Author Archives: Matthew Rhoads, Ed.D.

Graze and Tag: The Most Underrated Strategy in Your Co-Teaching Toolkit

It was third period of 11th-grade American Literature. My co-teacher had just introduced the closing image of The Great Gatsby chapter 1, the moment Gatsby stretches his arms toward the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and I started walking around the room. Two minutes in, I noticed students were paraphrasing the language but missing what the green light was actually doing in the chapter. Without missing a beat, I stepped back to the front, took the marker from my partner, and said, “Hold on. Before we go further, let’s unpack what that green light is doing here.” He moved into the room to circulate.

We had just executed Graze and Tag, and we had not planned for it that morning. That fluidity of this co-teaching strategy is the magic of this strategy. It may also be the most undervalued tool in your co-teaching toolkit.

Build Your Own EdTech: Why the Future is Local

Think back to 2023, 2024, and 2025, the EdTech market was flooded with what we now affectionately call “AI wrappers.” These were sleek at first sight, user-friendly web apps that essentially put a nice interface over a standard API call to generate lesson plans, differentiated reading passages, worksheets, and quizzes for the classroom. They felt magical at first, but they came with subscription costs, heavy enterprise costs for districts and schools, and lingering questions about student data privacy. Fast forward to today, and the script is entirely flipping. We are entering an era where the power to build, run, and maintain these tools is shifting directly into the hands of teachers and schools, and it is all happening locally.

How to Use NotebookLM to Conduct Smarter WASC Accreditation Reviews and Visits

Over the past year, I have integrated Google’s NotebookLM into my WASC review workflow, and the results have fundamentally changed how I prepare, analyze, and report before, during, and after my visits. This is not a post about replacing professional judgment: it is about amplifying it. What follows is the process I now use, phase by phase, to conduct reviews that are more evidence-grounded, more analytically rigorous, and ultimately more useful to the schools I serve.

NotebookLM as Your School’s Brain: A Mission Control for Leaders Who Are Serious About Improvement

Most schools do not have a data problem. They have a synthesis problem of putting it all together in one location. The attendance reports live in one system. The benchmark assessments live in another. The LCAP goals are in a PDF somewhere. The department meeting notes from October are in a shared drive folder thatContinueContinue reading “NotebookLM as Your School’s Brain: A Mission Control for Leaders Who Are Serious About Improvement”

From the Moon to the Mind: How Space Exploration Illuminates Learning

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong (1969) The Mission Control Mindset Picture a professional development session where teachers design instruction the way NASA engineers design a mission. The stakes are high. The sequences are deliberate. Every decision is backed by data, rehearsed under pressure, and built forContinueContinue reading “From the Moon to the Mind: How Space Exploration Illuminates Learning”

Autonomous AI and (the Possible Future of AI in Schools): OpenClaw and Autonomous AI Agents

Over the last week, I have played extensively with Clawdbot, now aka Moltbot. Seeing AI that is THIS autonomous, and the work it has done has been mind-blowing. I have built numerous applications and have several tasks and projects that will be delivered to me daily. From research to applications ready to be delivered on my GitHub. Wow! In my opinion, this is where AI comes alive and goes outside the box.

Holding Two Truths: Education, Evidence, and Fatherhood

As I prepare to become a father, my view of education is shifting. What will I hold onto and what will change when learning becomes personal? A reflection on time, empathy, evidence, and raising a learner in a complex system.

Creating Examples vs. Non Examples Using Nano Banana Pro on Gemini 3 to Amplify Instruction

Learning abstract concepts is difficult because our students are beginners in many cases. This means they primarily understand new ideas in the context of what they already know, which is usually concrete. To build a robust “schema” (a mental structure of organized knowledge), students need more than a definition; they need to see the concept in action through examples vs. non examples. With this said, it is now ever been easier to create examples vs. non examples using Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro image generator that is associated with Gemini 3. In this post, you’ll see how to do this to support your instruction.

From the Sidelines to the Shoulder: Using Co-Teaching as the Engine for Instructional Coaching

The Gradual Release of Responsibility (“I do, We do, You do”) is a powerful framework for instructional coaching, and it can be delivered directly through co-teaching strategies. Instead of a coach modeling and then simply observing, the crucial “We do” phase becomes a hands-on, collaborative partnership. This post explores how to use specific co-teaching models as the bridge from “I do” to “You do.” I share a single-session example of supporting a teacher with multilingual learners, moving from my “I do” (model) to our “We do” (“Team Teaching”) and finally to their “You do” (with me in a “One Teach, One Support” role), all within a single lesson.

From Digital Consumers to Digital Pedagogues: A Framework for Moving Teachers from Digital Consumers to Tech-Enabled Pedagogues

In my work with teachers, I’ve seen firsthand a significant challenge that has only accelerated in our tech-saturated world: the gap between how pre-service teachers use technology and their capacity to teach with it. This is the Consumer-to-Pedagogue Gap, and it is one of the most critical hurdles we must overcome in modern teacher preparation and on-going professional development and coaching as they progress forward in their careers.

This post outlines a framework to bridge this gap, moving teacher candidates from passive digital consumers to active, tech-enabled pedagogues. The central thesis is straightforward: we must replace passive observation with a system of structured, low-stakes rehearsal. This over time will improve instruction as well as the use of technology when integrated together.

This system is not built on intuition; it is grounded in established learning science, specifically the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework and Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). These are the foundational lenses I advocate for in all effective instructional design.

AI Agent Advancements: Google Lens (aka Homework Helper) and Comet Browser

As educators, we’ve navigated the shift from chalkboards to smartboards, from calculators to laptops. But the change barreling towards us now is different. It’s not just a new tool; it’s a new kind of actor in the learning process. I’m talking about AI-powered tools like Google Lens and the emerging class of AI-agent browsers, such as Perplexity’s Comet Browser. These technologies are fundamentally reshaping what it means to “do work” and forcing us to confront a critical reality: we can no longer guarantee the authenticity of any work done outside our direct supervision. As a result, what does this mean for asynchronous online learning and completing graded work outside of traditional in-person classes?

Webinar – Innovative Co-Teaching: Strategies and Tools for the Modern Classroom

Last week, my co-author Dr. Karge and I had the opportunity to share ideas from our book Co-Teaching Evolved in an edWebinar with educators from around the world. It was exciting to dive into the 11 research-backed co-teaching strategies, from One Teach, One Support to Team Teaching, and show how they can flex across grade levels and content areas. This is a fantastic webinar that provides an overarching themes of co-teaching and how to implement some of its strategies across classrooms and schools.

Using AI to Support Interleaving & Spaced Practice and Retrieval in Unit Planning

As teachers, we are constantly seeking ways to make learning more durable and meaningful for our students. We want them to not just memorize facts for a test, but to fully understand and retain what they’ve learned over the long haul. Cognitive science offers a powerful toolkit of strategies to achieve this, and with theContinueContinue reading “Using AI to Support Interleaving & Spaced Practice and Retrieval in Unit Planning”

EdTech Leadership in the Age of AI: What Matters Most When Everything is Changing

My coffee is still warm when the first alert comes in. A teacher cannot access Canvas, and their students are stuck at the login screen. I walk the teacher through the SSO steps, confirm access, and move on. By midmorning, I have visited classrooms, supported teachers with technology integration, and observed lessons to plan follow-up coaching. After that, I sit with our engineers to review system performance, troubleshoot issues, and test several EdTech tools and updates planned for release.

At two o’clock, there are three messages on LinkedIn about a new AI tool that promises to transform learning. I scan one, note the potential and the hype, and return to the work I already committed to do. The afternoon goes to email, planning professional learning, and reviewing the week ahead.

Sound familiar?

For many of us in EdTech and instructional leadership, this mix of strategic and immediate work is the norm. Some hours go to multi-year plans, budgets, and compliance. Others are dedicated to making sure one specific app works for one teacher so students can keep learning. The pace makes it easy to lose focus when the day is packed and many things are going on simultaneously. I return to a single question: how do people learn, and how can instruction and technology work together to support that? If we cannot answer that question, systems, budgets, and tools will have little impact.

This post shares how I connect what we know about learning with the daily realities of leading technology and instructional change in schools. I will describe several major themes and then provide a summary of the next steps to help you further reflect upon your leadership and programs.

Creating AI Agent Safeguards (for now) through Pragmatic Instructional Design to Deliver Assignments and Assessments

As you prepare your syllabus for the upcoming semester, a question I’ve explored before looms large. In a previous post, “The Death of the LMS in Higher Ed,” I argued that its role as a simple repository for assignments is becoming obsolete. With AI agents now ubiquitous, how do we prevent the LMS from becoming a mere drop-box for bot-generated work from an autonomous AI Agent?

The solution isn’t to fully abandon the LMS (for now), but to evolve its purpose and create humanizing instructional barriers in the tasks and assessments we deliver to our students. This post presents a few practical strategies (I am implementing this term in my own graduate-level course) to revitalize our courses by shifting the focus from the final product, which AI can generate in seconds, to the learning process, which it cannot. This is going to my attempt to defend against students utilizing AI Agents. While I know this may not be one-hundred percent effective, I do have a hunch it will mitigate AI Agents to a degree, at least for the time being, this semester.