"Katie-Magic" Isn’t Magic

At some point during my district coaching career, someone coined the phrase: “Katie-magic.”

I remember the heat rising to my cheeks, blushing and laughing it off, because really, what were they even talking about?! I wasn't really sure what that meant. I knew what they were seeing: teachers trying something they hadn't tried before, people becoming more comfortable with technology, a teacher who had been frustrated suddenly getting excited about something, or a principal proudly showing me something they had created and saying, “Look what I figured out!” But there wasn't really any magic happening, at least not the kind that involved waving a wand and making technology problems disappear.

Most of the time, I was simply showing up.

I showed up in classrooms, in hallways, in planning meetings, at trainings, and sometimes in a teacher's doorway because someone had mentioned that they were trying to figure something out. I asked questions, listened to what people were saying, and tried to figure out where I could help; sometimes that meant introducing a new tool, sometimes it meant creating something for them, and sometimes it meant sitting beside them while we figured it out together. And sometimes it meant telling someone, “Let's not worry about all of that right now. Let's just figure out this one piece.” I think that last part might have been more important than I realized.

The teachers I worked with over the years were carrying a lot. Some were still frustrated by the way technology had been pushed into classrooms during COVID (yes, even five years later) and I don't blame them. Technology had become connected to a really difficult time in their teaching careers and, for many people, their personal lives, too. Then politics really came into education. (I’m not going to elaborate here. You can research that on your own.)  Then AI makes a grand entrance center stage into the every day education sphere, and that added an entirely new set of questions about teaching, learning, thinking, writing, cheating, student work, and what teachers should or shouldn't be doing with it… So there were so many different dynamics and a lot of questions.  I have really never thought the job of an instructional technology coach was to walk into a classroom and tell a teacher what they should be doing with technology. I always needed to observe and listen first.

So many of my coaching conversations started with questions that had very little to do with technology: How’s your day going? What does your typical “flow” look like? What is working? What isn't? What are your students struggling with? What takes up too much of your time? What would make tomorrow a little easier? Sometimes the answer was technology, but sometimes it wasn't, and I think that is an important distinction because instructional technology coaching isn't really about finding an excuse to use technology; it's about figuring out whether technology can actually help solve the problem in front of you.

When it could, we tried something.  When we couldn't, we found something else.

That sounds very basic, but I watched those small decisions change people's confidence throughout the year. During our monthly training times, I tried to give teachers something they could actually use the next day, along with directions they could come back to later when they had time to play with it, because I didn't want people leaving training thinking, “That was a waste of time.” or “That was interesting,” and then never opening the tool again; I wanted them to leave thinking, “Okay, I could actually do this.”

One of my favorite things to hear became, “I've been using ____ since _____,  and I didn't know it could do that!” That always made me smile because it wasn't really about the feature they had just discovered; it was about realizing they were capable of doing more with something they already knew. Sometimes confidence grows because we learn something brand new, but sometimes it grows because someone helps us see something familiar in a different way.

And then there was the teacher who went from proudly using the bare minimum in technology to using AI as a co-creator to help create lesson slide decks. He was so funny… I had stopped by and said hi a few times, and noticed he was a low-tech teacher.  I just liked to make sure his projector worked because he would project a Word document with his agenda and teach from it. There was nothing wrong with that. He knew his content, and his students did well in his class.  I asked him if he ever considered using a slide deck, and he said he just didn't see himself as a graphic designer, and he didn't have time to learn how to become one, so why would he spend hours creating something different? I empathized with him and didn’t pressure him.  I said I would be ready when he was ready to try it.  A year passed, and I kept my same habit of stopping by, making sure his projector was working and he was still good with his Word Documents.  I let him know I was starting AI training and we would be exploring different ways to interact with some different AI chatbots.  He was VERY skeptical of AI, but he started coming to my trainings out of curiosity and some peer pressure from his friends. 

As I mentioned earlier, I always tried to incorporate something practical that a teacher could use right away, and then leave them wondering about the next thing.  Well, this AI series I was training teachers on was using an application called Notebook LM (now called Gemini Notebook) as a way to use the documents you have to create really great visuals from.  It just so happened to include slide decks.  So, this teacher used his unit planning page, his current Word doc agenda, and AI made a BEAUTIFUL slide deck for him.  He was downright GIDDY.  Like a literal giggle.  This AI tool gave him a way to try something new, and while the first slide deck wasn't some magical transformation, it was a starting point. I encouraged him to try using it with his students and let me know how it went the following week. 

Well, he did.  His students responded to it positively, and they were engaging in the content in a new way.  The response had a big enough impact that he decided to keep going for the rest of the unit. He emailed me his slide decks. He was SO proud of them. He even started adding sound effects. This teacher went from a Word Document to Slide Decks with audio. The piece that I emphasized to the teacher was that the technology didn't magically make his students more engaged or the lessons better; he was already a great teacher. The technology tool gave him a way to try something that had previously felt like it would take too much time, require skills he didn't have, or simply wasn't worth the effort. He tried it, his students connected to course material in a new way, responded positively, and that gave him a reason to keep confidently using it more and more, even learning more on his own.  

And then his excitement spread.  “If I can do this, you certainly can do this…” and other people started trying new things, too. Teachers shared ideas, principals played around with AI-generated graphics, and people who had been hesitant started asking questions; I would walk into a conversation about one thing and leave with three more people wanting to know how something worked, and somewhere along the way, the excitement started to become contagious.  This is just one of many coaching stories...but this one from last year just stands out.  

That was when I realized the “Katie-magic” people were referring to, but I knew what was really happening wasn't anything new or fancy or magical.  I was building relationships, listening, sitting beside people instead of standing in front of them, trying to make the next step small enough that it didn't feel overwhelming, and reminding people that they didn't have to know everything before they started.

I was also willing to keep showing up, even when the first try didn't work, the technology didn't cooperate, the teacher wasn't ready, or the idea that sounded so much better in my head didn't quite work with 25 students. Sometimes someone would say, “Nope. Not for me,” and that was okay, too, because coaching isn't about getting everyone to the same place; it's about helping people figure out where they want to go and then helping them take the next step.

That has probably been one of the biggest lessons I've learned throughout coaching and being truly helpful. Being helpful often means being willing to figure it out with someone. Sometimes I knew the answer, sometimes I knew where to look, sometimes I had to say, “I don't know. Let me figure that out,” and sometimes I just needed to sit beside someone and help make the problem feel a little less impossible.

That is the part of educational technology that has always fueled me — it's not really about the technology; it's about what the technology makes possible. Sometimes that means giving a teacher a way to create something they didn't think they had the time or skills to create; sometimes it means giving a student another way to show what they know; sometimes it means saving someone twenty minutes of work they didn't have time to do in the first place; sometimes it simply means helping someone move from “I don't know how” to “Okay, I can do this.”And sometimes it means respecting “I don’t have the capacity to try this right now” and showing up for them in a different way. 

So now when someone calls that “Katie-magic,” I smile and understand what they mean, even if I still laugh and blush a little at the name. I don't think the magic belongs to me anyway; it comes from people who trust me enough to say, “I don't know what I'm doing here,” from students who respond to something differently and give their teachers a reason to keep going, from teachers who are willing to try something new even when they aren't sure it will work, and from colleagues who are willing to share what they are learning with each other.

My part was simply showing up, listening, and helping make the next step possible, and allowing others to shine.  And honestly?  THAT is the best kind of magic to get behind.