Ryder wins national award for teaching excellence

FARMINGTON – A teacher at Mt. Blue High School was recently honored as one of the country’s top educators, joining four other recipients in Washington D.C. for the Salute to Excellence in Education Gala last week. The NEA Foundation event recognized Success & Innovation Center Co-Director Dan Ryder as one of the five recipients of the Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence and presented each teacher with $10,000.

“We spent it on braces and a couple car payments,” Ryder said.

The point being, he said, the award and the money are cool and all, but what does this mean for the students he works with every day?

“If I can’t use any of this to grow support for the school and make things better for kids and families around here, then what was all that about?” he said.

Ryder and co-director Becky Dennison run the newly established Success & Innovation Center on Mt. Blue Campus. In short, SIC is whatever you want it to be. Ryder and Dennison have hand curated a huge variety of resources for the students and staff at Mt. Blue- Ryder tends to focus on the physical problem solving that takes place at the center, while Dennison fills the role of an informal social worker. But they both do a little bit of everything.

“We’re seeing kids and teachers being able to make things happen that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” Ryder said. “We’ve been able to do a lot of good here.”

SIC was made possible by a federally funded GEAR UP grant, which will run out next year according to Ryder.

“We’re collecting data, but it’s kind of like asking a library to prove that they help kids pass their classes at school,” he said.

Often times, success to a student can be as simple as walking through the front doors. Or finding joy in everyday things. Ryder said they’ve been trying to capture all of the many stories they see each day at SIC, but that can be difficult.

Which is where Ryder’s new award might come in handy.

As part of the award, Ryder was filmed in his classroom with his students and colleagues. The footage was put together into what is essentially a promotional video for Horace Mann, but Ryder sees it differently.

“The video really shows people what we’re doing in the center. It shares our story and helps people see value in it,” he said.

The video highlights the unique solutions that the SIC offers- from broader visions of offering multiple pathways to success to footage of students digging through buckets of legos- all focused on the idea of design thinking.

“Design thinking is human-centered, empathy-fueled problem solving. It completely transformed everything I was doing in the classroom,” Ryder explains in the video.

As one piece of the lengthy application process for the award, Ryder was asked to teach a half-hour lesson to a panel of adults. In response, Ryder pulled in one of his “flash labs” and handed the participants a poem. They were then asked to analyze and identify the needs of the speaker in the poem and design a solution. Using LEGOs.

“Flash labs focus on solving a problem for someone else authentically and quickly. It best represented what I do,” he said.

So what is Ryder’s design thought response to the problem of the SIC potentially having to close its doors?

Get the word out. Tell the stories. Share the video.

“The teachers here are amazing. They’re teaching the students about how to be whole humans- how to achieve goals, to go into a career with purpose and meaning for you and for others, and to add value to the world,” Ryder said.

The Success & Innovation Center can be found on Facebook here. The SIC video can be found here.