Scott Le Duc

My name is Scott Le Duc. I am an autodidact. I have been a learner all of my life. I am employed as a teacher. So, I am in the right profession.

I am a National Board Certified educator currently working at Capital High School, teaching International Baccalaureate (IB) and Career and Technical Education (CTE) classes focusing on arts and technology instruction, specifically music, film, and game design. I have worked as an adjunct faculty at Lesley University, City University of Seattle, St. Martin’s University, and Wuhan University of Technology in Hubei Province, China.

What Makes Me Tick

Imagine three concentric circles.

At the center of everything I do is language and music; writing, composing, and performing. That’s where I’m most alive, most myself. It’s not a hobby or a side pursuit; it’s the core.

The next circle out is a love of learning. Specifically, learning how things work beneath the surface. The invisible systems, mechanics, and principles that drive outcomes. What makes a story land? How do top performers make great work look effortless? How did Toyota build continuous improvement into its DNA? I’m drawn to the WHY and HOW behind the WHAT.

The outermost circle is where my curiosity becomes action. I bring these frameworks into the classroom, helping students understand not just craft but the systems beneath it. Preparing them for a world of work changing faster than any curriculum can track. And I carry it into my own creative practice, where music becomes a living laboratory for everything I’m learning.

Threaded through all of it is what I call AI³: Authentic Intelligence, the lived knowledge you can call up in a moment; Artificial Intelligence, the tools that extend what humans can do; and Amplified Intelligence, what emerges when the two merge. The goal isn’t augmentation for its own sake. It’s to cultivate what Brian Eno calls “Scenius,” or collective genius, and to tell stories to increase empathy and understanding in the world.

This is the kind of thinking that wakes me up at 3:59 a.m.

Short Educational Biography

I’ve taught creative and technical arts for over 30 years. I support students of all abilities to develop their creative voice and educational agency in a co-authored classroom learning community. I help students engage in filmmaking, game design, songwriting, and audio production while encouraging iterative, productive workflows. I am a founding member of the Washington State-based non-profit Advanced Media Entertainment Society (AMES.team), which helps build community between high school students and professional storytellers in the media arts.

Teaching Philosophy – (slightly snarky version)

I help students develop context-based learning ∫grounded in student agency. What? I help students focus on the end in mind. What? Think problem-based learning. What? Try this … ask yourself, ‘what problem(s) are we trying to solve?’ Start with that, then build the learning experience. With this in mind, co-author the learning experience with students and develop what Brian Eno calls a ‘Scenius’ or learning community. This is what I do.

Teacher Training Process

I help teachers support students in finding their creative voice and agency through film, music, and game design, building a collective genius in a co-authored learning community. This happens through project-based learning (PBL) grounded in brain research, weaving together frameworks including:

  • Understanding by Design (UBD) — backward-planning from learning goals
  • Universal Design for Learning (UDL) — flexible pathways for all learners
  • Total Quality Learning (TQL) — continuous improvement in the classroom
  • Getting Things Done (GTD) — personal productivity and workflow management
  • Scrum (with Trello) — small team collaboration and project management
  • Personal/Professional Learning Networks (PLN) — building community beyond the classroom

Alongside these frameworks, students develop storytelling skills through arts integration, mind mapping, storyboarding, pitching ideas, and creativity-on-demand techniques like time constraints that force focus and support innovation.

M.K. Gandhi quotes I try to live by…

  • “My life is my message.”

Connections

5 thoughts on “Scott Le Duc”

  1. Sitting in your WITEA presentation and thank you for it. I have been looking for examples of good presentations so this super helpful. Do you have a resource that has a bulleted boring slideset reformatted into a slideset folllowing the SUCCES criteria? Thank you much for your work!

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  2. I was at your presentations that do not suck session in Wenatchee at the WITEA conference in March. I love!!!! the who am I student example you showed and am going to have my AVID students do that lessson. Do you have a lesson plan or student examples you could share for that amazing project?

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