We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rick Fowler. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rick below.

Alright, Rick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career.

I have been in education (secondary and post-secondary) for over 10 years. I’ve taught in public, private, for-profit, and non profit industries. Currently I spend most of my time teaching high school students how to create awesome creative, informative, and exciting projects after school via video, audio, graphics, and photography production. Many of my students are enrolled in Film/TV, Journalism, and/or Photography classes at their high school. Then after school a couple days a week, they work with me. I get a lot of time to really get to know these students despite my program being virtual since the plague hit in Dumpster Fire Year, 2020. High schoolers get super chatty when they are speaking with someone they can trust.

One thing that seems to be the biggest ongoing problem with the education system, especially in grades 9-12 is the push for standardized testing. As most know, it generally forces classes to be focused around the test and assessment scores which aren’t always a relevant measure of learning, especially in areas outside of science and math where there are many defined rules and an advantage for pure, rote memorization.

Students want to learn how to use their creativity. They want more opportunities to be innovative rather than memorize equations. From my perspective, the current generation wants to know more than simple things that are easily Googled. They need more life lessons and fewer equations. Not that those equations are unimportant but there needs to be a better balance between the focus on the standardized state testing and the tests of life that are approaching our high school students.

Think about all the things many people can do and some wish they could in life. Students should learn about personal finances, about contracts like rental/lease/purchase agreements, about interest and how to balance a checkbook. How about checking a vehicle’s oil, changing a flat tire, or household management skills? I think a lot of industries would be improved by teaching our high schoolers simple telephone, email, and texting etiquette. I’d imagine more parents would appreciate that as well.

Arizona is consistently near the bottom on state standardized test score ranking. Rather than spend a bunch of time and energy on competing on that (standardized test scores) playing field, we should specialize in another area that might reduce the state’s dropout rate. Let’s teach our learners how to be better people, not just better test takers. We can improve the education system and our communities by rerouting some of our education focus away from standardized test and toward real life lessons that will really make an investment in the future.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have had a sordid past in my career path. I’ve welded mufflers in an automotive shop, I’ve worked for a home remodeling company as an electrician, I’ve worked in data entry and data management, I’ve worked quite a bit in entertainment, I’ve worked in live event production management, I’ve worked in visual design, hospitality, customer service, I’ve owned my own business, and I’ve played hundreds of shows as a performing musician.

From an outsider’s view, there’s no common thread in my journey. However, what my career amounts to is that I have an seemingly unquenchable thirst for lifelong learning & skill building. Most people want to be the best at something but I get bored doing the same thing over and over and over. I am primarily driven toward novelty in experience and learning new things. I’ve had a lot of formal education (an A.A. in Psychology, B.A. in Psychology w/ web technology Minor, and an M.Ed. in Post-secondary Educational Leadership, along with a host of specialty certifications). Although that path was interesting and challenging at times,

I have found the most rewarding work being creative, problem-solving, and finding easier ways to complete tasks. I also get a serious thrill in watching lightbulbs go off in other people–must be my love of electricity, haha! Sure doing the thing is fun and having a completed project is great but when it comes down to it, I want to show people, “this is what I did and THIS is how I did it so you can do it, too.” I get so proud of teaching people and helping others learn and solve problems. Oh, and movies… I also love watching movies.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Teambuilding in and of itself is easy. Building a successful, long-term invested team who consistently work well together and have developed a sense of trust with each other–is where the real challenge lies. I’ve worked in teams of very few (2) on small and large projects and I’ve also worked with large teams (50+) on very large projects. From my perspective, managing a team comes down to transparency, express collaboration within the team at all levels, and investing in the idea that each person will be bringing something of real value to the table in their position.

Being transparent to a team allows each person to manage their own expectations and better grasp the “why” of the project(s) or goal(s). I’m repulsed by the old top-down approach to management because often times there’s a lot of unnecessary egotists in the middle of those organizations. They tell everyone what to do (or cloak the task in a question or feigned request) and then hide behind their desk in their offices waiting down the clock. Being a white male (and thus having the privileges afforded to me), I’ve must admit my shame that more often than not, the person I’m describing is often a middle-aged white male. But I digress. The top priority in managing a team is allowing the team to manage with a manager helping to steer the ship when needed.

Collaboration seems like an obvious one for team morale. We see the ill effects in situations where collaboration breaks down. I’ve seen it a lot working in higher education. Lack of investment in collaboration allows people or teams to operate in a silo, independent of everyone else. It creates confusion, doubling or tripling the work and it crushes agility. When your team fails to collaborate everyone often chooses to become the “that’s not in my job description,” employee. Bring everyone in the team into the collaboration. Have all positions interact with each other and encourage collective team success rather than internal competition. That’s what I’ve found is the best.

The last aspect I look for in happy, successful teams is the belief and faith that everyone is bringing something of real importance to the table. Some evidence of this will be obvious (EG. a good sales person will bring in clients). Some will be less obvious (EG. your IT manager might be putting together staff for a casual basketball team on the weekends, thus growing moral and building bonds among your IT staff). Or the person who brings coffee and/or little unexpected things for the office. Sometimes the bench-warmer with a lot of heart is the one the team really can’t do without.

To wrap up, something more tangible that I believe helps teams in general (and this is very true in the classroom) is to outline and celebrate milestones in projects frequently. If you only celebrate at the end of the year when you reconcile your annual budget, not many people will be excited to work for/with you.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I love this question. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered a resource I wish I knew about earlier, I’d be on that proverbial beach sipping a frosty beverage right now with my toes in the sand.

Growing up, my household was a fairly early adopter of computer technology and advances in communication. We had an Intellivision game system, we had a Commodore 64 computer in our home when they came out, and I was the first of my friends to get my own home phone number and a pager. On the computer side, I really have to thank my uncle because if he wasn’t so into programming software on the Amiga computer back then, my parents wouldn’t have been so compelled to pickup the C64. Before I was a teenager, dial up internet was at my fingertips; I can still here the buzz, beep, blip, crackle, static, beep of the modem in my memory today. Initially it was BBS bulletin boards and shortly thereafter, America Online. I even met the woman who became my future wife online in an AOL chat room. The point is, technology and more specifically The Internet has opened up so many unexpected doors for me in my creative journey. But for the record, I don’t miss waiting 30 minutes to download a lofi, overly-compressed audio file just to hear one song.

Now, it’s all out there on the web if you know how to search for it. I gained access to early iterations of Photoshop, ProTools, and other creative software thanks to my access to a computer and the Internet. Don’t tell Ma but those early software downloads may have been pirated but who can be sure?

One resource that comes to mind that I use daily now that I wasn’t an early-adopter of is Cloud-based software and storage. I had knowingly (and sometimes unknowingly) interacted with Cloud resources but it took me a while to really trust in the value and scalability of the Cloud as a resource. Today, I don’t know what I would do without it even for simple transfer and storage of large files. If I would have known to use it in the late 00’s, I wouldn’t have lost all my honeymoon photos and videos when my laptop was stolen during a break in to my apartment in Long Beach near CSULB. It’s crushing to know that the world will never get to see the ridiculous episode we shot of what we deemed “Survivor Woman” in our hotel room in the Dominican Republic. The resort had unlimited food and drink (including alcohol), I better never have Mamajuana (Google it, there’s no weed in it) again.

I can’t wait for more advancements/adopting of Cloud-based resources and for local infrastructure to adopt it and make it more affordable for all. I hope that’s a thing one day.