Jon Corippo is the Executive Director of CUE, past Innovation Officer, and was the Chief Instigator of the CUE Rock Star Teacher Camps for CUE. He began his teaching career in Clovis Unified and has had multiple positions as a teacher, administrator, trainer of teachers, and ran a weekly TV show.

Jon has received many awards for his dedication to bringing technology and joy to teaching and learning. He co-authored EduProtocols and has a new book coming out soon. There is so much to share about Jon so I’m excited to share his story here. Enjoy!
 
What it was like for you as a student/learner
I grew up in Paso Robles, CA where they went from 3 wineries to 500 since I’ve lived there. I was in the class of 1969 in kindergarten and was a July 1st baby. I would say that some of the earliest memories of school for me were that I was the only kid that couldn’t tie his shoes. Some other memories of 1st and 2nd grade were that I never got blue stars and only got red. School kind of went like that all the way through for me. My freshman and sophomore yearbooks had no signatures. That was a school for me. Somewhere around my junior year, I started not caring what other people thought of me from what I heard through Danny Elfman’s song lyrics.” No matter what I do they won’t like me anyway”, so I can do whatever I want. That was the big paradigm shift for me. I did just enough with a 2.9 GPA to get me into football and played in college. In my junior year in college, I got into an advertising class that was hands-on where we were given a product and had to come up with a way to market it through multiple venues. That’s when my GPA shot up to a 4.0.
Jon Corippo – A New Way to Kick off PBL and 1:1 Smart Start
I love Michael Fullan’s quote “We are overly-dependent on corporately produced lesson plans.” If I went up to 100 teachers and said I was burning your teacher’s edition, what would you do?” They would be strapped. I made it a point to be able to teach K-11 Language Arts without a text. I understand Latin roots, how to teach parts of speech, how to connect those to technology and social media, and how to do things in a class that doesn’t have a bell curve. My school passion is to seek to undo what was done to me.
We need to remember that education is a People Business first.
Your journey to becoming an educator
I became a graduate assistant football coach. I learned a lot about coaching and subtleties with football along with idiosyncracies about teaching and learning.  Let’s talk about the end of year assessments. As a division 1 football coach, you cannot practice until August 5th and your first game is August 25th and it’s going to be on ESPN. You have 30 days to be ready. It is not about the first game. Everyone gets better by the second game and even better the third game. It’s a constant improvement cycle.

I actually went out and did some advertising for a few years and I was helping my wife out. She taught High School history and was doing a summer class. I love history and was giving her some ideas. I found it fun. I was between jobs and decided to become a teacher. My goal was to be a teacher that made the class effective and simpler, not to make the class smaller. My goal was different, so my results were different.
Opening Minarets High School
After teaching in Clovis Unified for 11 years, I got to open Minarets High School in Chawanakee Unified School District in ONeals, CA with Mike Ahoff. That district never had a high school. Mike had 20 years of experience at a high school with my K-8 ideas and mind-melded them. The stats in California were that 70% will not attempt college. If high school is designed for 30% of our kids, then we are wasting a lot of people’s time.