I didn’t arrive at teaching others through a K-12 or university classroom. Most of my instructional experience comes from professional and organizational contexts meeting my students where they are, such as, training faculty and staff at Texas A&M, supporting Apple customers through complex technical problems, designing development programs at the Texas A&M Foundation, and training call takers and dispatchers on the floor of 9-1-1 call centers where life and death struggles happen on a daily basis. Those environments taught me something that formal instruction sometimes misses: if people don’t see why something matters, in the environment, where it matters, no amount of lecturing and forced memorization will help them retain it when it matters most. That is where experiential learning comes in to play.
Game designers figured that out a long time ago.
A well-designed game doesn’t front-load everything you need to know. It drops you into a situation, gives you just enough to get started, and scales the challenge as your competence grows. Failure isn’t punished permanently. Feedback is immediate. Progress is visible. That structure isn’t just engaging, it’s how learning actually works, and it shapes everything I do when I design instruction.
In practice, that means I start with problems before concepts, building in opportunities to apply, fail, and try again before asking anyone to demonstrate mastery. I try to be explicit about where the research supports a practice and where it doesn’t, because I’d rather students leave with good critical judgment than a tidy set of talking points.
It also means thinking carefully about who I’m designing for. Years of accessibility work have made that instinct hard to turn off. A learning experience that only works for some learners isn’t a well-designed learning experience. Universal Design for Learning isn’t a compliance framework I apply at the end. It’s a starting assumption.
I’m a first-generation college student who always had to work. I know what it’s like to sit in a course while your attention is split six different ways. That’s the learner I keep in mind when I’m planning instruction, not the one who shows up with everything in order.
Because life happens and that’s often the best environment for learning to thrive.