March 19, 2025
073: Balancing Educational Innovation and Digital Well-being with Dr. Samuel Mormando
As Director of Technology and Innovation and founder of Advative Learning, Mormando has pioneered strategies that empower students rather than restrict their technology use.
During our conversation, Mormando revealed the surprising effectiveness of student-led digital citizenship initiatives, where high schoolers mentor younger students about responsible technology use. The district's comprehensive approach involved bringing together students, parents, teachers, administrators, and community members to conduct a root-cause analysis of technology challenges. This collaborative process led to tailored solutions for different grade levels, beyond simply embedding digital citizenship lessons to making instruction more explicit and meaningful.
Mormando's work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and education is compelling. As a member of OpenAI's K-12 Advisory Board, he helps educators navigate this rapidly evolving landscape while teaching students to evaluate AI outputs critically.
Whether you're struggling with cell phone policies, seeking ways to make digital citizenship instruction more authentic, or wondering how to integrate AI in your classroom ethically, this episode offers practical wisdom from an innovative district that is threading the needle between embracing technology and protecting student well-being.
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Connect with Dr. Sam Mormando via the Edvative website, LinkedIn, and Next Gen Educators.
Explore his books Navigating the AI Revolution in Our Schools (2024) and Effectively Designed Instruction: Amplifying Student Agency and Inclusivity (2023).
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction to SEL in EDU
00:50 - Meet Dr. Samuel Mormando
13:28 - Developing Digitally Disciplined Students
30:53 - Student-Led Digital Citizenship
50:36 - AI Literacy in Education
01:10:40 - Collaborative Approaches to Technology
01:32:12 - Music and Final Thoughts
Transcript
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Welcome to SEL in EDU, the podcast where we explore how educators bring social, emotional learning to life by sharing stories, strategies and sparks of inspiration.
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I'm your host, Dr Krista Lay, owner of Resonance Education.
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Thank you for joining us on this SEL journey.
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I'm AJ Bianco from Podcast PD, a part of the Education Podcast Network.
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Just like the show you're listening to now, Shows in the network are individually owned and opinions expressed may not reflect others.
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Find other interesting education podcasts at edupodcastnetworkcom.
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Dr Samuel Mormando is the Director of Technology and Innovation for Garnet Valley School District and founder of Advative Learning.
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A leader in ethical technology use, dr Mormando helps students and educators leverage technology responsibly.
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He serves on OpenAI's K-12 AI Advisory Board and is the author of Navigating the AI Revolution in Our Schools a Guide to Ethical AI Integration in Education.
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His work focuses on empowering learners with innovative strategies, policy insights and personalized learning approaches to shape in a future where technology supports effective learning.
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Thank you, sam, for joining SEL in EDU.
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We are incredibly excited to have you here.
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When I got a chance to see you speak at the PASCD conference a number of months ago, you were talking about huge shifts in culture that were happening over time within your district.
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First of all, let me say thank you for having me.
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I'm always excited to meet other educators and other people in the field that are trying to do good work right, because one of the things that I've been in education now 25 years plus, maybe one of the things I'm constantly frustrated with is we sometimes are siloed, we sometimes put walls around our schools or our districts and we don't have an opportunity, we don't allow ourselves to have an opportunity to go and meet others and have conversations.
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We're all.
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I strongly believe that we're all in this fight together, right?
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Education is incredibly complex.
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It's constantly changing and evolving.
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Complex, it's constantly changing and evolving and it's really hard to do it alone.
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And the more I have an opportunity and, because of my position in my district, I have an opportunity to participate in conferences and to meet people like yourself and others, the better I am at my job, and I don't think we extend that opportunity to everyone in education, and I certainly know that sometimes we don't give ourselves permission to do that as educators.
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So I want to say thank you for allowing me to be on this podcast with you and having conversations with you and others on these topics.
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I appreciate your time.
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I know you're incredibly busy and I know you're doing great work and I want our listeners to be able to access that and to see how you're leading the way for this collaborative process.
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It's often you're right not happening and it's siloed for a lot of different reasons and anytime people are finding innovative ways to break out of that siloization.
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I think I just made a new word.
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I don't know if that's actually a word, but I'm still going to go with it.
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It's great because collective minds can do brilliant things.
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When you think about the work, that you're doing, what are the pieces that you're most passionate about and that really fill your bucket in terms of that collaboration and supporting educators and students?
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Yeah, so again, I am super lucky to work in a school district that I work in.
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I've been here 11 plus years at Garner Valley School District.
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Our superintendent is amazing at what he does and building culture and just always keeping our focus on not only serving our students and our staff today, but also keeping an eye on what's coming down the road in the future and how do we prepare ourselves so we can prepare them when the time is needed right.
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So, again, I can't take credit for any of this, but I can speak to because I've been part of it His vision of and we call it, developing digitally disciplined students.
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We're in the process of rebranding that.
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That's a tongue twister, I know, but like every other school district in the country, we saw the nationwide concerns of teens and cell phone use and social media use to be more specific, right, and we've read the research and we've read the books and, to say the least, it's concerning right.
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And I'm fortunate enough to have my two boys are older, they've grown out of that phase.
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But when you're talking about sixth, seventh, eighth graders, even into high school.
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Dr Bertrano is our superintendent.
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He's brilliant.
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He brought together a district-wide committee over the summer and we've been meeting ever since.
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But over the summer that involves students and parents and building administrators and district administrators, community members, board members, faculty, obviously, to look at this, if it was easy to solve, it would have been solved, right.
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Yes, and we were looking at neighboring districts banning cell phones, for example, or not banning cell phones, like.
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What do we do with this?
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We believe in innovation, we believe in preparing students for a future that involves technology, but we also believe that some of this technology was causing some issues, with not some issues, some issues in our schools, but really a lot of issues with our kids.
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And we looked at the root cause and we did a root cause analysis and we tried to figure out what we had control of as a school district and what we didn't have control of as a school district and we looked at the epidemic that was really caused is happening outside of the school day, for the most part, right, but at the same time, our schools are being impacted by the amount of time teens are on their phones and their cell phones Right.
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Whether they're on them in school or not, we're still seeing that impact if they're staying up to all hours of the night texting and doing videos on social media.
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So we knew we had a role in this the play.
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We also knew that we weren't going to be able to solve it ourselves.
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So that's the purpose of bringing that committee together with all those stakeholders.
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So the first thing we did is we looked at our digital citizenship curriculum.
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Now we've been awarded awards for this.
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Right Before the pandemic and even through the pandemic, we were one of only a few school districts in the country to be recognized by Common Sense Media as a common sense digital school district.
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So we were super proud of the work that we were doing.
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But we needed to do more and, based on our student and parent feedback, we did a gap analysis of that curriculum and said here's our scope and sequence for our digital citizenship curriculum.
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And we had the belief that digital citizenship is taught by every teacher every day and we were doing a really good job with that.
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But as we were getting the feedback, we noticed there's a lot of gaps right.
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We weren't teaching it in a way that was resonating with our students.
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We were teaching it like math or science, right, and we weren't having real conversations about kids and we weren't having and we weren't making the curriculum authentic.
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I think, at the end of the day, it was what we were missing, and we're still in that process.
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Right, we haven't solved the issue, but that's what we've done this year.
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What was it that the students wanted to see that would make it more authentic and more relevant and meaningful to them.
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So that's a great question and that didn't come out right away.
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We were so focused on on like the nuts and bolts of, like the scope and sequence of the curriculum that it took a few of our meetings to finally answer that question.
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Meetings to finally answer that question what the students, particularly our high school students and credit to them amazing kids.
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They want to be part of the solution.
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A lot of our high schoolers weren't falling into the trap, but they were seeing their younger brothers or sisters falling into that cell phone and social media trap.
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They want to be part of the solution by going back and having those conversations and being part of delivering the message, whether that be through a video or in-person conversations with kids, to say, hey, you know what?
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I too was 13 at one time and I too got a cell phone for the first time and signed up for apps.
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I probably shouldn't have it, stayed up to all hours of the night, you know, texting my friends and watching videos, and these are some of the lessons I learned from that.
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Right, I was extremely tired the next day, I did poorly on my test or my quiz and I was losing in-person All the things that we know as a result of that.
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But when our middle schoolers who are on the committee were hearing that from their high school peers, you could see the light go off.
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It's different from a classroom teacher presenting a lesson on the harmful effects of social media and cell phone use, but when it's your brother's best friend giving you that message, it tends to hit home a little different right A little differently.
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So that's the first thing that we saw is we have to get students involved in some way in delivering that message to our younger kids.
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And that really resonates with me.
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One, because student voice is so important.
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We know that's part of self-management, having a sense of agency and developing that.
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We know that's also giving them a sense of purpose under self-awareness and it's building their relationship skills so they can make better decisions for themselves.
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And we also know pedagogically that while they might have good rapport with some of us adults, they really want to hear from their older peers and that's definitely more valuable.
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The second thing that struck me and I was really reflective and really critical of myself, because I'm the one who was advocating for digital citizenship to be taught this way was my belief.
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We went one-to-one in 2014-15, like many districts did.
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It was my belief that digital citizenship should be taught every single day by every single teacher, but it should be embedded into daily lessons and it should be reinforced through teachable moments, with classroom conversations and discussions, and for 10 years I believed that.
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And now I'm kicking myself because I'm hearing our students saying I don't remember that lesson, I don't remember our conversation sometimes with our sixth grade teachers.
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We're taking a different approach now, where we're making this instruction more explicit.
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We're not trying to embed it.
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We're still going to do that to an extent, but we're not going to go out of our way to try to embed these conversations into our everyday teaching.
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We want to make it explicit.
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We are teaching you this lesson on this topic in terms of digital citizenship, because this is important for you to under and we want to spell it out right.
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Yes, because a lot of our, a lot of the kids were giving feedback that those lessons they weren't absorbed to the level that we thought they they should have been.
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I have so many thoughts because I'm with you on this idea of it being embedded.
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To me it's like the literacy standards or social, emotional learning skills, because those are our processes to help us learn the academic content and I really admire the fact that you're like but here's where we could have increased its effectiveness because it wasn't as explicit.
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What is that looking like for you now, with it being embedded but more explicit?
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And is that some time where that explicitness is separate?
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So we're in that work right now.
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We're kicking around a lot of ideas, taking the feedback from, again, those committee members, and then we took that work of the committee it was a large committee we took it back to our buildings and each of our levels are different, right.
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So elementary has a different concern.
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Middle school is where we're heavily focused, and then high school being a 9th through 12th grade high school, for us there's a big difference between an 18-year-old and a 14-year-old, right, absolutely.
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So we wanted to provide some structure but again give some responsibility for our kids.
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We really weren't seeing the negative effects of the cell phone and social media as much in our older grades and older students.
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We were definitely seeing it in our younger students and middle school students.
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So we're kicking around ideas, our younger students and middle school students so we're kicking around ideas.
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We have an amazing high school course called High School 101.
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That's been in place at Garner Valley High School for probably a few decades and it's really like how do I become a really effective and productive high school student?
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And it's everything from teaching digital citizenship, but also teaching study skills and all those soft skills that sometimes get lost and we advocate to other folks.
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We explicitly teach those in high school 101.
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So do we need to make a middle school 101 course?
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Right?
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We're having conversations around that right now.
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I believe the consensus is in some form or fashion we do, because it's so effective at the high school that we need to have something for our incoming sixth graders to lean on and go to every day or every other day, whatever the schedule allows, and say this is a big transition from fifth to sixth grade.
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We get it.
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The work is different, the schedule is completely different.
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You're allowed to change classes.
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Now, right, those things we think.
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You have lockers.
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For the first time, you have some freedom and autonomy to choose your electives.
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So all those things are important and we didn't really provide.
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I'm thinking back to my middle school years.
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There wasn't really a transition plan.
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It was just like you're now in middle school, you'll figure it out, and kids do.
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They're resilient, but it would be helpful if there was some structure in place.
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So your question around how are we going to explicitly teach this?
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We're doing that work.
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Now it may end up as a course, not that the other folks aren't going to teach it every day, but at least we would hit it every day or every other day.
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In this specific course, we're doing a lot of work with our parents.
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We sometimes take for granted that our parent community is reading all the research and watching the videos and seeing the same things that we're seeing, but I think everybody in education would agree that sometimes parents have other things that they're doing.
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They're working full-time jobs and things like that.
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So we have to bring that message to our parent community that this is a problem, and a lot of this problem stems from things that are happening after school, but certainly we're impacted on that when the kids show up to school.
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So this is a joint collaboration.
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This is a joint project between home and school.
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Like most things right, but we have to get this one right because everything is pointing to.
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If you don't get it right, then there's going to be some long-term consequences that no one wants to see happen to kids.
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My first thought when you mentioned the high school 101 is, having talked with my boys, who have all graduated one's graduated college.
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Two are in college right now is how nice would it have been to have a life 101 for when you're a senior, no matter what your pathway is after this?
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Here are some things you're just going to want to know.
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I think about the life lessons I was learning up until my early 30s, till I'm like, oh, I think I have a better handle on what this whole thing's about.
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And I also then think about the importance of having, like, a middle school 101, because not only are their schedules changing, but the social dynamics are changing, because you're bringing students in, usually in districts from multiple schools to come together again, and so they've been with these same groups of people for so many years.
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And now it's the shifting social dynamic and having to meet people and collaborate and then be able to learn academically from people as well and then be able to learn academically from people as well.
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Yeah, and the students on our committee, both our high school students and our middle school students who sat on the committee they both groups acknowledge the benefit of having such a course.
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The other thing that surprised me was, throughout the conversations, throughout the work of our committee, each student group, didn't matter the grade level, recognized that they're on their phones way too much.
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Recognized that they're on social media way too much.
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Number one.
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Number two is they both groups wanted to do that less.
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They just didn't have a way to do it less.
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They felt the peer pressure, right.
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Everything else that happens in middle school, right, there's a lot of peer pressure that goes on.
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So, when we were thinking about not only the courses but our policies related to this, how can we help them put their phones away more often or get off their phones during school, or how can we help them achieve the goal that they all want, which is to use those cell phones less?
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And we're picking on cell phones, but a lot of the issue is social media.
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But we've also had conversations that came out of this is we're a one-to-one school district.
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We believe in innovation, we believe in technology when it's used purposefully in our classrooms, but we were seeing times where we were sometimes getting away from that philosophy.
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Right, we weren't using our technology always in a purposeful manner.
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Sometimes it was a replacement for other things, and that's not our belief system, that's not our mission, right?
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There's great uses of technology I know everybody knows those but then sometimes, for indoor recess, for example, in our elementary schools, our principal is like oh, tomorrow, no more iPads and indoor recess.
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That's something we had to hear from our students and for us to internalize.
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A simple act like that, a simple new policy or new rule, helps support the things that we're trying to do in the district to help kids achieve what they ultimately want to achieve, and that's to be kids.
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One of the most powerful things that I took from that is that the students want to achieve, and that's the kids.
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One of the most powerful things that I took from that is that the students want to be off their phones more.
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They acknowledge it, and so they're learning pieces on how it's impacting their brain and how they're getting sucked into these.
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Was it the dopamine?
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And I know there's all the hormones that start going, but then how can we support them so that they can reach their goal?
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I think often we come together in groups, thinking we have different goals that we're working to achieve, and by having an opportunity to have that collaboration, you find that all the goals are similar, just needing the supports and being able to get there.
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And I think as a parent as well, my husband and I have gone out to dinner and we're looking around and there's people sitting across from each other on their phones, and so I can say one of the things that I was really proud of is, at least when we had dinners or meals together, phones were away.
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But I also know as a parent of teenagers they had their phones in their bedroom at night.
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I knew that they shouldn't and I should have taken it and a little part of me was like let's see how they do, like giving them that bit and if they find that they were up until three o'clock, they still are getting up and going to school on time.
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And are they tired?
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Yes, and do they have sports practice?
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Yes, and there are natural logical consequences that come with that.
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But then also balancing that with students who have a difficulty regulating themselves.
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So I think there's a lot to be learned there and opening up conversation for what us adults can be doing to model behavior that is more aligned in support of students.
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Yeah, absolutely, and kids have said that to us in these committee groups is I see my teacher texting sometimes and again there could be an emergency at home.
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We're not saying that.
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It's not that there's not appropriate times and needs to have a cell phone as an adult, to have your cell phone.
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Now, there's a lot of benefits to that during the day because students do need to check their phones and things like that for sporting events and parent messages, because we don't want them checking their phones during the class period, right.
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But then there's a downside to that because if they're on their phones during the cafeteria time then they're not really socializing and interacting with their peers.
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So we're trying to thread that needle, we're trying to find the balance there and it's not certainly easy and it's probably not going to be the right answer the first time.
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We're probably going to have to evolve wherever we land on this year, but I like the direction we're going for next school year.
00:20:57.445 --> 00:21:24.657
As I'm hearing you, I can't help but think that it's like having a balance in almost every aspect of your life, and because we're humans, it's hard to always find that exact balance, and so, in my mind, your idea of this evolution is just what's going to be important like striving for a balance, knowing that it's never going to be perfect, but having the flexibility and the agility to navigate when you need to.
00:21:25.307 --> 00:21:29.325
Having the flexibility and the agility to navigate when you need to.
00:21:29.325 --> 00:21:37.977
Yeah, and I think, again, my superintendents did a really good job of framing this context of let's identify the root causes of this problem.
00:21:37.977 --> 00:21:52.726
And most people know that cell phone companies and social media companies they spend millions, if not billions of dollars on figuring out how to get people to stay on the screen, right, because that's how they make their money.
00:21:52.726 --> 00:22:09.351
We're not going to solve, we're not going to solve that we don't have the resources, we don't have the people in place to combat millions and billions of dollars and research that they do to try to keep people on their phones and social media.
00:22:09.351 --> 00:22:14.570
So we just have to know what the rules are of the game, right, and the rules are we lost that.
00:22:14.570 --> 00:22:17.365
We're not going to be able to figure that side of it out.
00:22:17.365 --> 00:22:19.550
The algorithms are too smart for us, right?
00:22:19.550 --> 00:22:22.136
So then what do we do as a school district?
00:22:22.136 --> 00:22:23.146
That's easy.
00:22:23.146 --> 00:22:25.315
We have students from eight to three.
00:22:26.465 --> 00:22:29.871
No cell phones in class has been our policy and most policies forever.
00:22:29.871 --> 00:22:31.972
Now there's consequences that have to be talked about.
00:22:31.972 --> 00:22:38.990
One change we made in our middle school is cell phones are in their locker and they're in their book bags at all times.
00:22:38.990 --> 00:22:40.032
They should never be out.
00:22:40.032 --> 00:22:41.356
That's new for us.
00:22:41.356 --> 00:22:48.613
We allowed students to check their phones in the hallways between classes a year ago, but the students were reporting.
00:22:48.613 --> 00:23:09.830
That's not helpful, right, they don't need to do that, but we do need to provide opportunities for them to check their messages because of, again, sports schedules changing and things like that, parents texting and then the work we're doing with our parent community, letting them know that this is an epidemic for these age groups of students and we have to get on top of that.
00:23:09.830 --> 00:23:18.259
And then, even equally as important, we're having conversations with our elementary parents, who's, for many of them, their kids, their only kids.
00:23:18.259 --> 00:23:24.356
Right now, they don't even know what's coming in terms of technology and addiction and things like that.
00:23:24.356 --> 00:23:29.277
So we want to get the message out ahead of time so they can be proactive in some of their plannings.
00:23:29.526 --> 00:23:34.851
And the feedback's been great from our elementary parent community because, again, for many of them, they didn't see this coming.
00:23:34.851 --> 00:23:39.817
They're like, oh, I was about to buy a cell phone for my fourth grader, right?
00:23:39.817 --> 00:23:49.711
And we're like, if it's possible we don't want to tell parents out of parent, but if it's possible, hold off at least a year or two right, see if you really need the cell phone.
00:23:49.711 --> 00:23:51.751
So we're having those conversations.
00:23:51.964 --> 00:23:59.453
Again, this is going to be a long-term process for us, but we're going into it with our eyes open.
00:23:59.453 --> 00:24:00.891
We know that it's an uphill battle.
00:24:00.891 --> 00:24:04.252
We know that the technology companies are going to do their best to fight us.
00:24:04.252 --> 00:24:12.594
We know that they're going to do their best to try to get teens hooked on different apps and things like that, and we know that the technology is also going to change.
00:24:12.594 --> 00:24:15.851
So, yeah, we're talking a lot about cell phones right now.
00:24:15.851 --> 00:24:20.189
It could be a watch, it could be something else in the future that's getting their attention.
00:24:20.189 --> 00:24:26.839
So we're trying to be sure that we're not super focused on cell phones right now, because we know that things are going to change down the road.
00:24:28.006 --> 00:24:47.546
I was always excited about what's coming up next, knowing that there is always something, and so how are you forward, thinking about that and helping the students, but also the parents, and where I'm going with this is that I was on your Advative site and I was looking around at the courses that you offer and the resources that are there and the books that you've written there is.
00:24:47.546 --> 00:24:53.855
So there's a wealth of information out there for parents, for students, ones that I pulled out.
00:24:53.855 --> 00:24:55.771
And this is around AI as well.
00:24:55.771 --> 00:24:59.615
You have a creative digital citizenship pledge.
00:25:00.226 --> 00:25:09.133
Thinking about how you're switching communication and implementation plans for AI and I love that you use the Heath Brothers communication and implementation plans for AI, and I love that you use the Heath Brothers book as a foundation for that.
00:25:09.133 --> 00:25:35.449
Thinking about how students can use AI in their prompts Like I thought the dive one was phenomenal and then how educators can leverage AI in a smart way to be able to help make their lives a little bit easier as well, and so I'm hoping that you would not their lives a little bit easier as well, and so I'm hoping that you would not mind talking a little bit about the foundation, the business that you have, and how that's influencing and supporting areas around you.
00:25:37.270 --> 00:25:46.464
Yeah, I'll briefly talk about Advative, but I specifically want to talk about AI and AI literacy for kids, because that's a lot of our focus right now, obviously in a lot of school districts too.
00:25:47.289 --> 00:25:54.663
So Advative came out of a need in 2017-18 from myself and some colleagues here at Garner Valley.
00:25:54.663 --> 00:26:00.962
We were asked to support a local district to lift and to help them lift an online and blended learning program.
00:26:00.962 --> 00:26:16.792
At that time, garner Valley, we had homegrown a blended learning and online learning program that allows any one of our students K-12, to take any course at any time in one of three formats traditional, face-to-face, online or blended.
00:26:16.792 --> 00:26:25.680
Same teacher, same curriculum, all the resources OER created and it was a really robust and successful adoption for us.
00:26:25.680 --> 00:26:32.599
So other districts were interested and we wanted to help support them, but they didn't necessarily have the people in place at that time.
00:26:32.599 --> 00:26:44.390
They didn't have, maybe, the technology in place at that time this is almost 10 years ago so we were asked to support their administration and their faculties in developing a similar program for their district.
00:26:44.390 --> 00:26:46.798
But we ran into some roadblocks.
00:26:46.798 --> 00:26:58.566
One of the things we found out pretty quickly was in the state of Pennsylvania, you can't be employed in one district and then go work and support another district, even if it's outside of your school day, even if it's over the summer, and things like that.
00:26:58.566 --> 00:27:02.786
So we developed a nonprofit school day, even if it's over the summer and things like that.
00:27:02.786 --> 00:27:03.549
So we developed a nonprofit.
00:27:03.549 --> 00:27:14.420
We wanted to be super transparent with, obviously, the Garnet Valley community, but also honor the fact that people were working outside of their traditional contract and they needed to be compensated for those times on weekends and over the summers and things like that.
00:27:14.420 --> 00:27:16.334
So we developed a nonprofit.
00:27:16.334 --> 00:27:23.696
Just to be super clear about any conflict of interest or the perception of a conflict of interest, so we developed a nonprofit.
00:27:23.696 --> 00:27:29.695
The founders, myself and some colleagues legally cannot get paid for the work that we do, so we were comfortable with that.
00:27:29.695 --> 00:27:33.661
But the people who were doing the day-to-day work on the ground could be compensated.
00:27:33.661 --> 00:27:35.436
So we developed that program.
00:27:35.436 --> 00:27:40.478
We helped a lot of school districts through the pandemic with delivering their instruction in a virtual environment.
00:27:40.478 --> 00:27:47.134
For many of those teachers they were doing it for the first time Steep learning curve, as you can imagine, and we got through it.
00:27:47.454 --> 00:28:02.798
So the next evolution of the change in technology is now AI and being a school district like ours and our superintendent this is his leadership and his forward thinking approach to pretty much everything we do is we have to embrace this.
00:28:02.798 --> 00:28:04.561
It's not going away.
00:28:04.561 --> 00:28:18.711
It's going to be impactful on our industry but, equally as important, our students are going to need the skills on how to interact with AI responsibly, ethically, appropriately all those things right when they graduate Garner Valley High School.
00:28:18.711 --> 00:28:20.894
So what are we going to do to get ahead of this?
00:28:20.894 --> 00:28:23.740
And it's really been a challenge because it changes so quickly.
00:28:23.740 --> 00:28:25.163
But, yeah, we embrace AI.
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We're fully invested.
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