April 1, 2025
From Youth Pastor to Teacher Educator
What happens when a struggling first-year teacher discovers the transformative power of professional learning communities? Dr. Joshua Kenna's educational journey takes us from his humble beginnings as an alternatively certified social studies teacher in Florida to his current role as a teacher educator and conference coordinator for the Tennessee Council of Social Studies.
Spotlight 4 Success Website: Spotlight 4 Success
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction to Dr. Joshua Kenna
00:56 - Journey into Education
03:45 - American Book Company Sponsor Message
04:56 - Trends in Education and AI Impact
06:29 - Importance of Basic Reading Skills
Transcript
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Welcome to Spotlight for Success by American Book Company.
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I am Devin Pintosi, your host.
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We are here at the Tennessee Council of Social Studies with the conference coordinator of Tennessee Council of Social Studies.
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We're so excited to have you here.
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Thank you so much for coming.
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Yeah, no problem.
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Thank you for having me.
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Thank you, guys for being here one of many people.
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We've gotten nothing but great praises from people.
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We're only in the president's reception tonight, but the actual conference will kick off tomorrow and hopefully people will start learning a lot more.
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Yes, so, Dr Joshua Kenna, you have quite a journey that you've gone through and I would love to share with the audience some things about that.
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But I want to hear from you Tell us a little bit about your process of deciding to get into the education field and how that started?
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Yeah, so I don't think it's unlike most.
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I wasn't training to be a teacher.
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I was in college and I was going to be a youth pastor training to be a teacher.
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I was in college and I was going to be like a youth pastor, and then I was like I still wanted to be involved with, with children and youth and and be in their lives, and then I decided to.
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Ultimately, I wanted to make a switch and I was like I'm going to be a teacher and a social studies teacher.
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I wanted to be a coach as well.
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I'll be honest with that one.
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And then I was like you know, we can, um.
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So I was, uh, I was in the state of Florida, and so Florida had like an alternative certification process at the time.
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So I took the test that I needed to do that, got a job and I thought, well, how hard can it be?
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Social studies was my favorite subject.
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I felt like I knew it well enough, so it was the best one for me to teach and it didn't take me.
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I think I mentioned to you earlier it took me a couple weeks to realize it was a lot harder than I thought and I was, so there's still a lot to learn with.
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I mean, I didn't know anything with lesson planning, I didn't know anything with classroom management, I just thought I just had to stand up there and talk and then hand out a worksheet, right, it's kind of what I remember and I was just a completely different environment for me and um, and so then at the time, state of florida said you need certain courses.
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So I eventually went to university of central florida or UCF and I started learning how to do lesson planning and I was like, wow, this stuff is amazing.
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And I was the kind of student that when I took a class on, say, a Thursday night, friday morning, I'm trying to use those same things I was learning in class.
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And I was telling my colleagues like, hey, have you thought about using this type of strategy or this or that?
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And they're like, okay, and there wasn't a ton of excitement, necessarily for the entire department, but there was a few that started catching on.
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Okay, and um, and I I think certain people caught wind of some of the things I was doing.
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I think I was voted the teacher of the year for our school that year that I was learning all these things, and um, and one colleague told me to go to the state council for the Social Studies that they had in Florida and I'd never heard of it and I was starting to learn even more.
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I was like, oh, there's more teachers like this, just maybe not that were at my campus.
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There's more out there.
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And then one of my professors recruited me to get my PhDs.
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I mean you kind of have the it factor where you can train teachers.
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I think you have that ability, kind of have the it factor where you can, you can train teachers.
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I think you have that ability.
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And I was like you know, I looked at it like a ability to.
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You know I can affect x number of students, or I can affect x number of college students who can then affect a larger amount of k-12 students.
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And so I I took the the leap of faith and we we joined the phd program at UCF.
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We graduated.
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First job was at Lubbock, texas, and then now I've been here at the University of Tennessee, knoxville, for 10 years and it didn't take every stop of the way.
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We always joined the State Council for Social Studies because of that experience I had in Florida and the national one as well.
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And now I'm here, I got involved.
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I'm on the board, I've been a president and now I'm here.
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I got involved, I'm on the board, we've been a president, now I'm the past president and conference coordinator.
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Just love still seeing former students.
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I'm here and I can see several of them here because we talk about it in class and eventually, when they're teachers, they're coming to these things just to let them know that I can't teach you everything in our class, but there's more opportunities for you to learn when you get into the profession.
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Besides the, you know the in-service day on teacher pre-planning or that one on President's Day or something like that, you know there's more out there where you get a little bit of choice, and that's what we like about Tennessee Council for the Source Days.
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We give all the teachers some choice in what they get to try to learn about that kind of stuff.
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So At American Book Company in Woodstock, georgia, we are committed to your students' success.
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As you can see behind me, we have our workbooks and we have online testing and e-books that go on fancy iPads over here, for instance.
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They're all designed to help your students succeed and have higher test scores on their high-stakes assessments.
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Give us a call 888-264-5877, or find us on the web, abck12.com, and you can receive a free trial or a free preview book of your choice.
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Hope to hear from you soon.
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Bye-bye.
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That is wonderful, and so you've been doing a lot of things here.
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You know what are some of the new trends.
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You see that you think that TCSS will be incorporating that.
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They've done some things this year.
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They're going to do next year, based on what you're seeing out there.
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Yes, certainly.
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I mean AI.
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You're going to see more stuff.
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We have a couple sessions actually this year that you know these are.
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One thing about TCSS is we make calls for proposals and we let teachers submit them and exhibitors submit them and then, based on that, we review and try to pick what we think is the most applicable for Tennessee teachers.
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So we're trying to be very promoting Tennessee teachers.
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We also get a rave for elementary and middle school and high school variety of content.
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Certainly, we can't hit everything that we want.
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There is some limitations, but we usually get a lot of great content.
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We've got a couple social media stuff and AI stuff.
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You're going to start seeing more of those, that's for sure.
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If teachers aren't already using AI in some capacity or know about it, they're going to in the next couple of years.
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There's just no way around it.
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I think every subject matter is going to be doing that.
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But still the old adage of inquiry-based type stuff getting your students to read and write those because of AI are actually going to be more important than probably ever before.
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Oh, okay, so I know I talk about the new things.
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I think also remembering to still do the basics really well is going to be so much more important.
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I think there's been some little research coming out that with college students, even who have decent reading skills, when they use ai they actually find and they do another test their reading comprehension actually diminishes slightly the shortwave reading comprehension and it's because you kind of get easy I liken it to.
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I told my students, like I have the face ID on the cell phones and I've used it so much I don't remember my password anymore For certain things right.
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It's like oh, I forgot my password.
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Ai can lull you to sleep that way too.
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You're getting so used to having it summarize things for you that you almost can forget to read and find the summary yourself.
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And, of course, if our K-12 students already and we know this from a lot of data already struggle with reading comprehension, it's only going to make it that much harder for us as teachers.
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And so to still use some of the basics really well is going to be important.
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Okay, in my opinion, that is wonderful.
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Well, thank you so much for being here with us.
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This is Dr Joshua Kenna, once again, who is the conference coordinator for Tennessee Council of Social Studies.
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Thank you so much for just spending with us today.
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Yeah, thank you, thank you Awesome.
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