Sean Van Aacken has always been driven to help others succeed. Since his early days at McDonald’s, to his current role as a leading expert at UCLA Extension on education strategy, Van Aacken has placed an emphasis on building relationships and preparing people – students and instructors – on how to navigate an ever-evolving professional landscape.

“I try to marry my business expertise and education experience in order to train future generations of students, and the instructors teaching them,” he said.

His journey began at age 15 with a typical high school job – flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Van Aacken, though, stayed with the company for 15 years, specializing in worker training and development. He created programs and instruction for store employees on how to use technology in day-to-day operations, as many stores integrated computers and other innovations.

Van Aacken earned a bachelor’s degree in international business and a master’s in business education. He became an expert in Career and Technical Education (CTE), a school program combining academics with hands-on, job specific skills to prepare students for any number of outcomes, including college. He now has a doctorate in career and technical education leadership.

Van Aacken currently works for REAL Journey Academies as director of college and career readiness. He started his role at UCLA Extension in 2023, helming various teacher training initiatives, many dealing specifically with the modern classroom and new technologies.

His first project for UCLA Extension was to create a professional development series for Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. They met for 10 consecutive Saturdays. About 100 teachers attended, and the classes were received positively, paving the way for a long-term partnership between Van Aacken and UCLA Extension. Now, he is developing an artificial intelligence in education certificate while also teaching the Integrating Technology into the Curriculum for CTE course. Making a difference in the classroom motivates him each day.

“What keeps me in the education space, especially since I’ve moved more into administration, is providing more opportunities to K-12 students,” he said. “I typically work with some of our most vulnerable and at-risk students, and I really like providing more opportunities for them. That’s why I do what I do.”

Below, he talks with UCLA Extension Newsroom about important topics facing students and teachers today:

Screens, and specifically phones, have changed the landscape of education. Attention spans are a lot shorter. The good news is that both governments and school districts have begun to eliminate phones from the classroom.

But the reality is, there are screens and Instagram and Snapchat and all these different social media platforms. Teachers must be willing to adapt and be a little bit more strategic in terms of building their lesson plans to be more bite-sized while being more intentional and strategically sound in what they’re trying to achieve.

In addition, we need teachers to help students feel comfortable stepping away from technology. That can be challenging, especially in our modern age where we use technology for a lot more of our day-to-day work. But there is a way to teach with an eye toward how to be professional with technology.

I’m on a little bit on an island regarding this topic. I'm not concerned about AI coming to your classrooms. We've had AI for a long time. It was just called Google. Google is AI at its finest.

Now we have more generative platforms such as ChatGPT, which is something similar that works more efficiently – in terms of finding information. Citation matters. When I was going through school everyone tried to copy Wikipedia and call it their own. So we need to teach the concepts of research first, before we jump into ChatGPT.

I remember when I learned statistics, I learned how to calculate a standard deviation by hand first. And then my professor said, ‘By the way, you can do this in a couple steps with Excel.’ But he had us learn the concept first before using Excel. It's important to learn how to research first before we use ChatGPT. Then we can check our sources and make sure that the information being gathered is correct.

As a teacher, I have always allowed open notes, open books, open lectures. You can use whatever resources you want. But for me, I want to teach the teachers how to assess the skill and the outcome. Students can use any piece of information they want. If you aren’t able to apply the concepts it is difficult to say someone really knows a concept.

AI is now a resource. It is not going away. So how do we embrace this? How do we teach it ethically to be used in all aspects of education? When I teach instructors about using ChatGPT in the classroom, I emphasize project-based learning versus rote memorization. If we're just wanting to regurgitate, yes, ChatGPT can take over. I’m all about competency-based education and project-based learning. Because you can use ChatGPT all day long, but can you explain how and why you applied it to your strategy and answer?

I think we're seeing more vulnerability, and a need for more social-emotional learning to combat things like burnout. Our students have so much information at their fingertips. Our instructors are asked to do the impossible every single day.

We need to help strike a balance for students between school and their home lives. There's just so many more demands than what I remember when I went to school. There's more spotlight on what they’re doing. Bullying doesn't just happen in school anymore. It happens everywhere because of social media.

Teachers are being asked to navigate the social and emotional wellbeing of their students in ways they've never had to before, and that is challenging. What does self-care really look like? There's more burnout. We're always connected to our devices – teachers and students. So, we're always ‘on.’ How do we balance school, life and professional? Let’s teach each other at a younger age how to find that balance without experiencing burnout. We need to partner with mental health professionals and instructors will be asked to start teaching some social-emotional lessons.

At UCLA Extension we are having a lot of conversations about how we bring groups together to intentionally tackle these questions.