Teaching ToThe Test Pattern: Billy Dunn from the Albertville Innovation Academy

He got the jumbotron at 2pm. Game was at seven.

That's Billy Dunn's year three. Albertville Innovation Academy. Five sports. Five jumbotrons. Every single one installed after the season had already started.

And at the end of it, he sat across from me and said, "I knocked everything down. But I didn't grow."

That's the thing about imposter syndrome that nobody really warns you about. It doesn't go away when you win. It just changes shape. In year one, it sounds like "I don't know what I'm doing." In year three, it sounds like "I don't know if what I'm doing is enough." Same fear. Different costume.

Billy came from Fox 6 in Birmingham. If you know broadcast, you know Fox 6. And he walked into his first classroom carrying that standard with him. If it won't go on Fox 6, it's not going on. He told me that himself. And then he told me something else: "I realized I was wrong."

That pivot... that's a year's worth of growth most teachers never find. Letting go of the standard you mastered so you can find the standard that actually fits the room you're in. That's the hard kind of hard. The kind that doesn't show up in any evaluation rubric.

So what does his year actually look like from the outside? Seven cameras at the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center for the NASA HERC competition. NASA brought four. His kids brought five, plus a GoPro and a 360. They were embedded journalists in an engineering shop, running social media for a moon buggy teams, learning to cover live events in someone else's yard with no safety net and no control over what happened next.

And then there's the student who started the year asking "how long does this have to be?"

By April, she was walking across the room to confront him about a strobe effect he quietly deleted from her video. One second of flash. She noticed. She came back, put it in, and said, "This is the copy that better make it tomorrow."

He said okay…Because it was her video.

That kid isn't just a good story. She's the measurement. She went from minimum effort to ownership in one year. Under a teacher who thinks he didn't grow.

So here's the question worth sitting with: what if you're doing the same thing and just not seeing it?

Here's the shift Billy is navigating, and if you're a few years in, you're probably in it too. AV education used to be about what your students know. Can they use the switcher? Can they frame a shot? Check the boxes, move them along. That game is changing. The students sitting in your room right now have never not known what a wireless lav mic looks like. They've never not had a camera in their pocket. The technical floor is higher than it's ever been.

Which means your job isn't primarily teaching technique anymore. Your job is building passion and giving them something to build from. A kid who loves what they're doing and understands the rule of thirds will figure out frame rates eventually. A kid who doesn't want to be there won't care about any of it, no matter how clean your lesson plan is.

Billy figured that out in year three. He let the editors edit. He let the anchors anchor. He split the class into what it actually was instead of forcing everyone through the same door. Is it messy? Yes. Is it wrong? No. It's year three. You're finding your stride.

Jill Oldham, one of my favorite Principals of all time, once told me, after I said almost the exact same thing Billy said to me: "You’ve found your stride. It usually takes 3 years."

You might be further along than you think.

Here's what to do with that: pick one student who's coasting. Not the one who's failing outright, and not the easy one. The one who's just... not all the way in. Find out what they actually want to do. Give them a version of the work that gets them there. It won't look like your plan. It'll probably be messier than what you had in mind.

But it might look like a kid who walks across the room in April to fight for a one-second strobe effect…That's the year you're building toward. You might already be in it.

StreamSemester.com is presented by Amitrace.com.

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Meet the Author, Tom White

Tom White is the director of business development at Amitrace. Tom's role is to help educators build better programs through better training, planning, and equipment. Before joining Amitrace, Tom was the Broadcast Engineer at Grady College of Journalism and Communication at the University of Georgia. Prior to that role, Tom taught at Morgan County High School and Rockdale Career Academy where he and his student produced thousands of live streams for sports, news, and community events. Tom is a member of the SkillsUSA Georgia Board of Directors and also serves as a contest tech chair for SkillsUSA Alabama and Tennessee.

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