This article was previously published on CambridgeToday.
Michael Kearns has taken a progressive mindset to teaching over his 21 years as an educator.
It's an approach that's helped make him adaptable and receive buy-in from his students.
And it hasn't gone unnoticed.
The Monsignor Doyle Catholic Secondary School teacher was recently presented with the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence for his dedication to providing a supportive, nurturing environment in the classroom.
Kearns runs the Global Leadership Program at the school, which combines subjects like world issues, economics, politics, sociology and psychology.
As the times have changed and technology has become ingrained in the fabric of society, he's used it to his advantage to prepare students for the working world they'll one day enter.
"I use an e-learning platform that allows you to do things like track changes, change the state of images on screen and track variables," Kearns said.
"You can do interactive stuff like games and sims. I've got AI avatars in the game and sims that talk to them. They'll then get up and role play. I'm very hands on."
The virtual world of education is right up his alley, as he also does work in e-learning development on the side.
The role playing and game aspect of his teaching in particular is critical to student success in the age of social media, he said.
By getting his student's heads out of textbooks and interacting with each other, he hopes to tap into their emotions and get them excited.
"It makes it more engaging," he said.
"Also, having a narrative and a story when your teaching is important so people can find themselves in that story as opposed to just giving them facts."
In over two decades of being in the classroom, he's seen the dynamics and environment change before his eyes.
Some of it has been for the better and some for the worse.
"The biggest change happened with phones," he said.
"Instead of kids talking to each other in class, they're sneaking their phones and texting. It's taken away a lot of the interactive components and excitement from talking to each other."
While Kearns is in favour of getting phones out of the classroom, he sees trying to eliminate all use of technology as "pushing water uphill."
Instead, it's about how it's used and doing what's best to prepare young people for life outside of school, he believes.
"We're in an innovative, technological world," he said.
"We can either embrace the tools and use them to our advantage or try to push back. In the end, we have to find a way to embrace it to compete with the technology that's pulling them away from the classroom."
His approach seems to be working as it was his students who ended up nominating him for the award.
"I got an email back in late March saying that I had won," Kearns said.
"I was was very grateful and I was honoured. It was really kind to have students that wanted to step up and nominate me for the award, it was very special."
