RYAN CASHMAN comes from a family of teachers. His father taught high school social studies, and many of his cousins teach high school. He himself started teaching in the classroom on the community college level for 4 years, until he transitioned into an instructional design and learning and development role for multiple technology companies. While in graduate school, studying mass media, he was a graduate assistant at Illinois State University's basic public speaking course, which he was responsible for not only teaching this course, but improving its materials, activities, and assessments. His success in that area granted him the responsibility to train other teachers on pedagogical best practices and classroom management. He hopes his mission-driven education endeavors inspires his 1-year-old son so that he may one day also want to gravitate to this area. He has worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco. He is currently the L&D leader at Quad which is a digital marketing agency. When not teaching or training, you can catch him and his wife performing improv and sketch comedy in Chicago.