Teaching TO The Test Pattern: Savannah State University Dean David Marshall
PowerPoints Are Dead in This Building
Three of his students didn't pass.
Senior capstone. Industry judges in the room. The work wasn't there.
And David Marshall's first response wasn't about the students. It was about what his program missed.
"It's one too many," he told me. "We're doing a deep dive. It's not seeing a lot about the student. It's seeing really a lot about our own delivery."
That's the dean of the College of Media Arts and Communications at Savannah State University. Nationally accredited by ACJMC. One of three programs in the state of Georgia to hold that distinction. And when three students fall short of the finish line, he looks in the mirror first.
I've been on a lot of campuses. That is not the default response.
The capstone class has one grade.
An A. Not almost-right, not a B-plus for "the color was a little off." The rubric is either met or it isn't. Industry judges sit in the room and score the work. The people who might actually hire these students are the ones holding the pencils.
Three didn't clear it this semester. And instead of moving on, David called it "one too many" and started asking what he missed.
That accountability... that is something.
He also told me about his decision matrix. Every decision that lands on his desk gets filtered through one question: is this going to help a student get to graduation or not?
If the answer is "or not," and I'm quoting him exactly here, the answer is "H-E-L-L no."
He spelled it out. I loved every letter of it.
But here's the thing that's been sitting with me since I left Whiting Hall.
He told me students are coming in who could teach the classes. Digital natives. Content creators since they were seven or eight years old. Phones that outshoot cameras. Instincts built over a decade of posting, editing, watching what works.
So what do you tell them?
David's answer was honest. Not a lot about technique. The gap isn't technical. The gap is soft skills. Working on a team. Seeing something through when it gets hard. Sticking with the edit at two in the morning not because anyone is watching but because you are not done yet.
He called it stick-tuitiveness.
I thought about my son and his bad knee and his week off from running.
You see it everywhere. The technical ceiling keeps rising. The capacity for hard things... you have to build that one on purpose. Through repetitions. Through the 75th show when everything has fallen apart and you are still pushing because today's show goes up today.
That is what hands-on education builds. Not knowledge of how to do a thing. The muscle for doing it when it's hard.
Powerpoints are dead in that building.
Not discouraged. Not limited to certain courses. Dead.
Every class has a project. A real problem. Something that goes into a portfolio. By the end of your first semester, you have already made something. Not demonstrated something you memorized. Made something you can show.
By the time you hit the capstone, you present to industry people who give you a score. And that score matters.
Here's what you do with this before next semester starts.
Look at every class on your roster and ask one question: what does a student make in this class? Not what do they memorize. Not what do they demonstrate they retained. What do they make.
If the answer is nothing... that's the first thing to fix.
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.
What does a marketing teacher in Gwinnett County know about broadcast education? More than you'd expect.
Tom sits down with Evan Rosenberry at Collins Hill High School — the first marketing teacher in Teaching to the Test Pattern history — and the conversation goes places. AI in the classroom, why banning it might be the worst thing you can do for your students, a student MLB franchise project that ended up in Seoul, Korea, and what happened when Evan handed his kids the VidPod and said "figure it out."