms of the advancement of your cause, of telling that story?

Patrice Semicek:

I think we're very fortunate in our roles to be able to interact with teachers across the county and the state and for me, I'm seeing a lot of teachers that are, despite all the challenges because right now being in this field is very challenging across the board despite all the challenges, they're doing some amazing things. And so when you, like you, were saying they are in small pockets and sometimes they're not noticed in the grand scheme of things, but for us to be able to be in the spaces and then say, oh my gosh, that's amazing, come tell us about it is has been something that's been really, really cool. For us to be able to, like shed light on the amazing things that people are doing. That's been the coolest part, and I think that's what continues to fuel us is like we need to acknowledge that people are doing this amazing work and how can we get it out there for people?

Andrew Kuhn:

Something that really stands out for me is the amazing conversations that we get to have with people that we just might not have them with.

Andrew Kuhn:

So we, you know we obviously in the podcast we can only air so much of the conversation, but there are pre-conversations and post-conversations and the dialogue just continues on and we've learned so much along the way on the journey, so I feel very fortunate to be able to be in this position and continue the learning. We will go to trainings or conferences and we're like we're able to kind of vet out who would we want to talk to when we're there and who do we want to learn more from, and so the podcast allows that, that gateway to open that door and then have further conversations and continue our learning as well. So it's as much as you know. We want to share it out with others. It's really a learning tool and a learning vehicle for us.

Brandon Langer:

Well, and I my favorite part of listening to you guys as episodes. I love the content, I love the stories, I love, but I also love hearing two people get to be themselves and work together you know, and and hearing the two of you you you have good chemistry, you know just be who you are as people and it just it's so.

Brandon Langer:

It's so much more genuine. It's great to go to big conferences here Cuneo it's. It's great to go to great sessions and hear really smart people talk about things. Sometimes it can lack authenticity and there's nothing quite as authentic. That's why I love this medium. I love the ability to sit down and just learn from people, andrew, kind of like you're describing and have just an authentic conversation about what we're doing. So kudos to the two of you for this work and everybody in the office that helps contribute and support what you're doing.

Patrice Semicek:

For me it didn't start out super authentic. I needed bullet points and I needed to feel secure in what I was saying, but it evolved into I don't even prep, really, which is crazy to feel, to go from that extreme to the other. So now it's it really is. It's just who we are now, which is terrifying for a lot of people to witness.

Andrew Kuhn:

Yeah, our, our first, the first, first podcast that jerusalem was on. I was part of it. It's like like, okay, we're going to do this podcast. She's like no, no, no, no, so I'm like we're going to go. She's like I need at least two or three days of a program.

Patrice Semicek:

He's not telling the story right Five minutes before he recorded. He's like you're going to be on today and I was like no, you don't know what your topic is I. So you're trying to be like, oh well, do it in a week. No, you're like in five minutes A week. I'd be like, okay, cool, five minutes.

Andrew Kuhn:

I was like I gots to go, like no, and honestly, my first podcast that I was part of kudos to you, brandon, was at the time it was the OPL podcast, and I remember feeling so stiff, you know you put this microphone in front of me and it would just I just froze and you would ask a question. I'd be like yes, and that was it, and you're like this is a pocket. You got to talk to me, it's a podcast, you know what you're talking about and so that's, you know that's. It's been interesting as well to kind of get to a point where you know we feel more comfortable having a conversation and interacting with people, even though you've got all this equipment in the room and headphones on about About 15 minutes in people start to forget that it's there.

Brandon Langer:

Whenever we do the video work for the IU. I actually. My trick of the trade is to waste 10 minutes of time getting them comfortable, because I know I'm not going to get. There's a I mean add mics and all that stuff. Now point a camera at somebody and it just goes.

Andrew Kuhn:

I mean talk about freezing.

Brandon Langer:

People get super nervous and it is nerve wracking. You want to look, you want to present, well, but those first eight to 10 minutes are just making sure that you feel comfortable talking to me about wherever we're going to go in the conversation and helping. The faster you can get someone there, the more authentic conversation to the point earlier you're going to get, and we've all been there. I mean, I remember when I started doing this I had my note card and.

Brandon Langer:

I've never been a reader of the note card and sometimes I'll bring a couple notes with me. I feel like I want to make sure in this conversation that I say X, and usually it's out of wanting to make sure I think and give gratitude to those that are doing awesome things in education, I know you guys feel the same way. Well, thank you both for sitting down, thank you both for what you're doing Change. It's been a blast to watch take off for you in the past.

Brandon Langer:

You know 12 months or a lot of fun it's been um excited to see where you guys go this year with your stuff. How does one find change yet, other than obviously you can search Apple podcasts and that kind of thing Learnmciuorg slash.

Patrice Semicek:

Change it and that gets you to the magazine Everything, the podcast, the standards, upcoming events, expo, steal's, expo, yeah, yeah, coming up in the spring. Everything, yep, that's where we're at.

Brandon Langer:

Awesome.

Patrice Semicek:

Well, thanks for having us.

Brandon Langer:

Yeah, thanks for joining. I mean I think we'll check in, maybe later again. We'll definitely probably chat again when Steel's Expo is on the horizon to dive deeper into that and if you want to know more, it is up on that website. But if you haven't found us before, this is the MCIU Learns podcast. We are also on learnmciuorg, which is our MCIU learning network. You can hop on there for blogs, you can hop on there for podcasts. You can find ChangeEd there. You can also find our upcoming events and learning opportunities from the Office of Organizational and Professional Learning. So a lot going on over there. Follow us at MCIU Learns across all the social networks and the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit and we look forward to the next conversation. Thank you both for joining and we'll see you soon. You.