Meet the Teachers
Our experienced faculty have the subject-specialist knowledge needed to guide our students on their educational journey. Elmwood’s faculty draws on best practices unique to all girls’ education as they encourage students to be open-minded and reflective life-long learners.
Mr. Matt Perreault
Infinite Loop
“I'm really passionate and excited about what we can do as a whole—I try to instill that in my students.”
As a government web application developer, Matt Perreault seemingly had a programmer's dream job. Good pay, reasonable hours, great benefits and interesting, challenging work. There was one catch though—hours of staring into a computer screen, with few opportunities for social interaction. Perreault knew he had to end that loop.
A graduate of Queen's University with degrees in both Computer Science and Education, teaching was actually Perreault's first career aspiration. However, with student loans to pay off, he took the government job in order to make ends meet, with the long view of eventually getting into education.
“I always wanted to get out and have that one-on-one connection with students that my government job was lacking,” said Perreault.
So when his first opportunity to teach arose at The Bilingual European School in Milan, Perreault didn't even blink. He and his wife, Nathalie, a teacher herself, packed their bags and bid “Arrivederci,” at least temporarily, to Canada.
“Teaching is the perfect job for me because it has the social aspect, it has interaction, you get to inspire young learners—and you get to teach them cool geeky things,” Perreault, with a playful grin, states. “It's really the perfect job.”
Video description: Junior School students demonstrate how they built Crab Robots using Lego Mindstorm kits.
While in Milan, Perreault heard about Elmwood from a colleague who previously taught at the Ottawa all-girls' private school and recommended it to him—primarily because of its commitment to the International Baccalaureate (IB). Upon returning to Ottawa, Perreault applied for a Technology Teacher position at Elmwood and now integrates technology into the Junior and Middle School programmes, teaching students from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 8 and collaborating with colleagues to make technology blend into the background.
“It's important to integrate technology into each Unit of Inquiry so students see what they're learning is useful to them every day...The IB programme is something I really believe in, especially in the Junior School with the Primary Years Programme. I was excited to work in an environment that really values that.”
While Perreault may have the perceived benefit of offering a programme with neat things like computers and robots, he does not see technology as an end in itself. “The end product when you integrate technology with something is always 200% better than if you're just learning a piece of technology for its own sake,” Perreault interjects.
“When it has a purpose behind it, when students see what they're doing in technology helps them learn and communicate what they've learned in other classes, the quality and buy-in from them is so much better—it's much more motivating,” Perreault explains. “The kids don't ask, ‘Why are we doing this?’ They see—they understand why they're doing it because it fits right into their learning elsewhere in school.”
One example Perreault is particularly fond of is the Grade 4 Mythology unit—students wrote myths in Language class, featuring their own mythical creatures. In Technology class, they brought those creatures to life with Photoshop; often they would combine their own faces with different animals.
“For example, we had a dog with lots of different eyes that could breathe fire—the kids had whole stories to go with them. I myself was a cute polar bear—I put my head on there with some bird wings,” laughingly shared Perreault.
The opportunity to inspire young learners is not lost upon Perreault. “I'm really passionate and excited about what we can do as a whole—I try to instill that in my students,” he states. “There are so many amazing things you can do with computers and so many opportunities that technology opens.”
“When I start a unit by showing them what the end product is—they get excited to learn; to do as much as they can to achieve that result. But it's a cyclical thing—seeing other students get excited as I am inspires me further—it's a feedback loop that never stops.”
In programming circles, the term “infinite loop” is a sequence of instructions that causes a computer program to never end, usually an unintended by-product of a programming error. Once in a while though, the programmer actually wants the program to continue indefinitely.
Such is the case with Matt Perreault and his students at Elmwood School.
Infinite loop. End program.
Elmwood Teacher Profiles
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