Educator Experience: Matt Driscoll, Partnerships Associate

This teacher appreciation month, we are honoring teacher voices and experiences through our Educator Experiences series. Our New Classrooms and Teach to One team possesses a collective 300+ years of teaching experience, and we’d like to tell those stories. Read Rosa Pynes’ story of success through relationship building and skill centers here. Read on for Matt Driscoll’s experiences as a math teacher and coach in New Orleans.

After college I was accepted into the teaching fellows program in New Orleans. I entered with intentions of teaching special education yet fell in love with, what were at the time, the new common core standards, and switched over to math. I found a role at a K-8 charter school and taught seventh grade math. It was a huge learning experience for me and was frankly a very difficult year. That being said, my love of math instruction solidified and I grew greatly in my ability to deliver lessons effectively.

I went on to teach three more years, these in fifth grade. Establishing strong relationships across the school community, I worked my way into a coaching role, coaching our middle school math team of teachers for two years. From there I expanded my work in leadership, leading a math team across a K-8 school.

I now work on our Partnerships team helping bring solutions to schools across the country. Having worked with Teach to One as a leader with my teachers, I saw just how much the program can help students grow and help teachers do their jobs more effectively. Because of this I wanted to spread the transformational power of Teach to One to more schools across the country.

Keep learning. Your work is never done as a teacher and those that are always learning not only put a better product in front of their class each day, they set a tremendous example for their students to learn from.