Cal Jordan Powers
WEAVER • WONDERER • WORDSMITH
Educator • Researcher • Leader • Advocate • Organizer
Innovation & EdTech Portfolio
Cal has repeatedly woven technology and innovations throughout diverse teaching, educational administration, and project management roles. Cal has taught in person as well as remotely both through Zoom and virtual reality, using various technologies to guide learners across six continents from kindergarteners to entrepreneurs to retirees. Cal has extensive experience developing online curricula, multimedia activities, and innovative tools to enrich education and enact change.
Cal’s Innovation Work
Through Professionall
Founder of
Professionall, Public Benefit Corporation
2020–Present • Remote
As a public benefit corporation, the specific purpose of Professionall is to advocate for the wellbeing of all educators in the world, to reduce teacher burnout and attrition, and to inspire and nourish the future generations of educational leaders. To accomplish this mission, Cal is creating innovations within the education profession to move educational professional development into its next era by integrating technology for the benefit of all educators.
Social Professional Learning
The ultimate goal for Professionall is to build a social learning management platform to centralize professional development the entire education profession. Not only will this platform be innovating on best practices, but it will also allow for other educators’ innovative contributions to have a more effective and longer lasting impact on the profession.
Entertaining Professional Education
To make professional development entertaining and accessible in diverse formats, Cal creates entertaining educational content through the Pathways Podcast, on social media, on our blog, through videos, and with comics to diversify the ways in which educators engage in professional development, making teacher-focused content that is easy to digest.
Cal’s Innovation Work
Before Professionall
While teaching at Immerse, Cal nurtured adult learners of English from dozens of countries across six continents to develop communicative proficiency for purposes including professional development, immigration, socialization, and public transactions. Cal led classes and community events using a virtual reality headset or computer application to join virtual spaces that immersive students in natural environments to contextualize learning while mimicking real-life competencies.
at Immerse, Virtual Reality Language Learning
Exploring Educational Technology
Virtual Reality Teacher of
English as a Second Language
As the first-hire in the English program, Cal supported the launch of the program by assisting in developing curricula and project managing program administrative systems. Cal created management innovations to support administration, such as building a scheduling tool to simplify assigning teachers to time slots, creating an automated bug reporting system to streamline the technical repairs to the software, and creating quick-access dashboards to organize company resources.
2023–2025 • Remote
Administrative Innovations
at Teacher’s Discovery
Curriculum Manager & Creative Director
2021–2022 • Remote
As Curriculum Developer, Cal produced two online Spanish textbooks of comprehensible-input stories to foster communicative proficiency for K-5th grade novice learners. Outside the responsibilities of this role, Cal architected innovations to improve educational content, project tracking, and program management.
Program Management Innovations
For the curricula, Cal contributed elements such as story videos, native-speaker interview series, pre-launch product commercials, and materials tailored to each sub-market. Cal collaborated with company partners to generate supplemental video series that both integrated the elementary curricula, but also mimicked the Voces style. Conducted in Spanish, Cal designed and led a new interview series with seven native-speaking children from Argentina, Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela across the age range of the target audience of the textbooks, answering questions related to each unit.
Outside the curricula, Cal made further efforts to innovate within the company’s content management processes, designing project tracker templates, expanding program marketing strategies, and training other managers on these new management processes. Cal innovated the company’s program management, such as developing several new program management protocols, leading several PD workshops, aligning messaging with email templates, expanding sales leads with new marketing funnels, building scaffolding to support the company's rapid growth, and supporting supervisors in task delegation.
Curricular Innovations
DEI Audit & Advocacy Work
Cal pioneered innovation in the company’s DEI efforts, architecting a DEI Audit of the company’s catalogue of content to identify and replace problematic stereotypes with authentic diversity, integrated DEI and social emotional learning into the curricula, and trained other curriculum managers with custom resources to audit each language program’s textbooks. Through this work, Cal was able to feature engaging stories that subtly teach learners about diverse peoples and cultures. For example, Cal created a story about young school children using math to build an entrance ramp to the school for a young wheelchair user in their class, or the story of Marcel el Murciélago, a bat who––like real bats––is colorblind, but finds magical glasses that let him see color. Story themes include being prepared for class, sharing with others, asking for help, making friends, curiosity of other cultures, responsibility with pets, expressing emotions, following directions, and being a good sport.
Researcher & Presenter
“Understanding Teacher Burnout During a Global Pandemic”
2022 • IGI Global
This presentation began as a class project for Cal’s graduate course in mobile-assisted language learning which Cal then adapted for a WLE teacher education conference. Technology is becoming a prominent tool in the average language classroom, but educators often have to create their own materials using emerging tools. The mobile app ARIS creates adaptable adventure-style games that increase motivation and can scaffold upon in-class curriculum while enticing students to continue their learning outside of the classroom.
Researcher & Author
This study analyzed the coping strategies of 165 WLE educators to reduce the symptoms of teacher burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter began as several graduate course projects that Cal adapted into a chapter that was published within a teacher education textbook focusing on adapting to online teaching contexts. These data indicate that teacher burnout should be a priority concern for both WLE teachers and administrators alike to prevent any further damage to our education systems.
“Midnight in Monterey: A Geolocated Game For Adventurous French Learners”
2020 • ACTFL
French Teaching Assistant & Tutor
2019-2021 • MIIS
Cal worked in the French department remotely teaching graduate courses through Zoom and Canvas on global francophone cultures, co-constructing graduate-level course curricula for courses on Contemporary Quebec and Global Relations in the MENA Region. Cal integrated digital innovations and social emotional learning strategies into course activities to build community during the COVID lockdown. As the department tutor, Cal met one-on-one with students to develop proficiency, practice communicability, and refine professional language goals, and even substituted for French Prof. Jason Martel with less than 24-hour notice.
Private French Tutor
2020-2023 • Remote
Cal worked privately as a virtual tutor to adult learners of French, meeting with diverse learners from university students to global travelers to international businesspersons to curious retirees. Cal worked one-on-one with clients to identify language goals, practice communicability, and develop proficiency for purposes including travel, socialization, and professional development. Cal developed custom digital activities to develop students’ abilities and grasp of French grammar and culture using technology to explore the globe, like the “Randonnée en Normandie: Pronoms” activity to practice object pronouns using personal photos and stories of Cal’s hike with friends.
Graduate School Work
Cal’s Responsibilities as Chair
As Co-Chair, Cal had the responsibilities of building the organizing team, writing and disseminated the Call for Proposals, spearheading the proposal rating and inter-rater agreement processes, finding and negotiating contracts with keynote speakers, meeting with the Faculty Advisor and seeking feedback from program faculty, drafting team meeting agendas, setting up the registration processes and pricing, planning and leading the technical dress rehearsal, and building the website.
While studying at MIIS, Cal volunteered as Co-Chair for SOWLE 2020, the Symposium on World Language Education, a virtual student-led professional development conference for educators working in WLE.
Co-Chair of the Virtual Conference
2020 Symposium on World Language Education
2020 • Remote
From FLEDS to SOWLE, Looking Forward
Prior to 2020, the in-person conference was called the Foreign Language Education Symposium, or FLEDS and did not have an official or unique logo. While respecting tradition, Cal and Grace saw the need to look forward, and with the blessing of faculty, they changed the outdated term ‘foreign language,’ updated the logo, and organized the first virtual conference at MIIS. After, Cal organized the transfer of resources to the next generation of co-chairs by starting a Transfer of Power Doc.
After exploring EdTech in an undergraduate honors thesis, Cal decided to pursue technology in language education further throughout all projects and courses in graduate school. Taught by EdTech researcher Dr. Thor Sawin, Cal took a course in Mobile-Assisted Language Learning, mastering the concepts of affordances, teaching in virtual reality, and not just integrating but alchemizing education using modern technology.
Graduate School Work
Experience Teaching Abroad
Through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF), Cal worked in Laon, France, a historic site, teaching at both a high school (Lycée Pierre Méchain) and a middle school (Collège Charlemagne), coaching groups of novice learners of English ages 10-18 with technology-enhanced activities to improve language production, speaking skills, and cultural awareness. Cal developed and administered technology-enhanced activities and games to improve language production, speaking skills, and cultural awareness, advising teachers in creating similar innovations. Cal initiated the Assistant Transition Handbook to facilitate onboarding for successors.
English Language Teaching Assistant
2018–2019 • Laon, France
Honors Thesis
As a member of the Honors College at UNT and seeking to make the most of faculty expertise to prepare for graduate school, Cal volunteered to complete an honors thesis. While mentoring with Dr. Lawrence Williams, Cal researched the beliefs and attitudes of university students toward the value of using language learning apps like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone as support to their in-class learning. This thesis project began Cal’s love for researching educational technology as well as survey-driven research to voice the opinions of a community for their own benefit.
2017-2018 • UNT
Researcher & Author
Studying EdTech & MALL
Cal’s Portfolios
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