In search of what to do next after wrapping up a two year Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship in Washington, DC, I decided to shift my focus from being in the classroom to supporting educators in hundreds of classrooms. While I still absolutely love teaching students directly and the relationships one can build as their teacher and through coaching sports (volleyball and softball), more than a decade later on this journey of supporting educators, my soul is fed by the teachers who have built and changed their own STEM identities in significant ways over the years. You can even hear some of them (and me) share their STEMAZing Stories in their own words. Whether the morale boost and STEM identity building from a professional development workshop or multi-day institute or full school year teacher leadership program, the impacts on hundreds of educators and therefore thousands of students continues to ripple across the globe.

Starting and building The STEMAZing Project at the Pima County School Superintendent's Office from 2013 to 2022 put me in the role of "intraprenuer" - essentially building a business with the confines of another organization. Through all of that work, stemazing.org became a place to house the resources and work being developed and identified by myself and the growing STEMAZing Teacher Leader Corps. For the last two and a half years with the Waters Center for Systems Thinking, I shifted my focus to incorporating systems thinking into my work, calling it STEMAZing Systems Thinking, and supporting STEM educators and other professionals to do the same. Again, the website expanded with new resources developed in collaboration with so many educators taking advantage of our professional learning opportunities.

Now, as braided STEM and a shift in the website from stemazing.org to braidedstem.org, the work of braiding systems thinking, STEM instruction, and teacher leadership will continue and the resource collection will continue to grow. Our newest Northern Arizona University STEM Challenge, Parkitects - a collaboration with Anna Heyer, is the first resource to be branded with braided STEM and there will be many more to come. Braiding has been a fascination of mine since childhood with simple braids of embroidery floss and bailing twine to French braiding my hair. I have been fascinated by the patterns in Japanese kumihimo braiding, inspired by Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and resonate with the braided river model of STEM workforce development presented by Dr. Kathy Gardner-Vandy and her collaborators. As I considered an identity shift for my work, braided STEM just made sense. I truly believe we are better (and stronger) together like braids. I also see how science, technology, engineering, mathematics, systems thinking, social studies, reading, writing, and all the other things, make so much more sense (and are stronger) when they are also braided together. I am looking forward to all of the new strands of relationships, knowledge, and ways of doings which will braid together through my work and contribute to the constructive disruption I will to continue to make with others to the world around us!