CIOReview | | 19 FEBRUARY 2023EXPERIENCE AS THE GREAT EQUALIZER: THE FUTURE OF STEM EDUCATIONBy Justin Luttrell, Ed.D, Director of STEM and Blended Learning, Pulaski County Special School DistrictRecently, a team of dedicated leaders and educators from my district attended a national conference. At that conference, leaders from our Learning Services division attended a session presented by a large, urban school district on closing opportunity gaps. The greatest gain from the session, however, did not come from any words spoken by the presenters. Rather, our greatest take away came when a member of the presentation team handed out pens and paper to our table. The pens were your typical black ink pens containing a school logo. As the session progressed, I found myself trying multiple times to find the cam (thrush device) to extract the ballpoint to no avail. Embarrassed that I could not get the ballpoint to extract, I eventually looked over at my colleagues. When our eyes met, the three of us simultaneously acknowledged our same plight. We laughed nervously, and then began to study the pen diligently. Collectively, the three of us hold doctorates in our fields with over 70 years of work experience. And yet, none of us could figure out how to get these seemingly, ordinary ballpoint pens to work. We pushed down. We twisted the cap. We twisted the nib. We twisted the barrel. Nothing worked. Finally, one of us pushed the clip upward, and "Voila!"We snickered to ourselves that we faced such a struggle to accomplish what should have been a rather easy and mundane task. Each of us had education on our sides, or so we thought. But, despite our educational backgrounds and accomplishments, the element that predominated our success all came down to one factor- our experiences. You see, each of us had brought our experiences of how ballpoint pens should be extracted to the table (literally). Our experiences had taught us that caps, nibs, and CXO INSIGHTSJustin Luttrell
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