Published: 2010-05-20

Not Your Run-of-the-Mill Professional Development Videos

By Diana Fingal

It's a scene that makes the hair on the back of your neck bristle: A teacher greets his students as they enter a high school classroom. A tall, athletic kid walks in wearing a scowl and sipping a Big Gulp.

"Hey, hey," the teacher says. "You know better than to be drinking a Coke in class."

The student looks down at his drink and then says, "This? This isn't Coke, it's 7-Up."

The other students snicker. But the teacher persists. "It doesn't matter what it is. You can't bring a drink to class."

The conversation escalates until the teacher, who is in a wheelchair, rolls out from behind his desk and approaches the student, demanding the drink as the kid pulls away with an aggressive look on his face.

The image is frozen as a voiceover warns: "Right now we have a dangerous situation. The teacher will not back down, and the student is very likely to throw the drink."

It is the opening scene from a professional development video on defusing anger and aggression. It's not your typical talking-heads DVD with charts and graphs and lots of guys in suits. And the man behind the video, Adam Wendt, the chief operations officer of IRIS Media, is not your typical ISTE member.

His company works with researchers to produce, evaluate, and distribute innovative PD resources for K–12 educators with an emphasis on positive behavioral interventions and support. IRIS Media also produces programs for parents and people with developmental disabilities as well as the staff and loved ones who support them.

Wendt joined ISTE in 2006 because he was working on new ways to deliver training materials to schools and staff using the Internet. "We felt that many teachers were using technology in their classroom instruction but were unable to access effective professional development resources for behavior and classroom management through anything but the one-time inservice," he says.

Wendt's productions span a wide range of topics. A father of three adopted children, he has produced videos designed to teach adoptive parents how to communicate with their children. And his videos on handling aggression in schools landed him a gig developing a training for bartenders on how to handle unruly patrons.

But his primary focus is on education and the schools.

"Most recently I have been interested in the ways that schools communicate with parents," he says. "How can we use technology to bridge the school–home connection?"

He's an at-large board member of ISTE's Innovative Learning Technologies Special Interest Group, which is made up of educators, researchers, educational reform leaders, and learning technology innovators who share information about promising and proven new learning technologies.

"They've helped me understand the barriers and opportunities of instructional technology for professional development," he says.

Wendt wasn't always on a technology path. He studied musical composition in college and fell into this career after he borrowed some recording equipment from his friend, Brion Marquez, to create a multimedia musical production. In return Marquez asked Wendt to help with the sound on a video he was producing. Wendt didn't know much about sound but agreed to help. The two ultimately became business partners and formed IRIS Media, which is based in Eugene, Oregon. A third partner, Nell Caraway, is the chief executive officer.

Wendt grew up in Wyoming, a state that he says strongly supports and funds education.

"The basis of my technology understanding comes from having opportunities at the schools I attended when I grew up," Wendt says. "It is my hope that through organizations like ISTE, we can make that a reality in every district in the country."

—Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L

Learning & Leading with Technology, vol. 37, no. 7 © 2010, ISTE ® (International Society for Technology in Education), (www.iste.org.) All rights reserved. Visit the website for ISTE's Learning and Leading with Technology