NTL Reflections 2025 Leonard Ruszel

Designing the Future: My CTE Journey

My name is Leonard Ruszel. I achieved my National Board Certification in Career and Technical Education (CTE) specializing in the Engineering, Design and Fabrication pathway. As a Computer Science and IB Design “specials” teacher at Ebinger School, I have always believed in the power of hands-on, project-based learning to engage students; it’s amazing to see my students get inspired working on real work-world activities. In my 7 years as a CPS SECA and 13 years as a CPS teacher, I’ve lived and breathed lifelong learning, and that led me to pursue National Board Certification. My curriculum is constantly evolving, and, with the support of my school’s amazing Ebinger Foundation, I was able to add laser engraving and 3D printing to our middle school IB Design curriculum! As proud as I was to guide students through investigating, planning, creating and iterating using industry level tools, I knew that simply having fancy toys alone would not make my curriculum great. I wanted feedback on my lessons from highly accomplished teachers to help me improve my practice and to maximize the impact I made on my students’ learning. To help me become my “best teacher self,” I chose to pursue certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) with the help of the Nurturing Teacher Leadership (NTL) mentorship program, and I’m so glad I did.

It took me years of teaching to feel prepared enough and have the confidence to attempt National Board Certification, but I wish I would have started sooner. My advice to potential CTE candidates out there is to shake those self-doubts and get started with Board-certification too. The more I learned about the NBPTS’ Career and Tech Ed’s Engineering, Design and Fabrication pathway (one of the 8 CTE pathway options), the more things just “clicked” for me. As a Computer Science teacher, I’ve always aimed to better prepare my students for the mercurial nature of the future job market by developing their skills and providing access to career relevant experiences in coding. When I added IB Design, laser engraving and 3D printing to my Computer Science curriculum, I was proud to bring students new career options to explore. I used new lessons I learned during my NBC process to demonstrate that my practice met the National Board’s CTE standards and showcased how my units and assessments turned out to be a perfect fit to demonstrate my mastery of the Engineering, Design and Fabrication pathway. Locking into that CTE pathway led me to strengthen my curricular connection with the career world. For example, after teaching students to create and engrave vector graphic files, I noticed my students weren’t reflecting on the flaws in the engravings. To show them the value of evaluation, I connected with a local engraving company to learn work-world specifics of their reflection process – their actual “product check” steps. I learned that doing a product check before they ship their engravings saved them money by catching mistakes early, thereby reducing material waste, and final quality control checks reduced losses in return shipping costs. When I taught my students the value of this real-world example, students were able to see the value of the Evaluation part of the design process to a small business; my students engaged in it, making test slides to ensure their final engravings came out perfectly. This and other shifts I made with the guidance of NTL brought me closer to my core teaching goals: bringing out the very best in my students and preparing them for real careers and real life. 

Coming from a family of educators, I’d known about National Board Certification for years. I watched my mother become one of the first National Board Certified teachers in Illinois and knew how challenging and also how meaningful the process had been to her practice as a Library Media Specialist. My mother, Cathy Ruszel, NBCT, always described how rigorously she’d reflected on her students’ learning, how much it helped her examine her teaching practice and improve it, and how National Board Certification had pushed her to be the best teacher she could be, and I wanted to do the same. The Board-Certification process had also helped her become a confident leader in her school community. She also “gave back” to our profession by becoming a National Board mentor for many years. As an NBCT and now a new mentor myself, I’ve certainly followed in her footsteps. I owe so much of that to my mother’s encouragement, but she wasn’t the only NBCT role model in my life. My school principal, Mrs. Michelle Nash, is also a National Board Certified Teacher and a former mentor with NTL – I couldn’t have asked for a more supportive leader throughout my transformative time in the NTL program! 

During my NBC process, I learned several new techniques that not only impacted my teaching but also changed the way I communicate with students. Those changes have resulted in improved student learning; for instance, I refined the way I provide feedback to students and began to focus on an inquiry-based approach to giving feedback. I asked probing questions to get students thinking rather than simply providing a quick answer. My students became more thoughtful and less reliant on my advice, and, as a result, I saw students correct 3d modeling mistakes on their own, independently closing gaps where previously I’d had to constantly catch that flaw in their work myself. In NTL, I learned new ways to approach and hone in on my learning targets, like when I built a unit specifically to help students fix chronic scaling (sizing) issues. I challenged my students to create a functional game that would work with a sphere of a specific size. Because of this new addition to my practice, my students learned the value of precision scaling and iteration as a byproduct of getting their game to work, since it would only function if they built their goal or basket to perfectly fit a 5mm sphere.   

I also learned to better differentiate instruction while going through the NBC process. I now divide my lessons into multiple different levels (mild, medium and spicy) for the whole class, rather than just adding modifications and accommodations for students with IEPs, which is what I did before NTL. During my candidacy, I added bonus questions for advanced students, asking them to predict which rotation of a 3D object would require the fewest printed supports (requiring them to imagine rotating the object in space) and put extra visuals and hints in place for students struggling to imagine more than one side of a 3d object at a time. This differentiation methodology helped me better challenge advanced students like those who participate in my Design clubs, while creating appropriately modified work for those who needed more and different support. Because of what I learned, I now conference with students to help them decide whether they feel ready to try “mild, medium or spicy” content each day, so they can personalize their learning experience, which had previously been a challenge for me since I see so many students. Since making these changes, I’ve seen almost all of my 700 students’ skills improve in their mastery of the design process regardless of their entry skill level.

I’m so glad I chose the Nurturing Teacher Leadership program as my support net to help me become Board-certified. I’ve always been a “lifelong learner” and have continued to improve my practice through many different professional development programs during my 20 years with CPS, but choosing to pursue National Board Certification with the help of Nurturing Teacher Leadership was the most rigorous and rewarding professional development I’ve ever done. Because I was matched with a cohort of teachers in similar subject areas, all of the preparation was applicable to my practice, and that’s a rarity with any PD. NTL pushed me to engage in a whole new level of both student and self-analysis and reflection. When my cohort and I were examining videos of my teaching, I found that I had a blind spot in assessing student progress during group work; it became clear that I wasn’t giving equal time to each student as I checked in on small group discussions. With the help of my cohort I improved how I formatively monitor student learning. I learned to be more meticulous in how I check in during group work, ensuring I hear from, engage with, and ask questions to probe each student’s thoughts and understanding rather than do what I used to do – relying on one leader and one note-taker to summarize the team’s progress. With this change, I now collect more formative data to monitor student progress and can better track their learning, which then enables me to adjust and customize my lessons to all student needs better than ever.

I’m so very glad that I had the support of the Nurturing Teacher Leadership program because, without the benefit of a fleet of thoughtful, supportive fellow teachers in my cohort and the guidance of our wonderfully insightful mentors who led me through inquiry, I would have struggled to find solutions to the problems and challenges they had helped me pinpoint in my teaching. I would not have gotten nearly as much out of the Board-certification process without my cohort, if I had even been able to achieve certification at all! The NTL program’s greatest strength was truly its diversity of voices, perspectives and insights – my mentors were my heroes and my cohort my support net, and I’m proud to join their ranks as a new mentor this year. I look forward to continuing to learn more under the program’s leadership and their master mentors, and I’m excited to discover new ways of thinking from current candidates as I help others to grow and achieve.