As we begin a new school year across Arizona, ABC15 is once again profiling teachers across the Valley and will follow up throughout the year to listen and see how it's all going.
First up is Mr. Andrew Shapiro from Kyrene Middle School in Tempe, who teaches audio engineering and social studies to sixth graders. He is using things like Minecraft, AI and music to help his students create new connections to the old world, to each other, and most importantly, to themselves.
"This is no classroom. This is a time machine."
That's one of the first lines you'll hear when you watch the trailer for Mr. Shapiro's Individuals and Societies course.
Yes, we did say trailer.
It's not every day you meet a teacher who has an actual trailer to preview what his course is about; then again, it's not every day you meet a teacher like Mr. Shapiro.
"That they belong," says Mr. Shapiro, about what his number one goal is for students. Fostering that sense of togetherness among his students is one of his core values.
Mr. Shapiro has taught in his Kyrene classroom for the past 17 years, which he affectionately refers to as "The Shapiro Republic."
"It's not a dictatorship!" he insisted recently to ABC15's Nick Ciletti. "And when it is, it is a benevolent dictatorship...It's not my room. It's their room and we decide what the rules are, what makes this room best, together. We make those commitments together. We challenge each other, and they are part of something."
For Mr. Shapiro, it's all about meeting his students where they are, using 2025 tools to help them learn about the world before them.
On the day we stopped by, he was helping students create AI characters to help them navigate their experience as "time travelers" through history.
Mr. Shapiro even wrote a song about the Roman Empire and created music with the help of AI that's available on Spotify. It's a surprising link to a past time - and a past life - for Mr. Shapiro; he was in a rock band in his 20s - and even had the hair to prove it!
"I don't know if they think it's cool or corny," says Mr. Shapiro. "Maybe a combination of both? I'm okay with all of that! As long as they want to come to my class. I want to be the class they don't want to miss....I want to make sure, when the year ends, that they feel they were part of something. Not only did they learn something about history, about themselves, but they are also ready to move on to the next chapter, that they made connections, that they walked some bridges they didn't know they would walk, and that they learn more about themselves."
