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Joe Moseley: Lego Master and STEM instructor
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Joe Moseley Lego Master and STEM instructor extraordinaire
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BY CARLTON REESE
One day he oversees the planning and building of such iconic structures as the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam; the next he’s leading an expedition to dig up dinosaur bones at a nearby excavation site. For Joe Moseley, it’s all in a day’s work but it never really seems that way to him.
As STEM Coordinator for The Cornerstone School, Moseley takes a somewhat unconventional approach to instilling in students a passion for learning what most children may find dull. Not simply relying on boilerplate materials to teach the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math, Moseley has carved out a clever niche in his methodology by virtue of his passion for Legos. That’s right – Legos, as in the popular building-blocks toy
Photo by Ralph Demilio
enjoyed by children all over the world.
In 2018, Moseley was selected Master Lego Educator of the United States, due mainly to his geography lessons in which he had students construct distinctive buildings with Legos as part of the learning process. In order to help his students learn the different regions of the U.S. they were to construct replicas of the Statue of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam and others.
“To quote one of the Lego educators: ‘Children learn best through play,’” says Moseley, who left careers in the restaurant business and in computer hardware and software development to join the Cornerstone team 20 years ago. “Even though play doesn’t get its due and respect in this world of education, us Lego educators know and feel there is a lot of learning going on during play.”
Moseley’s geography lesson plan that included Legos was the signature series leading to his award, which was given to him at Tufts University in Boston in front of 300 people from around the world. “It meant a lot to me to be recognized for what I feel like has been my life’s work.”
Not long after winning the Lego award, Moseley earned the
Mike Neden STEM Champion Award from the International STEM Educators Association. The award honors individuals “who have implemented STEM programs, provided professional development, encouraged others and have been instrumental in supporting integrated STEM education.” The honor also coincided with The Cornerstone School’s recognition with the ISEA STEM School of Excellence Award.
The awards are nice, but for Moseley, seeing the excitement on students’ faces as they learn various concepts has its own reward and is what drives his unparalleled enthusiasm. When he speaks of his STEM lessons, Moseley sounds like Tony Robbins giving a motivational speech and you want to immediately dive into his next project with him.
“A good STEM educator I believe has an eye on how to engage the kids,” Moseley said. “I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I do know how to get a kid fired up and excited.”
The use of Legos in geography lessons was a prime example of Moseley’s philosophy that STEM can be used in all phases of the classroom and he relies on his creative
thinking to fuse educational disciplines that seem miles apart.
“STEM is not a different room you go to all the time,” said Moseley. “STEM education should impact and support the learning in the classroom. So I go and ask those teachers what they are working on and learning about then I go back and see what kind of creative STEM activity I can do that will emphasize that particular lesson.”
Hence, the Lego structures for geogra-
Photo by Ralph Demilio
phy class. He has also used the Legos to help first graders in a unit on the human body as students were to construct parts of the skeleton. “Part of what they had to do was to know the most important bones of the body.” In essence, the students are having fun playing with Legos while at the same time gaining more than just rudimentary knowledge of the subject matter.
Moseley’s Lego acumen has garnered him individual awards and helped him lead Cornerstone to national recognition and could now lead him onto the television airwaves. His reputation has him being recruited as a potential participant on the Fox television reality competition program ‘Lego Masters.’ He recently went through the initial interview process with the show’s producer and will be submitting an audition tape for review.
If selected, Moseley would be teamed with his friend Mark McCombs, the Northeast Florida FIRST Lego League Director of Robotics in Jacksonville. The show, which films for five weeks in Atlanta starting the final week of February, pits two-person teams of Lego enthusiasts facing off in brick-building challenges.
If qualifying for the show, the pair would also be involved in robotics, a subject
that melds nicely with Legos and garners great interest from Moseley. For the last 13 years, Moseley has sponsored one of the biggest robotics tournaments in the state, “Robopalooza,” which The Cornerstone School conducts with Forest High School’s EMIT program.
“When I started doing robotics, I didn’t want just one or two teams – I’ve tried to blow it up and make it one of the fundamental things we are known for as a STEM education school,” Moseley said. “We have more robotics teams than any school in the county – the kids here are really jacked up to do this kind of activity.”
At the school, Moseley believes he has around a million Lego pieces that are of use to any age group.
“Easily half of those pieces are the types of Legos that go into the robotics programs and structures,” Moseley said. “The other types of products I have are the blocks you see little children playing with. So I have two focus areas applying to Legos: one is blocks that apply to kindergarten and lower age groups, then around fifth grade we start using the robotics.”
For the eighth graders recently, Lego blocks were used to create PSA videos as part of the technology curriculum. In the videos, which were to instruct proper hygiene during this era of COVID, stop-action techniques were incorporated with Lego figures and backdrops.
Moseley is quick to point out that the use of Legos is only a part of the STEM methodology he uses. Although deemed a Lego Master today, Moseley admits, “I can’t make the claim that as a child I played with Legos and just couldn’t let them go.” For him, Legos serves as one of many teaching aids.
He is taking aim at modern misconceptions about STEM curriculum where most attention seems to be on computer codes and high-tech concepts.
“Philosophically, when you talk about STEM education, you’re going to find people that think it’s just about computers and that high-end electronic technology,” Moseley said. “STEM is also hammers and shovels, what we used to call in my day, ‘shop class.’ My kids know how to hammer, why you use a screw and when you don’t use a screw – simple machine concepts that go with levers, that
you calculate mechanical advantage.”
For his third graders’ weather project, Moseley has the students build their own weather stations as opposed to purchasing them at a store. The first graders also received some hands-on training for an archeological dig which required the use of spades and brushes as opposed to computer programs.
With the help of a rancher friend who provided an entire cow skeleton, Moseley buried that skeleton at the school then proclaimed to the students, “I think I might have found a dinosaur!” Moseley and the students laid out a grid similar to an archeological dig site and all were given a spade and small paint brush.
“I made sure every kid found at least one bone and it was just an awesome project,” Moseley said. “We had a lot of math concepts, a lot of science; they learned what an archeologist does. I see STEM as a very wide thing. A lot of people classify STEM as just technology; I see it as much bigger.
“Any first grader loves dinosaurs. Whenever a kid has something they like, if you’re a good teacher you try to follow that thread.”
Moseley’s range as an instructor is staggering. In addition to his status as a Lego Master, Moseley is CAD (Computer-Aided Design) certified through Project Lead the Way, a nonprofit organization that develops STEM curricula for schools. He is also certified by Code.org, an organization dedicated to computer science education and conducts a program called Hour of Code.
Moseley uses these certifications outside of school hours. He recently incorporated the national program Girls Who Code, which offers instruction on how to code computer programs for any girl in Marion County whether a Cornerstone student or not. And it’s all free of charge.
“I have guests come in that are experts in their field: one from Lockheed Martin, one from the Fifth Judicial court system and that is the technology director and a man that does technology for an accounting firm,” Moseley said. “The girls come in and they get a free dinner and they also learn how to code.”
Moseley credits the opportunity for innovation and creative methodology to the flexibility offered by Cornerstone’s Head of School, Ingrid Wasserfall, who he says is a “visionary for education.” He never feels locked into a lesson plan that keeps him from exploring options that may go outside normal teaching methodology.
“My boss will give you the freedom to work on your craft as a teacher,” Moseley said. “What’s different is that I have the independence to create lessons and come up with new things. My daughter, when she was teaching fourth grade (in the public school system) she knew that she was supposed to be on page 89 in the math book on a certain date. We have flexibility. Such is the case with being able to hone your craft at a small, independent school like Cornerstone, which has one class for each grade kindergarten through middle school.
“We still have teachers that are (state) certified and we do standardized testing and all that. But if you’re a teacher who wants to reach kids in a better way, we’re the kind of place to go teach at.”
With his work in robotics, creative handson lesson plans and the incorporation of Legos in his teaching, Moseley has been able to achieve his goal of reaching kids in significant and sometimes unorthodox ways. For Moseley and Cornerstone, it’s a perfect fit.
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