The Harvard EdCast: Recent Episodes
Harvard Graduate School of Education
In the complex world of education, the Harvard EdCast keeps the focus simple: what makes a difference for learners, educators, parents, and our communities. The EdCast is a weekly podcast about the ideas that shape education, from early learning through college and career. We talk to teachers, researchers, policymakers, and leaders of schools and systems in the US and around the world — looking for positive approaches to the challenges and inequities in education. Through authentic conversation, we work to lower the barriers of education’s complexities so that everyone can understand.
The Harvard EdCast is produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and hosted by Jill Anderson. The opinions expressed are those of the guest alone, and not the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
00:00 – Rethinking the “Best Years” Narrative
01:30 – Are Students in Crisis—or in Transition?
03:00 – What the Data Really Says
05:00 – Loneliness as a Normal Developmental Experience
07:00 – The Expectation Gap
09:00 – When Language Gets Complicated
11:30 – The Institutional Dilemma
13:30 – Meeting Students Where They Are
15:00 – The W-Curve Explained
17:30 – Why the W-Curve Matters
19:00 – Beyond the Traditional Student
20:30 – Building Connection in Online Learning
22:00 – From Theory to Practice
23:30 – The Power of “Micro-Mentorship”
25:00 – Supporting Students Through Big Decisions
26:00 – Advice for Parents
27:00 – Final Takeaways
00:00The case for rethinking how we challenge advanced math students
00:49Why focus on high-performing students during a time of learning recovery
01:09The tradeoff: prioritizing struggling students vs. supporting advanced learners
02:51Inside the classroom: the real challenge of differentiation
03:17Why accelerating students can make teaching more difficult
05:21The downside of treating math like a race
06:37A better approach: depth over speed
07:44When accelerationdoesmake sense (and for whom)
10:43What “math enrichment” really means
11:07Why worksheets and puzzles aren’t enough
12:13Simple questions that push deeper thinking
13:39What to do with early finishers
15:06Practical strategies teachers can use right away
16:19Why grades 3–5 is a key turning point
19:13Why this issue looks different in high school
20:03The reality of teaching accelerated students
21:31How common is deep, discussion-based math teaching?
00:00 Why families fixate on elite colleges—and the rise of the “panicking class”
01:15 How rankings shape decisions (and why they mislead)
03:10 The truth about differences between top-ranked schools
04:45 Why choosing a college feels so confusing
06:15 How test-optional, early decision, and the Common App changed everything
08:20 Inside the “black box” of holistic admissions
10:05 Who makes up the “panicking class”
11:40 Reality check: most colleges accept most students
13:00 Prestige pressure as a parenting culture problem
14:30 What “fit” really means—and where to start
16:00 When prestige leads to the wrong choice
17:10 How to decide after admissions disappointment
18:40 What should change in college admissions
20:10 Will parent attitudes shift in the future?
21:30 Closing thoughts
0:25 — Why reading scores still struggle
2:15 — Rise of the science of reading
5:00 — Aligning leadership to drive reform
7:30 — Consistency and long-term commitment
10:00 — Implementation matters more than policy
12:30 — Where literacy efforts break down
14:30 — What teachers need to do
17:00 — From percentages to individual students
19:00 — Why some states lose momentum.
20:30 — “Mays vs. shalls” in policy
22:00 — How long it takes to see results
23:30 — Third-grade retention
25:00 — Why early intervention matters most
26:01 — Mississippi Marathon / Closing thoughts
0:00 — Introduction
1:05 — The three types of sex education most people receive
3:20 — What comprehensive sexuality education actually means
5:10 — Why consent alone isn't enough
7:00 — Why sexuality education shouldn't be siloed in health class
9:20 — Why conversations about sexuality should start early
11:30 — Teaching body awareness and safety
13:30 — Why kids ask questions about where babies come from
15:20 — The biggest challenges educators face today
17:30 — Why teachers often fear administrative backlash
19:00 — How school leaders can move forward despite resistance
21:00 — What progress would look like in 10 years.
22:30 — Closing thoughts
Harvard Graduate School of Education ProfessorKaren Brennan sees classrooms as magical spaces when we begin with curiosity, not just content.
“When I think about design process, from the initial moments of young people working on projects, all the way to the end where they've gone through the highs, the lows, the emotional vicissitudes of bringing their ideas into the world, the messy middle through to the end, there is a role for questions in every moment,” she says. “Start with questions, for me, is really about an attitude of leading with student interests.”
Drawing on a yearlong study of 25 teachers across elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, Brennan describes how powerful learning begins by asking genuine questions, or really questions teachers don’t already know the answers to. She is the co-author ofStarting with Questions: The Classroom as Design Studio, which explores what happens when educators take students’ ideas seriously.
Rather than treating questions as a closing ritual at the end of a lesson, Brennan argues for an orientation shift: start with what learners are thinking about, what they care about, and what feels hard or exciting to them. Grounded in traditions of progressive education, this approach does not reject content knowledge. Instead, it reframes the role of teachers as expert guides, offering domain expertise, metacognitive scaffolding, affirmation, and structure within a classroom culture that values intellectual humility.
Brennan comes to the classroom from a design studio background, a space that embraces tinkering and where self-directed learning happens in community. In studio-based environments, students pursue projects that matter to them while learning alongside peers and with the support of teachers. Self-direction, she explains, is not scriptless chaos but more structured, scaffolded, and deeply relational.
That mindset also shapes her optimism about artificial intelligence. Brennan argues that AI is not about offloading thinking, but about expanding what learners can imagine and build. “I feel like we don’t give learners enough credit,” she says. “When there’s all this handwringing around AI stealing assignments, maybe we were asking students to do things that weren’t that important to begin with. If AI can do it, maybe we need to be looking for new opportunities for interestingness for learners.
In this episode, Brennan pushes beyond traditional classroom approaches toward a powerful idea: how classrooms become transformative when we make space for students’ questions and trust their capacity to pursue them.
When Doug Larkin and Suzanne Poole Patzelt set out to study the relationship between teacher pay and retention, what they found surprised them.
“Without fail, no matter what school we went to, what state we were in, that was always the number one response,” Poole Patzelt says. “We did nothing to put that at the top. That was far and beyond the number one reason why teachers stayed was because of who they were working with.”
She adds, “We are relational organisms. We rely on relationships and other people.”
Pay, Larkin explains, mattered but differently than we often assume. Teachers generally felt their compensation was adequate. What didn’t hold up was the idea that increasing pay would directly increase effort or retention. “It doesn’t fit that behavioral logic,” he says. “If we pay teachers 10% more, they’re going to work 10% harder. That’s not what was happening here at all.” Instead, what consistently surfaced were collegial cultures where teachers felt supported rather than scrutinized.
In their new book, The Reasons Teachers Stay, they draw on a six-year longitudinal study of US schools, districts, and communities with high rates of teacher retention. In the districts they studied — spanning rural, suburban, and urban communities — a defining feature was a “real lack of teacher isolation.” Teachers shared resources. They kept doors open. Administrators fostered trust. Poole Patzelt notes that many of the top retention factors were intertwined: supportive leadership strengthened teacher relationships, and those relationships reinforced a broader culture of care.
Each district operated within its own cultural and political context. Still, the strongest schools resembled what Larkin calls a “healthy ecosystem for teachers,” where induction went beyond onboarding and new teachers were not left in “sink or swim” environments.
To make sense of these dynamics, Larkin introduces the “teacher embeddedness” framework, a way of understanding retention not as a single decision, but as the accumulation of many small connections. He shares a metaphor from elementary schools where principals are duct-taped to a wall as part of a reading challenge. One strip of tape does nothing. But layer enough pieces together, and they hold someone in place. “Each little thing you can identify,” he explains, “is another piece of tape that holds that teacher in place.”
In this episode, they introduce the “teacher embeddedness” framework and gain better insight in why understanding what keeps teachers in the job might be the biggest shift a district can make.
Disagreement is a part of everyday life, yet most of us avoid it whenever possible. Harvard Kennedy School Professor Julia Minson knows where and why our conversations often go wrong and how we can learn to disagree better.
Minson, whose research focuses on how people engage with opposing viewpoints, says fear drives avoidance. “Most of these conversations are a pleasant surprise, but people don't expect that. And so they just continue going around with the worst-case scenario in their heads, instead of exploring the reality that's out there,” she says. People worry that disagreements will be unpleasant, fruitless, or that the other person’s perspective will be shocking or even “crazy.” Research shows these assumptions are often wrong: when we actually engage, opposing views are usually more reasonable, moderate, and defensible than expected.
The problem isn’t only avoidance. Many conversations fail because participants focus on persuasion, treating arguments like battles to be won. Minson says that shifting the goal from winning to understanding changes the dynamic entirely, turning disagreement into an opportunity to learn rather than a contest to conquer.
To help people navigate challenging conversations, Minson and her colleagues developed a practical toolkit called conversational receptiveness, or the framework they call HEAR. Minson emphasizes that these skills take practice. Starting with low-stakes conflicts, like deciding when to set an alarm at home, helps build habits that carry into more emotionally charged conversations at work or in classrooms. “I really think that practicing on small, daily disagreements makes you more able to come up with the words when it's a big, important one and you're really frazzled,” she says.
In this episode, the Harvard EdCast explores how to disagree better, practical steps for transforming conversations, and the obstacles that often get in the way of constructive dialogue.
As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, how should schools teach this foundational document?
Harvard lecturer Eric Soto-Shed joins The Harvard EdCast to discuss how civics education is evolving from patriotic education and action civics to media literacy and reflective patriotism. He explains why students should engage not only with the Declaration’s democratic ideals, but also with its contradictions.
In a politically charged moment, Soto-Shed argues that classrooms shouldn’t just prepare students for civic life, they should function as civic spaces themselves. The goal isn’t memorization. It’s helping young people understand that democracy is a work in progress — and that they have a role in sustaining and strengthening it.
With about one in four children in the U.S. now living in immigrant families, Harvard Associate Professor Gabrielle Oliveira argues that supporting their wellbeing should be a national priority – not just for the children themselves, but for the strength of society as a whole.
Yet for many Americans, migration is often seen as risky or even reckless, especially when it involves bringing children across dangerous borders and leaving everything familiar behind. Oliveira reframes this perspective to migration is an act of profound care.
“Almost [no one] wants to leave their homes,” she says. “All things being equal, you want to stay where you were born with the people that you know, and love, and close to your roots. Most people that are coming, they're running for their lives in many ways. So, this is not this idea of people trying to come here to take something from the society, here to take their jobs, to take their safety, to take any of that, but it's kind of almost this beautiful thing about the United States being the safe haven where things are possible, and there's hope.”
She has spent years embedded with Latin American migrant families living in Massachusetts, documenting their journeys, their struggles, and the hopes that drive them to uproot their lives, which she shares in her book, Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life.
Oliveira explains that while public conversations about immigration center on fear and scarcity, the families she followed see education as a stabilizing force and a pathway to dignity. For parents, schooling in the U.S. represents the chance for their children to flourish, not merely academically but as kind, purposeful human beings. Yet for teachers, supporting these students can be complicated by the pressures of curriculum, testing, and limited training in trauma-informed practice or what Oliveira calls “constrained care.”
“If you're going to talk about a multicultural piece, why not actually talk about the home country of that child, and let that child write, and talk about that, and tell the stories, which then will increase trust in the classroom,” she says. “We know that if teachers, and students trust each other, the students are going to be a lot more inclined to want to engage more, to want to show up, and learn more in the classrooms versus if they feel that they cannot be their whole selves in the classroom.”
In this episode, Oliveira shares how children and families navigate migrating to America and its schools, and offers strategies for educators.
Looking back at the early history of U.S. education, Harvard Professor Jarvis Givens says we’ve long told the story in fragments: Native education in one lane, Black education in another, and the rise of white common schools somewhere else. But in his latest research, he shows just how deeply interconnected these histories actually are, particularly how the development of public schools was entangled with Native land dispossession and the economic engine of slavery. This history is the focus of his new book, American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation.
“The reality is that it's not that Black and Native people were not included in the project of American school development, because public schooling in the U.S. was actually developed over and through Native and Black people's dispossession through their subjugation,” Givens says. “It's Native land loss and it's the kind of capital generated from race-based slavery that's really driving the economic development of the nation and also its internal institutions, schooling in particular.”
Givens introduces the idea of an “American Grammar,” a framework in which race, power, and knowledge were built into the structure of schooling itself. That grammar hasn’t disappeared, he says, noting how today’s debates over curriculum, representation, and educational justice reflect it.
“If we're not being clear and if we're not being as nuanced and detailed as possible in how we're naming how we got to this place, then we can allow ourselves to work with faulty assumptions or faulty understandings about this history that then come to inform the solutions we try to create,” Givens says. “And that's one of the major issues I think that we're up against. How we narrate the past and how we narrate injustice has direct implications for how we go about bringing about justice in the context of schools.”
In this EdCast, Givens discusses what it means to rethink what we believe we know about the origins of American education and what becomes possible when we finally reckon with the full story.
Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Jal Mehta knows that education research matters – it has the power to shape schools, classrooms, and policy. Yet, today, in increased political polarization, many may question whether education research can be neutral.
“As a researcher, you have a lot of choices about what topics you study. Those choices are driven by a whole variety of things. They're driven by what researchers would think is interesting and sort of like where the edge of the field is. They're driven, to some degree, I would imagine, by people's own kind of values. And they're also driven by the interests of the moment,” Mehta says. He points out that education research inevitably echoes the issues and values of its time — from No Child Left Behind to Black Lives Matter to the current backlash against diversity and inclusion — but that doesn’t mean its partisan. Instead, it mirrors the social and political moment in which it’s conducted.
“There's a lot of interest among researchers about how can we talk to each other, how can we work across difference, how can you have constructive conversations,” he says. “And it's not that those things were any less important five years ago. They just weren't at the kind of the center of the zeitgeist. So, sort of wherever the middle is, you'll find a lot of researchers kind of studying that at that moment in time.”
Funding and politics, Mehta notes, also play major roles in determining which studies get done, particularly as recent cuts threaten the data infrastructure needed to track student progress. Yet despite those challenges, he sees hope in growing partnerships between researchers and schools, where the questions being asked are grounded in the realities of teaching and learning. He notes that we are all impacted by research whether we recognize it or not.
In this episode, we take a deeper look at whether education research can ever truly be neutral and what happens when ideology and evidence collide.
In the wake of the pandemic, tutoring has become a central strategy for helping students recover academically but not all tutoring is created equal. Liz Cohen, vice president of policy at 50CAN, has been closely studying the rapid rise of tutoring programs across the country, especially the emergence of high-impact tutoring as the gold standard.
“There's a funny thing about tutoring is that there's a lot of flexibility in it,” Cohen says. “So, in some places it might look like other interventions and in other places it might not. But one thing I want to be really clear about just to start with is that high-impact tutoring in particular is not homework help and it is not on demand.” Instead, high impact tutoring is structured, frequent, and aligned to what students are learning in school: at least three sessions a week, 30 minutes or more, in groups of four students or fewer, with the same tutor each time. Research shows that when tutoring is consistent and connected to classroom instruction, students make significantly greater learning gains, especially in early literacy and math.
Cohen points to examples like Tennessee, Louisiana, and district leaders in places like Baltimore and Guilford County, where strong funding, clear expectations, and hands-on implementation support led to meaningful results. But scaling tutoring can be complicated. As Cohen discovered and reveals in her new book, “The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives,” there’s many details that need to come together for tutoring to be a success.
“What I believe is the most powerful part of the story of the high-impact tutoring movement and the tutoring movement at large that's happened in the last five years in America is that it's a human centered story that is in part empowered by tech,” Cohen says. “This is fundamentally a story about humans, and it's a story about the fact that young people in America are very hungry for meaningful relationships with adults, and those can be young adults in high school and college, or they can be older adults too.”
In this episode, Cohen tells us what has made high-impact tutoring so valuable, how districts are successfully implementing tutoring, and how it has become more than just as an academic intervention.
In an era when many Americans believe the country is too divided to come back together, Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh believes higher education has a crucial role to play in bridging divides and he’s putting that belief into practice through a new university center devoted to viewpoint diversity.
“What do we want from students when they graduate high school or college,” Hersh says. “We want them to be able to engage with lots of different kinds of people in the workforce or in civic spaces, and know how to handle disagreement, and know how to fight for the things that they care about and know how to listen and learn and develop new ideas.”
Too often, he says, universities and social networks confine people to intellectual bubbles. However, when students understand how others’ beliefs shape their views, they learn to think critically, listen better, and handle disagreement with more nuance. That philosophy drives the creation of Tufts’ new Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, which Hersh leads. The center will host reading groups, workshops, and in-person discussions that encourage open, offline dialogue across disciplines and ideologies. The center’s mission extends beyond events. In fact, Hersh wants to rethink curriculum and teaching practices to ensure dissenting voices and unfamiliar perspectives are part of students’ education.
“It doesn't mean that you, as a student change your mind on every issue. But you just realize that these issues are complicated for a reason, which is that there is a lot of gray area,” he says. “And to me, that is quite depolarizing. Because all of a sudden, it takes something that looked like an us versus them story into a story of people with different values and senses of the world reach reasonable, different conclusions.”
While “viewpoint diversity” has become a politically loaded term, Hersh sees it as central to higher education’s purpose, not a partisan issue. In this episode, Hersh discusses his hope to rekindle a university culture defined by curiosity, conversation, and understanding.
Curiosity is one of our most powerful, yet often overlooked, human drives, especially in education. Elizabeth Bonawitz, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explains that while there’s no single definition of curiosity, it’s best understood as an internal desire to resolve gaps in our knowledge or a wondering about how the world works. That innate drive begins in infancy, fueling our rapid early learning. But as children grow older, especially within structured school systems, that spark too often dims.
Through her research, Bonawitz explores how curiosity operates like mise en place for learning preparing the mind to absorb, connect, and retain new information. It activates attention, memory, and motivation, setting the stage for deeper understanding. Studies from her lab show that simple practices, like encouraging children to ask more questions, not only increase curiosity but also improve learning outcomes.
“Children who are more curious do better in math or reading scores in school. And that's particularly true for students that come from more under-resourced communities or students that might have other challenges associated with school,” Bonawitz says. “So, curiosity is the great equalizer for education.”
But curiosity is not the easiest thing to cultivate, especially in a classroom where barriers like test driven school structures and cultural differences link to uncertainty. The good news is there are things educators and even parents can do to help foster a child's curiosity.
In this episode, the EdCast takes a deeper look at curiosity and explores ways to home in on what Bonawitz considers the simple act of wonder.
Dreama Gentry grew up in Appalachian Kentucky, in a community often defined by outsiders for what it lacked. But what she saw was strength, connection, and possibility. Today, as the founder and CEO of Partners for Rural Impact, she’s working to make sure the 14 million young people growing up in rural America can see those same possibilities for themselves.
“What I see in Appalachia is that a lot of young folks have lost hope. And they've lost the ability to dream of a future and of a path. And some of that is because their parents also have lost that hope. And some parents are afraid to have dreams for their young folks,” Gentry says. “And I think that's why programs, schools, community systems have to wrap around the whole family and support the whole family in learning how to dream again, holding the hope of a better future, and providing them with those supports.”
Despite rural students often graduating high school at higher levels than their peers, they also have lower enrollment rates for college. Part of Gentry’s work is developing that path for students. She explains how “place-based partnerships” are transforming rural schools by bringing together educators, families, and community leaders around one goal: every child supported, from cradle to career.
“Career pathways for rural students are the same as career pathways for students in urban areas and other areas. And I think sometimes, we don't make that distinction,” she says. “I think we have a responsibility and a duty, when working with young folks, to help them actualize and develop a dream, a goal that they want to work toward, and then to make sure that they're leaving high school with the skills to achieve that, if possible. And they're college ready. They're career ready. And so, the pathways are unlimited for young people in rural places, just like they are in others.”
She says there are many surprising connections between rural and urban education. In fact, Gentry notes how her work with Geoff Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone changed her perspective. Now, she emphasizes that while the settings may differ, the core work of supporting children and families is universal. Rural and urban educators, she says, have much to learn from one another if they’re willing to move beyond perceived divides and recognize their shared mission to create opportunity for every child.
In this episode, Gentry challenges assumptions about rural life, reminding us that the challenges and outcomes facing small towns are deeply tied to the nation’s future.
When educators talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation often begins with excitement about its potential. But for Stephanie Smith Budhai and Marie Heath, that excitement must be matched with caution, context, and critical awareness.
“AI is a piece of technology. It's not human, but it's also not a neutral thing either,” says Budhai, an associate professor in the educational technology program at the University of Delaware. “We have to be intentional and purposeful about how we use technology. So, thinking about why we're using it. So why was the technology created?”
Budai and Heath, an associate professor of learning, design, and technology at Loyola University Maryland, are the authors of “Critical AI in K-12 Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Cultivating Justice and Joy.” Their research explores how bias is built into artificial intelligence and how these biases can harm students if left unexamined. While bias in technology isn’t new — it’s been present in tools as old as the camera — both scholars argue that educators and students must learn to approach AI critically, just as they evaluate sources and evidence in other forms of learning.
“What does it mean when we ask children…to partner with or think with a machine that is based in the past, with historical data full of our historical mistakes and also doesn't really explore? It's not looking at the world with wonder. It's looking in this very focused way for the next answer that it can give the most likely possibility,” Heath says. “And I think as learners, that's actually not how we want kids to learn. We want them to explore, to make mistakes, to wrestle with ideas, to come up with divergent creative thinking.”
Both Budhai and Heath believe that using AI responsibly in education means grounding teaching in equity and critical engagement. Budhai points to projects like Story AI, which helps young students tell their own cultural stories while revealing bias in generative image tools. Heath’s Civics of Technology project encourages “technology audits,” helping teachers and students uncover the trade-offs and values embedded in everyday tools.
In this episode, we explore how to use AI critically in classrooms, and the responsibility of educators to cultivate AI literacy, develop thoughtful policies, and consider broader implications such as environmental impact, equity, and student privacy.
Congress has passed the nation’s first federal school voucher–style program, set to begin in 2027. Supporters call it a landmark expansion of parental choice, while critics fear it will divert billions from public schools. Harvard Professor Marty West says the program raises important questions about the future of American schooling and even how the program will operate.
The new program, part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” is officially called the Educational Choice for Children Act. Although it isn’t a direct voucher, it will operate as a tax-credit program where individuals can receive up to $1,700 in credits for donating to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations. These groups can then distribute scholarships for private school tuition, tutoring, transportation, or even special education services. Families earning up to 300% of their area’s median income are eligible, and states must opt in, giving governors control over implementation.
“What is clear, is that in any state that wants to do so, the program can be used to support private school choice, and that's what makes it significant,” West says. “It really does have the potential to turbocharge the movement to expand private school choice in the United States, which already had significant momentum at the state level.”
The idea of vouchers has a long and varied history in the U.S. tracing back to 1955 when economist Milton Friedman proposed funding education through competition rather than government-run schools. Early programs often focused on targeting low-income families, but as West explains, this shifted over time, especially in recent years as the pandemic accelerated private school choice options.
The research on vouchers is often mixed. As West points out, studies often showing modest academic gains, especially for disadvantaged students, and positive effects on civic outcomes and graduation rates. The need for further research on the effects of vouchers is needed.
If one thing is certain, politically, vouchers remain deeply divisive. “The issue of private school choice has for decades, been the one education policy issue that most cleanly divides Republican and Democratic elected officials,” West says. Going forward, West will be paying close attention to how and whether the new federal program is adopted throughout the country. “What will the governors of blue states decide? Will they opt into the program or will they not? If they don't, this will further extend a new phenomenon in American education really in the past several years-- --which is that we're starting to see a red state model of education delivery and a blue state model of education delivery,” he says.
In this episode, West shares the history of the voucher movement, what research tells us about its success, and whether this national policy will transform American education or further fracture it.
Schools around the world are cracking down on student cell phones, with many turning to outright bans as a fix for distraction, bullying, or mental health struggles. But as University of Birmingham Professor Vicky Goodyear and Harvard’s Carrie James explain, the story is more complicated than a simple “phones are bad.”
“School phone policies alone are not enough to tackle some of the issues that we're seeing in adolescents,” Goodyear says. In her study of over 1,200 students, she found no differences in mental health, academic performance, or well-being between schools with strict bans and those without. While restrictions cut down on in-school phone use, they didn’t meaningfully reduce students’ overall daily screen time.
“Schools are not the silver bullet for addressing the negative impacts of smartphone and social media use,” Goodyear adds. “We also need to optimize on the benefits that are available as well. And there are also unintended consequences of these bans that we do not yet know.”
As James points out, for many students, cell phones can be an important tool for safety, connection, or learning support.
“Removing the devices doesn't remove some of the challenges that are associated with growing up with technologies, but it can remove some of the benefits of those connections,” James says. “So, this is not to say this is an argument for not having bell-to-bell policies. I think that they can be very, very important in a lot of cases. But it is an argument for being very alert and aware of some of those unintended consequences.”
Both researchers agree schools need phone policies shaped with input from students, families, and teachers — plus opportunities to teach “digital agency,” or how to use technology intentionally and responsibly. In this episode, we explore how the real challenge isn’t keeping phones out of the classroom, but how to prepare young people to thrive in a technology-saturated world.
Strategic leadership may be one of the hardest — and most vital — skills for school leaders to master. Liz City, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a long-time coach to school and system leaders across the country, says strategic leadership is not innate but a skill that can be learned and strengthened over time.
“We're in a context which, over the last five years, has been full of uncertainty and ambiguity,” City says. “I think that makes it harder for people to be strategic. It puts people in a kind of reactive survival mode, which is not our best place to be.”
Learning how to be strategic can mean the difference between finding success over being less effective, doing too much, and burning out, she says.
Drawing from decades of experience and recent research, City emphasizes that being strategic is not just about setting goals — it’s about taking intentional action, maintaining focus over time, and deeply understanding people and systems. In her new book, “Leading Strategically: Achieving Ambitious Goals in Education,” she and co-author Rachel Curtis outline five key elements of strategic leadership: discerning, cultivating relationships, understanding context and history, harnessing power, and think big, act small, learn fast.
She explains how leaders often get stuck, especially around power and discernment, and offers practical advice for moving from reactive leadership to purposeful progress.
“You can lead from lots of different vantage points. I think we assume that if you have formal authority, you have power, and you'll be able to get things done,” City says. “It turns out, though, that most things are accomplished through a large measure of informal authority.”
In this episode, City shares what it really means to lead with purpose, especially in today’s climate of uncertainty and change.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the statistics on global education — millions of children, especially in low- and middle-income countries, are spending years in school without mastering foundational skills. But as Harvard Lecturer Robert Jenkins reminds us, we can't afford to stay stuck in what we think we know about the learning crisis. Innovation is not just possible — it’s essential, he says.
“When you look at the big picture overall globally, it feels daunting, the scale of the challenge,” he says. “But when you disaggregate that and see the incredible innovations and proactiveness of many leaders, many educators, the commitment of educators around the world, indeed, [it’s] very exciting, and reason for optimism.”
While expanding access to education has been a major achievement, Jenkins points out that access alone doesn’t guarantee learning. “There was, I think, a very simplistic understanding that by promoting access and enabling kids to go to school, that would automatically translate into higher levels of learning and success in learning levels,” he says, “meaning kids, by going to school for many years, would graduate with the level of learning that would enable them to realize their full potential. And that's not the case.” True progress, he argues, requires tailoring education to individual needs, investing in holistic student support, and improving quality at every level.
With the growing threats of declining humanitarian funding, Jenkins warns this has the potential to stall or reverse progress in education systems worldwide. However, he also believes that a greater awareness and engagement from high-income countries, along with encouraging innovation, evidence-based interventions, and inclusive leadership can lead to transforming global education systems.
In this episode of the EdCast, Jenkins dives into what’s working, what needs to change, and how educators everywhere can play a part in transforming global education, so every child has the chance to thrive.
Texas and California often appear to be worlds apart when it comes to politics and culture, but the education students are getting – as far as their textbooks go, at least – may not be so different.
University of Chicago Assistant Professor Anjali Adukia investigated more than 260 textbooks used in both public and religiously affiliated schools in the two states, analyzing their portrayal of race, gender, religion, and historical events. “I think the part that was the most surprising to me is despite this narrative of political polarization, we actually don't necessarily see that in the books themselves that are given to kids on average,” Adukia says.
While there are differences, especially regarding religious content, textbooks used in both states tend to emphasize similar themes such as family, nature, and history, she says. Additionally, the textbooks also feature similar portrayals of females in passive and stereotypical roles, while males are more often linked to power, politics, and military.
She argues that textbooks play a crucial role in shaping students' identities and worldviews, transmitting cultural values and societal norms. Despite changing public attitudes, these textbooks remain largely unchanged, posing important questions about how educational content influences future generations and the values that schools are endorsing.
“The process of education and its associated books and curriculum materials necessarily, and by design, transmit the knowledge that we care about, the values that we care about. They transmit messages about who belongs in what spaces in society,” Adukia says. “Also, the presence and the absence of different identities can send messages to kids which can contribute to how they view their own potential and the potential of others.”
In this episode, we explore the similarities and differences across textbooks in public and religious schools, and the role textbooks play in shaping students’ identities and worldviews.
As a third-grade teacher, Lily Howard Scott noticed how she spoke to students impacted more than just their experience in the classroom. How teachers speak to their students and intentional shifts in language can nurture children’s inner lives, foster self-regulation and reduce perfectionism, she says, and become their inner voice.
“The thing about teachers, particularly elementary school teachers, is they have this superpower, which is that they catch kids at a moment where their capacity for neuroplasticity is more remarkable than it will ever be again. These kids are developing theories about themselves and their abilities, and they're bucketing themselves in all ways that may stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Scott says. “They're establishing thinking patterns that will stay with them, and elementary school teachers spend 1000 hours a year with their students in the same connected classroom… subtle shifts in language that help kids learn these basic things, that they have agency within, that they can choose which thoughts and feelings to amplify and which to quiet.”
Scott shares that young children are remarkably receptive to reflective conversations about language and often adapt the terms in creative, personal ways — such as a student renaming their “inner voice” the “President Decider.” She highlights the power of reframing mistakes as "brilliant mistakes," which invites curiosity rather than shame. This shift, supported by neuroscience and the work of researchers like Lisa Feldman Barrett and Carol Dweck, helps children interpret challenges with a mindset geared toward growth and resilience.
How to make these shifts is now the focus of Scott’s work and the central theme of her book, “The Words that Shape Us,” where she shares classroom-tested strategies and brain-changing teacher language.
Learning to speak differently as a teacher or even parent can be challenging, but Scott stresses the importance of modeling lifelong learning alongside children. For instance, by admitting their own struggles with perfectionism or learning from errors, teachers can foster trust and mutual growth. Scott explains that language like “feelings are visitors” (inspired by Rumi’s The Guest House) helps children understand emotional regulation and agency. She admits that young children are particularly receptive to language shifts. Perhaps even more importantly, the effort to tweak how we speak to children may also play a role with children’s mental health.
“If your mind is better company when you're seven, you hold on to these language nuggets and you repeat them to yourself when you're 17, so I think elementary school, it's not the precursor to serious learning. It's the most serious learning, and we should tip our hats to elementary school teachers and understand the immense and enduring influence they can have,” she says.
In this episode, Scott shares insight into when children are taught empowering, compassionate language early, they carry it with them for life, enabling healthier thinking patterns and emotional well-being. She provides caution against well-meaning but common phrases like “try harder” which may inadvertently shame children.
To succeed in school, in life, and as contributors to a more equitable society, students must be able to recognize, analyze, and challenge systemic injustices, say Harvard Lecturer Aaliyah El-Amin and Boston College Professor Scott Seider. Through their research, they are examining what it truly means to pursue education for justice in K–12 schools.
“The kids who are in classrooms right now are our country's next generation of leaders,” says El-Amin. “They’re the people who are going to help determine whether we continue on our current path of deep injustice and human suffering, or whether we chart a new course toward a more just society — one where people across differences have equal access to well-being and thriving.”
El-Amin and Seider argue that equipping young people with the tools to understand and respond to injustice is not only critical to building a more just society but also key to supporting youth development—academically, emotionally, and civically.
“Young people who are more critically conscious of injustice are more civically engaged. They have higher self-esteem. They have better mental health…” says Seider. “The primary goal of nurturing young people's understanding of injustice is to prepare them to help build a better world. But we also have growing evidence that this critical consciousness contributes to positive youth outcomes.”
To explore how justice-oriented education is being implemented across different contexts, the researchers studied more than 100 schools, identifying four core strategies for embedding this work throughout K–12 education:
- Building adult capacity
- Centering justice in the curriculum
- Partnering with families and communities
- Engaging students in social action
While this work may look different depending on the local context, El-Amin and Seider believe it can be implemented in schools everywhere.
“Students are asking big questions about the world around them,” says El-Amin. “And when students are curious, engaged, and eager to participate in these conversations, educators have a powerful opportunity to bring them into critical consciousness and advocacy right in the classroom.”
This episode of the EdCast explores how schools can become places where students are not only academically prepared but also empowered to confront—and help transform—the world they inherit.
In today’s digital landscape, schools face growing cybersecurity threats that can disrupt learning, compromise sensitive data, and leave administrators scrambling to recover. With cybercriminals becoming more sophisticated, understanding these risks and being prepared is more critical than ever, says Lisa Plaggemier, the executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance.
“The vast majority of bad things that happen at institutions like schools and municipalities-- again, under-resourced organizations or organizations that have some technical debt. They haven't kept up with the latest and the greatest when it comes to technology. It's really, really, really basic things that get exploited by people that are up to no good,” she says.
The Center for Internet Security recently released a report revealing that 82 percent of schools suffered from a cyber incident over an 18-month period. From ransomware attacks to AI-powered phishing scams, cybercriminals are finding new ways to exploit vulnerabilities—especially in under-resourced institutions like schools and municipalities. Plaggemier shares practical steps schools can take to protect themselves, from implementing multi-factor authentication to training staff on phishing awareness. She says the biggest mistake is not being prepared for a cyberthreats.
“[This] is not something that's fun to go through, to have to answer to the press, to have to handle the crisis communications, the questions you get from parents. It then becomes such a drain on all those other things… that are a higher priority, that you realize that you've risked all those good and noble things because of a lack of preparedness,” Plaggemier says. “It's not if, it's when. So, it's all about being prepared. It's about resilience. It's about business continuity, being able to still teach school if everything's offline, and then being able to recover from the attack and go back to business as usual.”
In this episode, we discuss why educational institutions are frequent targets, the role of human error in cyberattacks, and the importance of proactive security measures.
How we see the world and interact with each other, especially whether we create welcoming environments of acceptance, does not always come naturally. Tim Shriver, chair of the Special Olympics, and Stephanie Jones, a Harvard professor whose research focuses on social emotional development, say that it’s something we can teach, and fostering an inclusive and accepting mindset in schools and communities matters.
“This is not stuff that we're necessarily born with. It all grows and emerges through experiences and all kinds of things that happen in the world. So, they are malleable skills -- they can be taught,” Jones says. “And I would go further and say that the decades of work in schools focused on things like social, emotional, and behavioral development have given us some ideas about the essentials of teaching and supporting these kinds of skills.”
As a longtime advocate of students with intellectual and physical disabilities, Shriver admits he was intrigued by better understanding why some people are more open to inclusion and accepting someone who may be different from them. “From any number of points of view, difference is sometimes scary. But who are the people that know how to turn that fear or that lack of familiarity into an opening, rather than using it as a closed door?” Shriver says. “So, I started to ask myself, what is an inclusive mindset? … And the more I thought about this, the more I realized, and the more I searched around issues around it, it struck me that we didn't know.”
Working together they began to identify key components of an inclusive mindset and how to foster this by acting on empathy, dignity, and courageous action. In this episode, we discuss using teachable moments where students can learn to become upstanders, and why it is important to nurture these skills in the classroom and community.
Post-pandemic schools are still feeling the aftershocks—socially, emotionally, and politically – say educators and co-authors Mathew Portell and Tyisha Noise. Educators, students, and administrators are navigating a landscape that feels more uncertain than ever, with growing political pressures, policy shifts, and the lingering impact of disrupted learning.
“In this hurrying time of, ‘we've got to get kids caught up,’ that intensity is there. And I think it's playing a major role in missing gaps that we need to support for students who didn't have those developmental experiences starting at a very, even young age, and building their capacity and their tools to manage all that's coming,” Portell says.
Portell, an elementary school principal, and Noise, an educator and leadership consultant, believe a trauma-informed approach can help -- that is if schools truly undertake the work to make the systemic shifts necessary. They are co-authors of “Reducing Stress in Schools: Restoring Connection and Community,” a toolkit of actionable, evidence-based practices for educators that focuses on how to support students’ and adults’ nervous system regulation. One of the biggest shifts they advocate for is moving from reactive policies to a more human-centered approach aimed toward not just students but also adults.
“If we want what we say we want for children, we've got to bring healing and love and support and compassion to adults. We have to pour into the adults who serve children what we want them to pour into children,” Noise says. “Draining people of everything good inside of them, and then asking them to pour from empty cups every day is not only unfair, it's inhumane.”
In this episode, we discuss the tension between academic recovery and social-emotional learning as schools face increasing pressure to accelerate student progress while navigating political and logistical obstacles, and what it means to be a trauma-informed school.
Eve L. Ewing wants people to talk, not just about how American schools started, but also how that can inform the future of schools, especially for Black and Native children. She argues that Black and Native children’s schooling experience is more than just a footnote, but a central narrative in history.
“From the very first classes that I taught, I always began by telling my students, you cannot understand the history of schools in this country if you don't understand schools for Black people and schools for Native people,” she says. “Those are foundational to understanding the history of American public schooling.”
Those historical foundations of American public schooling are the focus of her new book, “Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism.” Ewing explains that her book was born from a need to unify discussions on these histories, structured around three themes: discipline and punishment, intellectual inferiority, and economic subjugation.
The University of Chicago Associate Professor highlights how the education system has been shaped by racist ideologies, many envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, and have only strengthened racial divisions. Those legacies continue today, with curriculums that downplay darker aspects of American history, and raise deep questions about what is the purpose of school. “There are a lot of unspoken assumptions, uninterrogated assumptions about what makes great education for Black and Native kids in particular, for low-income kids of all racial backgrounds, for kids of color of all income backgrounds, that sometimes isn't actually great for them,” she says.
She hopes that educators can find meaning by understanding history and possibly find ways to create a new future for schools. “These are long and old systems, but they were created by people, and we are also people, right? And it is also within our power to examine and critique those systems and create new ones,” she says.
In this episode, Ewing calls for honest conversations about history, a reevaluation of education’s purpose, and collective action to challenge systemic oppression in schools.
The U.S. Department of Education has been a subject of political debate since its creation in 1980.
“It's the one whose status has been most tenuous from the inception. So the recent calls we've heard to eliminate the Department of Education have really been a constant feature of its history from the moment it was created,” says Marty West, a Harvard professor specializing in the politics of K-12 education. He explains that the DoEd, established in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter, was politically motivated but also aimed at consolidating federal education efforts. Despite its relatively small financial footprint—contributing less than 10% of K-12 funding—it plays a key role in distributing federal funds, enforcing civil rights laws, and conducting educational research.
In speaking with West, before news reports that the Trump Administration was drafting an executive order to eliminate the department, he noted that some view the DoEd as essential for ensuring equal access to education and enforcing federal education laws, while others see it as an unnecessary bureaucracy that interferes with state and local control.
“I think debates over the status of the department and speculation over the department status are largely a distraction from the real debates over the scope and substance of federal education policy,” West says. “The status of the department is largely a question of bureaucratic organization and is not particularly substantive. The real question is whether the federal government has a useful and valid role to play in K-12 education.”
In this episode, we discuss the Department of Education’s responsibilities, the misconceptions surrounding its influence, and the historical and political forces that have shaped its existence. We also explore the feasibility of eliminating the department and what such a move would mean for schools, educators, and students across the country.
When it comes to making an impact on school outcomes, Harvard Professor Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell says we often overlook the power of relationships within the school.
“I think the complexity of how relationships work is one of the reasons why the first place we often go when we're trying to improve schools is to something like policies and procedures,” she says. “It seems very concrete. Put the policy in place. Something's going to happen. Have a new procedure. People are going to follow it. Cross your fingers.”
But the real lever of change is in people. Bridwell-Mitchell studies the intricate dynamics of relationships within schools and how they shape outcomes for students, teachers, and institutions.
“So all the time in organizations, we are shaping the interactions, the relationships people develop. And so from my perspective, we need to be much more intentional about what those efforts are accomplishing in terms of relationships and what impact they might be having on the outcomes that we desire,” she says, pointing out how seemingly innocuous decisions like where to put an office and what time to schedule a class can impact the social dynamic of an organization.
Relationships in schools are nested, where connections among individuals can ripple through classrooms, schools, and the educational system. However, figuring out how to more intentionally develop relationships can be challenging amid time constraints and policy demands.
Still, Bridwell-Mitchell attests it is well worth the investment if schools want to transform for the long run. “Whatever great idea you think you have to make things better in your context, in your classroom, in your school, in your district-- how much you're going to get out of that -- the bang for the buck you invest,” she says. “What you get out of it will be so much greater if you can leverage relationships in the right way.”
In this episode, Bridwell-Mitchell shares how leveraging social networks can spark meaningful change, and why schools must embrace both the complexity and the power of human connection to achieve lasting success.
Andrew Tucker says the growing adoption of Portraits of a Graduate in K-12 education is a way to address gaps in education and prepare students to thrive in an evolving workforce. Portraits of a Graduate (POG) are frameworks, adopted by a state or district, that defines the skills and competencies students should have upon graduation, extending beyond academic benchmarks.
“For a long time-- maybe generations really-- in our K-12 system, we've really focused on a single metric for success, and that's been a four-year college degree,” says Tucker, director of policy at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). “We're beginning to recognize that there are other opportunities and other options for students and that we actually need to prepare students beyond just those minimum academic requirements that exist for enrollment into a four-year college.”
As part of a CASEL report this year, Tucker highlights how states and districts are adopting POGs to equip students with essential "durable skills" like critical thinking, collaboration, and emotional intelligence. About 20 states have created these frameworks. He explains that these portraits are developed with input from diverse stakeholders—educators, parents, employers, and community members—and aim to address the disconnect between what schools teach and the skills employers and society demand. Some states like Nevada, North Carolina, and Utah are implementing these frameworks and aligning them with career and social-emotional learning goals.
Tucker emphasizes a portraits potential to enhance student readiness for college, careers, and life, particularly as "human skills" become increasingly critical in an era shaped by AI and automation.
“We're in the era of AI. And artificial intelligence is going to be taking the place of a lot of the technical skills that people need. And what's going to be left? What's going to be left are these human skills,” Tucker says. “So we have to, as a society, and as an education system, and as a broader workforce system, we have to define these things in ways that there's a common language.”
In this episode, Tucker calls on educators and policymakers to embrace Portraits of a Graduate as a means to foster an equitable, relevant, and future-focused education.
Laura Chávez-Moreno says bilingual education inadvertently creates boundaries around Latinx identity by gathering Spanish-speaking students together.
“Bilingual education, rightfully so, has focused on language,” says Chávez-Moreno, an assistant professor at UCLA. “But there has to be also a recognition that bilingual education, because it is a part of schooling in the U.S., that it is also engaging in the process of creating ideas about race and about creating our ideas about racialized groups.”
In her new book, “How Schools Make Race,” she argues that while bilingual education aims to support students’ language and cultural identity, it often fails to address the broader racial dynamics affecting Latinx communities.
Chávez-Moreno believes that more could be done to integrate discussions of race and ethnic studies. “There's this national debate in the U.S. about whether schools should or not teach about race, and sometimes that gets called like attacks on critical race theory. I use that in scare quotes because it's really not critical race theory, but it's used…” she says. “It's causing a lot of fear in terms of what teachers can do. And instead of having that debate, we should recognize that schools teach about race already, whether we like it or not, in indirect and direct ways. But we should recognize that in order for us to then improve how we teach about it, we really need to take a more systematic approach to how teachers engage in this work. And unfortunately, that's not happening in our schools.”
She calls for an "ambitious" teaching model that would prepare educators to guide these conversations thoughtfully, helping students gain a deeper understanding of their place within a racialized society.
In this episode, she discusses how bilingual education programs influence the racialization of Latinx students and how a more nuanced approach could enhance bilingual education and better equip students to understand the complexities of race in the U.S.
The superintendent’s role is challenging and always evolving but too often educators step into this leadership position not fully prepared for what’s ahead. As a position with high turnover and equally high isolation at times, Lindsay Whorton, The Holdsworth Center president, says we need to be more upfront about the role if we are to attract, support, and retain leaders.
“What we have to do is be honest but also be encouraging and celebrate what an incredible opportunity it is to be in these roles. Yeah, it's going to be hard and there's going to be these pressures. And it's a really complex, intellectually, emotionally, physically demanding job,” she says. “And it represents an incredible opportunity to facilitate a conversation in your community to help advance your district to do the right thing for kids and to really make a significant difference in the lives of both the students who are in your school system today and in the future.”
The transition to a superintendent role often surprises those coming from senior leadership, as it requires them to assume a broader, more public-facing leadership stance. Many new superintendents feel "discomfort" or even disillusionment when realizing how drastically their responsibilities have expanded, including heightened community visibility and accountability.
“What gets tricky is when that sense of discomfort turns into maybe I'm not capable, maybe I don't have the confidence, maybe this isn't something that I can do,” she says. “And so we think by helping people understand that it is normal to experience what we're calling a shift in professional identity, people can be a little bit less destabilized by that experience and can learn through it and get to the other side of feeling more prepared, more capable, more confident about the role that they have as a superintendent.”
Whorton explains that navigating the superintendency successfully demands strong relational skills, strategic vision, and adaptability. A key component to long-term success, she notes, is the ability to foster strong board relationships, even as boards may change or challenge the superintendent’s direction. Additionally, Whorton advocates for recognizing the superintendency as a role that requires community leadership and suggests a shift toward viewing superintendents as central civic figures.
In this episode, Whorton discusses whether the superintendent position has changed and why it’s necessary to reframe the role to inspire a new generation of leaders to step into this role.
Edward Clapp wants education to shift from a traditional, individualistic view of creativity toward a participatory, socially distributed perspective. Clapp, principal investigator at Harvard’s Project Zero and co-author of, “The Participatory Creativity Guide for Educators,” doesn’t see creativity as a personal trait some people "possess" or "are," instead he proposes that everyone can "participate" in creativity.
“Young people play a variety of roles when they participate in creativity, each leveraging their own talents, skills, background experiences, and cultural perspectives,” he says. “So, it's this more socially distributed approach to understanding what creativity is -- that isn't held within the skulls and skin of individuals. It's putting creativity in a social space so that everyone can participate in creativity in the unique ways that they have to do so.”
Clapp talks about the “eight crises of creativity,” where challenges stem from individualism, such as the misconception that some kids are inherently more creative, and from a "culture of power" that overlooks the social and cultural dynamics of creativity. Clapp argues that an individualistic view limits students by creating exclusive standards of creativity, often alienating those who don’t fit these norms. “Creativity is not socially and culturally neutral -- it’s socially, culturally charged…” he says. “I saw the posters growing up as a kid, of Charles Darwin, and Vincent van Gogh, and Albert Einstein. More contemporarily, we'll have Steve Jobs up there-- all the dead white guys who are these icons of creativity. And creativity literally-- it literally, from that perspective, doesn't look like the majority of our students. So young people will look at those icons and say, right away, ‘I just don't even look like that person.’ To counter these issues, Clapp advocates for participatory creativity in classrooms. For example, teachers can shift focus from "creative icons" to the evolution of ideas, inviting all students to engage.
In this episode, Clapp explains the participatory approach to creativity, and how it can empower students by validating diverse contributions and helping them develop purpose in the world.
Sexual misconduct by school employees is more prevalent than many of us want to believe, according to Charol Shakeshaft, a distinguished professor in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. Many times, school culture gets in the way of stopping this abuse from happening.
“What I find is that teachers see things, kids see things, administrators see things, parents see things. And what they see are what I call red flags of possible problems, but certainly what they see are boundary crossings,” Shakeshaft says. “Teachers are crossing a professional boundary, and they don't report it. And they don't report it for lots of reasons. The foremost reason they don't report it is because they don't realize they're supposed to report it. Nobody's taught them or helped them understand that these are signs that a child might be being targeted for sexual misconduct.”
For decades, Shakeshaft has studied sexual misconduct by school employees and served as a lead expert witness in hundreds of cases. In her book, “Organizational Betrayal: How Schools Enable Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It,” she unveils a problem that is deeply entrenched in our schools and calls for greater awareness and action to protect students.
Recent studies estimate about 17% of students report being the target of sexual misconduct by a school employee. “We expect our schools to be places that are looking out for our kids, and the people there are kind and good. And in fact, most of them are. Most of them are people who care about kids, who care about people, who are honest, who have good ethics. That's the good part,” Shakeshaft says. “But as in every profession, there are those who aren't. That's the sad part.”
In this episode, Shakeshaft stresses how educators are responsible for reporting suspicious actions without having to determine whether the behavior is truly harmful and shares strategies for educators and families to recognize, report, and prevent these incidents from happening in their schools.
Elliot Haspel believes universal childcare can happen in America, especially because it affects everyone across red and blue lines. Haspel, senior fellow at Capita, says part of the challenge is recognizing that childcare is something Americans seen as a public good.
Reflecting on the history of childcare in America, Haspel points out how certain policy failures, particularly the Comprehensive Child Development Act in the 1970s, have led to where we are today. “We've never gotten to this point in the country of really reckoning with, what is childcare and individual responsibility? Is it actually something that should be more of a right, that should be more seen akin to public education, or libraries, or parks, or roads, where society has a vested interest in supporting the family?” he says.
He highlights two key obstacles: inclusivity (recognizing informal caregivers and stay-at-home parents) and funding, with a necessary budget estimated at over $150 billion annually.
“Fundamentally, if you want a functional childcare system in this country that works for families, and works for children, that works for the educators, and it ultimately works for communities, and the economy, and society at large -- it has to start with robust, permanent, dedicated amounts of public funding,” Haspel says. “And we've never done anything like that in this country without first deciding, as a nation, that it is a value that we hold.”
He envisions a future where childcare is seen as a right and advocates for a large, sustained public investment. He points to other countries, like Canada and Germany, that have successfully reformed their childcare systems, showing that change is possible. Haspel emphasizes the need for a cultural shift to prioritize childcare, which he believes will lead to broader societal benefits.
In this episode, Haspel discusses the challenges and potential solutions for universal childcare in the U.S.
Drawing from her research and interviews with boys over the past three decades, Niobe Way, a professor of developmental psychology at New York University, reveals how boys in early adolescence express a strong desire for close, emotionally intimate friendships, but as they grow older, societal pressures cause them to suppress these feelings. She calls this a crisis of connection and it’s affecting all of us.
“This crisis of connection is not just for boys and young men. It's with everybody where we're starting to disconnect from our emotional sensitivity, our need for relationships, our need for intimate relationships, not just with a romantic partner, but with friends, as we grow older…” Way says. “Even our notions of maturity, it's the same notions as manhood. It's about being independent, self-sufficient, autonomous, stoic. It's not about being emotional, being sensitive, being able to be mutually supportive with another person.”
This loss of connection along with a culture steeped in toxic masculinity leads to emotional isolation, and contributes to rising rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and even mass violence. Often times society blames mental illness for the latter, but Way contends that our need to individualize these problems, rather than seeing them as cultural issues creates a cycle of not listening and blame.
“The point that we're not asking is, why are they having mental health problems? I mean, what's leading them to be that mentally ill? What is leading them to do that? What's causing that? And why are so many young men at this point-- because the numbers are almost every day that we have a mass shooting-- why are there so many high numbers of young men, white, privileged young boys have mental illness? Why?,” Way says. “Once you start asking why, then you start seeing a cultural story of the way we're raising our children. And I'm going to implicate everybody, including me. We are absolutely raising our children to go against their nature by only valuing one side, by valuing academic achievement over kindness.”
In the episode, Way advocates for a rethinking of not only how we raise boys, but all children, stressing the value of fostering emotional intelligence, empathy, and deep connections with others.
The explosion of artificial intelligence exposed many benefits and challenges for children interacting with AI, especially in educational and social contexts.
“The big question becomes whether children can benefit from those AI interactions in a way that is similar to how they benefit from interacting with other people,” says Ying Xu, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “So if we talk about learning first, my research, along with that of many others, show that children can actually learn effectively from AI, as long as the AI is designed with learning principles in mind.”
Xu studies the impact of AI on children’s development. She highlights that children can learn effectively from AI when it’s designed with proper learning principles. For instance, AI companions that ask questions during activities like reading can improve children's comprehension and vocabulary. However, Xu emphasizes that while AI can simulate some educational interactions, it cannot fully replicate the deeper engagement and relationship-building that come from human interaction, particularly when it comes to follow-up questions or personalized conversations that are important for language and social development.
“There is the excitement that AI has the potential for personalized learning and to help students develop skills for this AI-driven society. But like many of you, I share the same concerns about the outlook of this, what we call the "AI generation,’” she says. “There are so many questions, we don't have answers yet. When we talk about children's ability to actually find answers and learn on their own, and is using "hey" to command or activate AI makes kids forget about politeness. And perhaps the most worrisome to a lot of people is whether children would become more attached to AI than to the people around them.”
In this EdCast episode, Xu shares what we know so far about how AI impacts children’s development and the importance of AI literacy, where children are taught to understand the limitations and potential misinformation from AI, as well as the need for both developers and educators to promote critical evaluation of AI-generated content.
The 2024 Election is anything but easy to teach in a classroom today where fears range from community backlash, restrictive state policies, and job security. For many teachers, the election is a topic to avoid, but Eric Soto-Shed, lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, insists we're missing a real opportunity by doing so.
“We’re at a crisis right now in terms of Americans belief in our fundamental democratic system – not for this candidate or that candidate but does the system work…” Soto-Shed says, noting a recent Gallup poll shows only 28 percent of Americans are satisfied with democracy. “I think that’s a tragic number. And I think schools are the place where we can get folks not only engaged in the process, but also connected to the process, believing in the process.”
He sees teacher expertise and classrooms as a place to create a nurturing learning environment for students. Teaching the election can foster civic engagement, as data shows students are more likely to vote and trust democratic processes when educated on them.
“We can't avoid these hard conversations because they're going to happen anyway. It's just a swipe away on a phone or click on the dial. And students are going to be exposed to these rhetoric charged topics, really disparaging comments, different points of view. Why don't we use our schools as a place where we can really have real meaningful deep conversation around differences, around important issues?” he says.
In this episode of the EdCast, Soto-Shed offers strategies for navigating these challenges, such as focusing on critical thinking skills, connecting election topics to broader course themes, and presenting issues factually without heavy bias. Finally, he highlights the emotional and logistical challenges of post-election classroom discussions, particularly during highly contentious election cycles.
As millions of students prepare for summer vacation, many parents may worry about endless time spent on the screen. Michael Rich, pediatrician and Director of the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital, says children spend more time on the screen during the summer but that the real challenge is balance between screen time and offline activities.
“Now, the issue with screen time also should not be that the time you spend on screen is toxic, but that it is displacing something else. And if it is displacing something that is arguably a richer, more positive experience, then one should be thoughtful about that and make that choice,” he says. “The problem with screens as we use them is that we use them in such an open-ended way, such a way that it's a default behavior.”
He discusses the challenges of setting screen time limits in today's digital environment and offers practical strategies for structuring days with both screen and non-screen activities. One of the best ways, he says, is for parents to set good examples. “When we get home, we should put down our devices and focus on them, really look at them, listen to them, be silent with them, but not be distracted by our phones. Work is over ostensibly, although we don't remember that most of the time, and it's a time when you can actually enjoy them,” he says. “They're not going to be this old forever. They are constantly changing before us. So, in some ways, we need to value that time with them even more. And by doing so, we are modeling for them valuing time with us.”
In this episode, Rich shares insights on navigating screen time in children's lives, and addresses concerns about the impact of screens on mental health, advocating for a nuanced approach that considers individual readiness and understanding.
With looming threats of high teacher turnover rates during COVID-19, Olivia Chi, an assistant professor at Boston University, wanted to study how the pandemic shaped who decided to become a teacher.
Many states foresaw serious disruptions to the teacher pipeline as testing centers and schools closed around the county. While teacher requirements differ by state, many require a bachelor’s or master’s teacher education program, student teaching, state teaching exams, or some type of alternative certification program. Massachusetts sought innovative solutions to sustain their teaching workforce by issuing emergency teaching licenses. “In order to prevent a stopgap essentially in the teacher pipeline, Massachusetts issued what they called emergency teaching licenses. And these began in June of 2020, in response to all of the closures during the pandemic,” Chi says. “And the emergency teaching license is different from the others because it only requires a bachelor's degree to be eligible for the license. In other words, you did not have to complete and pass these teacher licensure exams in order to get the license. So if you have a bachelor's degree and you went through the typical checks, you could get that license and be eligible to be a Massachusetts classroom teacher in a public school.”
Chi's research, conducted in collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, demonstrates how emergency licenses influenced the demographics and effectiveness of the teaching workforce.
“I think our results would put forth to consider more flexibility, particularly for those who have already engaged in the teacher pipeline or may already have lots of experience working in public schools as paraprofessionals or in other staff positions,” Chi says. “That being said, I don't necessarily think our results suggest we should just do away with all of the requirements and let anybody in.”
In this episode of the EdCast, we discuss the study’s findings and what emergency teaching licenses can tell us about teacher requirements given the current state of the teaching workforce today.
While most schools in the United States do not report using corporal punishment – the use of pain as punishment -- it still impacts tens of thousands of students annually, particularly in states where it remains legal.
Jaime Peterson, a pediatrician and assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University, along with the American Academy of Pediatrics, issued a call this fall to end such practices in school. “As pediatricians, we don't recommend corporal punishment. We know it's not an effective form of discipline. Spanking and hitting a child might help a behavior in the short term. They might be fearful and obedient,” she says. “But in the long term it has a lot of negative consequences. But if it's how you discipline your child at home, parents are often teachers, and school personnel, and school board members that that's a practice in their community at home that seems acceptable. It may be hard to change it.”
It also disproportionately impacts certain demographics such as Black students and students with disabilities.
With 17 states remaining where corporal punishment is still legal today, Peterson urges parents, educators and policymakers to mobilize and push for abolition of this practice. Calling this form of punishment ineffective, she urges parents and schools to adopt more supportive and positive disciplinary practices that work.
“Saying that it's not allowed isn't going to change a school culture entirely. We don't know what other forms of discipline will come in,” she says. “I think really in the simplest forms when I talk with families, I remind them that our goal is no pain-- so that's corporal punishment-- no shame, and no blame when we discipline children. No pain, no shame, no blame.”
In this episode of the EdCast, we discuss the prevalence and effects of corporal punishment in schools, and what it’s going to take to end it for good.
Family engagement plays a pivotal role in combatting chronic absenteeism.
The number of students who are chronically absent – missing 10% or more of the school year – has skyrocketed since the pandemic. Eyal Bergman, senior vice president at Learning Heroes, studied this issue and was surprised to discover how schools with robust family engagement had significantly lower rates of chronic absenteeism. “It shows that the strength of a school's family engagement is actually more predictive of a school's chronic absenteeism than their rates of poverty,” he says.
But fostering strong home-school partnerships has been a challenge for many school districts. “What we find is that schools often, despite really good intentions, have not really been designed to promote really strong partnerships with families,” he says. “This is why families are often treated as spectators to the work of schools. This is why their cultural wisdom and their expertise about their children aren't necessarily woven into the fabric of schooling. It's why we see that schools often apply assimilationist practices.”
Bergman emphasizes the need for trust-building between educators and families, personalized approaches to student learning, and systemic infrastructural support to enhance family engagement. In future work, Bergman will dig deeper into the data and try to gather more information about what certain school districts with strong family engagement did to keep chronic absenteeism down and a possible tool down the line to help schools with family engagement.
In this episode, he explains the soaring numbers of chronic absenteeism while underscoring the transformative potential of prioritizing family engagement in ensuring student well-being and academic success.
For many first-generation college students, the dream of pursuing a college degree is often accompanied by financial uncertainty and adversities that keep it as just a dream. The faulty rollout of a new, more simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form may only keep this student population from even trying.
“The intent of simplifying it and making it 'Better FAFSA' was actually very much right-footed to really make sure that it can go to the intent of providing and expanding more access to young people who would be least likely to go to college, largely because they also think that they can't pay for it,” says Heather Wathington, the CEO of iMentor. “So what the challenge then is that something that was created to ameliorate a problem is stuck. So then you have young people that remain stuck. They aren't necessarily able to provide the financial information that they need, and they're discouraged about going.”
Wathington acknowledges that the FAFSA changes were intended and may eventually help first generation college goers, but the delays, technical glitches, and math mistakes of the new FAFSA have only added a layer of adversity.
“For the seniors, my heart aches for them because it's not feeling like they're going to college,” Wathington says. “And as we're trying to build a college going identity, particularly with young people who might be on the fence about whether they belong, whether they should go, whether they can pay for it, all the ‘whethers.’ We want to be able to make it feel possible, and this kind of serves to stymie them a bit.”
How can we make college feel more accessible for these student populations? What is the role of mentors in not only getting students to apply to college but also matriculating to college? In this episode, we explore the hurdles faced by these individuals and explore strategies to help them overcome the barriers to accessing higher education.
Math has a problem when it comes to equitable learning. The way math is taught and how students are tracked is part of the issue, according to Kentaro Iwasaki, a former math teacher who led new math standards in California and now works with school districts nationwide to overhaul their math programs. Tracking in math contributes to segregation, with Black and brown students often placed in lower-track classes compared to their white and Asian counterparts, he says.
“When we go into classes or schools, almost every high school is tracked. With the doors closed and just looking through the window of a classroom, if you just look inside, you can pretty much tell what is a high track class and what's a low track class just based on the student demographics. And that's really unacceptable in our education system today, and particularly this is problematic in math.”
The negative impact of tracking carries over into students' self-concept, classroom dynamics, and overall educational experiences.
As a math teacher, Iwasaki dismantled an honors math program at Mission High School in San Francisco. This change resulted in increased AP enrollment and passing rates for all students, challenging the notion that tracking is necessary for academic success.
“Math is being used as a vehicle to maintain segregation in our education system and that it's more comfortable for parents, particularly parents with social, cultural, political capital, to argue for segregation under the guise of mathematics and saying, ‘Well, my student is at this level, so therefore should be in this class,’ and really kept away from Black and brown students,” Iwasaki says. “No parent is going to outright say that, but in my work with parent communities and listening in and attending school board and school committee meetings, that very much is the underlying conversation and that is what district leaders, district systems, really need to confront.”
In this episode, we discuss the concept of complex instruction, the value of de-tracking math, and how like-minded educators can forge a new identity for math in schools.
Janet Patti and Robin Stern joined forces decades ago when they recognized the crucial role of emotional intelligence for school leaders. How educators understand and manage emotions can positively impact the entire school community, contribute to better leadership, well-being, and resilience. The problem though is that for many education leaders developing emotional intelligence is low on the to do list.
“People can burn out. People can be exhausted. And we hear that from leaders. It really takes a bite out of well-being when you're constantly in the state of emotion labor and you're not attending to that,” says Stern, a senior advisor for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
High rates of stress and turnover in school leader positions only point to more need for emotional intelligence training in leadership development. In their book “Emotional Intelligence for School Leaders,” they push for social-emotional learning as a required skill for school leaders. They also share how educators can develop a conscience practice incorporating emotions, and how coaching and professional development can only help sustain educators in the field.
“Many people just see it as, ’I'm not going to spend my money on me.’ That's number one. I'm not going to spend my money on adults. I'm going to spend it where we need it on kids. We understand that,” says Patti, a professor emeritus at Hunter College. “But if they only realize that by the investment in the principals and the assistant principals and even the superintendent who also is not faring well in terms of long lasting, they would have such a different outcome. Such a more productive environment. Kids would be able to achieve. Adults who would be happy going to work. It would be a different world.”
In this episode, we discuss the need for training in emotional intelligence, sharing real-life examples of leaders who have successfully integrated these skills into their roles, and how it can change a school culture.
Over the past few years, a battle is taking place on many school grounds – one being driven by mothers that is inevitably shaping the future of schools. Laura Pappano – a journalist with decades covering education – couldn’t ignore the growing influence of these movements on education policies and challenging public schools.
In her book, “School Moms,” she reports on the well-organized efforts of far-right movements, such as Moms for Liberty, in framing attacks on schools, influencing language and mobilizing local communities. As a result, these movements have flipped school boards, banned books, and changed curriculums.
“There is a lot of organized money on the far right. They see schools as a political opportunity. I mean, one of the reasons that I have been reporting on this and wrote this book is because I have viewed public schools-- and I think many people share this view-- that this is a place that is nonpartisan,” she says. “I never knew what people's politics were in my school. We're here for all children. We're here to support their learning. We're here to support the teachers, the librarians. And what the far-right extremists have done is recognize that because schools gather everyone, they are a great platform for gaining power.”
In this episode of the EdCast, we explore the historical parallels to these movements, the challenges faced by teachers, and the significance of public engagement in preserving democracy and inclusive education.
In a world increasingly dominated by structured routines and adult supervision, renowned psychologist Peter Gray is not surprised that children’s mental health challenges and anxiety has been on the rise for decades.
“We are so overprotecting children, because we are so always there to solve their problems for them, they're not developing the sense that they can solve their own problem,” Gray says, adding that clinical questionnaires conducted throughout the latter half of the 20th century showed a decline in locus of control for school-aged children as mental disorders rose. “How can you have an internal locus of control if you don't have experience controlling your own life? One thing that clinical psychologists have long known is that if you don't have a strong internal locus of control, that sets you up for anxiety and depression. No surprise. If I believe something can happen at any time, and there's nothing I can do about it, that's a very anxiety-provoking world. Things are frightening. I'm constantly anxious.”
He cites many reasons for how we got to this place, including societal shifts and an education system focused on accountability. Gray, a professor emeritus at Boston College, advocates for the urgent need to reclaim the simple yet profound act of independent play, emphasizing its impact on children's happiness and long-term well-being.
In this episode, we explore the critical role of independent play in fostering resilient, self-reliant, and mentally healthy young individuals.
How do we teach children to love reading amidst the ongoing debates surrounding literacy curriculums and instructional methods, and the emphasis on student outcomes? It's something that Pamela Mason, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, thinks about a lot. She's been both a teacher and school leader, and has spent decades training teachers on literacy instruction. She says it takes many pieces coming together to create the perfect mix -- especially making it fun -- for successful reading instruction.
As data continues to show dips in children's reading assessments nationwide, some states like Florida and Mississippi have been able to make progress and capture the attention of educators. "There's a whole systemic approach to literacy improvement. A lot of people looking at Mississippi say, 'Oh, it's because there's going to be third grade retention. Yes, that is part of their literacy plan, but there's so much more. There's in-school support. There's after school support. There's even books being given free to families who attend schools who are underperforming," she says. "So we have this merging of teachers, and community, and families, and administrators, all shining a light on the importance of literacy, and hopefully we're keeping some of the joy involved in that, as well."
In this episode, we explore the intersection of effective literacy instruction, cultivating joy in reading, and empowering educators and families to ignite a passion for lifelong learning.
Questions about the power of report cards led high school history teacher Wade Morris to dig deep into how these pieces of paper came to carry so much weight in the world. In his book, “Report Cards: A Cultural History,” Morris uncovers the evolution and significance of report cards. “Since the birth of report cards, report cards have had critics and they've had reformers that have tried to create alternative systems,” he says.
He traces the origins of report cards to the 1830s and 1840s, revealing how teachers in common schools grappled with the challenge of gaining parental support and controlling unruly students. Morris emphasizes that the emergence of report cards was a grassroots development, with teachers documenting their intentions and experimenting to find effective means of control. Over time, report cards have come to be more than just academic assessments and carry profound impact on students, parents, and teachers.
“[Report cards are] effective at motivating students even though it's an extrinsic motivation that has all kinds of unintended consequences like anxiety and sometimes bitterness and neurosis and self-loathing.” Morris says. “And it's also extremely effective at still today winning over the support of parents…I still save report cards of my kids. Now they're digital. They're in a Google Drive now, but we still save them. And because there's something deeply rooted about our psyche… report cards are a great way of controlling people because we like it.”
Morris says reports cards are instruments of documentation and surveillance, having a unique role in shaping power dynamics within the educational landscape and also influence college admissions, job applications, and even juvenile corrections systems.
In this episode of the EdCast, Morris shares how understanding the historical context of report cards can provide a sense of wisdom and perspective. He encourages parents and educators to navigate the complexities of the educational system with a deeper awareness of its evolution and the inherent challenges associated with grading and assessment.
When school finances were looking dire, Michael Hester, superintendent of Batesville Public Schools in Arkansas, saw an opportunity to get creative. In an effort to overcome financial challenges, he turned to a solar energy initiative. The district utilized legislation (Act 464) to conduct an energy audit and redirect savings from solar and efficiency measures to cover costs. Within four years, teachers had a 30% increase to their base salary.
“We didn't really have resistance at first because it was more just doubt whether the numbers match, if that would be delivered. Just disbelief that maybe what we were saying we were going to do and pursue could actually happen. Could we check all the boxes? Could we not only find the money, would those numbers be right? And then would we give the teachers the money?” Hester says. “Because you know how that goes. A lot of times you get your budget and things happen, and then you've got emergencies or crisis and things happen and it never gets to where you intended it to go.”
In this episode, he discusses the rapid implementation of the project and emphasizes the positive impact on education, the community, and student engagement with green initiatives.
A rise in mass shootings and growing tensions surrounding the Israel-Hamas War are just a couple things that children are likely hearing about – regardless how parents may try to shield them. These events compounded with other factors like existential uncertainty, the pervasive influence of social media, and a breakdown of civility in society are likely impacting children today and contributing to increased anxiety, says Abigail Gewirtz, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. Many of today’s challenges are unfamiliar with parents who are left trying to figure out the best way to respond.
“Parents are dealing with things in this generation that parents didn't have to deal with, at least in the last couple of generations. And that's a tricky thing to do, to know what to say, how to say, when to say it, what to listen for,” she says.
Although it may seem like there is nothing a parent can do, Gewirtz believes parents can take on these difficult conversations. In this episode of the EdCast, she shares effective communication strategies, including regulating parents' emotions and engaging in problem-solving conversations with children, and strking the balance between shielding children and providing age-appropriate information.
“I just want to acknowledge there's no resolution to these terrible events. But when I talk about resolution I'm thinking about how we can empower our children to feel better,” Gewirtz says. “These things worry us and upset us. And often we can be left feeling like, ‘There's nothing I can do,’ and we can be left feeling hopeless. But I think one of the most important messages that parents can convey to children is there is always something you can do.”
Higher education is one of the few industries that has changed little in the past few decades. Harvard Visiting Professor Brian Rosenberg believes there is an urgent need to transform higher education but too many structures and practices are keeping colleges and universities stuck in the past.
“Look at any mission statement for any college or university, and you will probably find a word like transformational or transformative. And look at the work of any faculty member in any discipline, and they will tell you that they're trying to push the boundaries of their discipline and change things,” Rosenberg says. “But when it comes to the way these institutions operate, there is, in fact, a powerful resistance to, reluctance to, opposition to change.”
He says an unsustainable financial model in colleges and universities and the importance of making education more accessible and equitable should be enough of a driver for higher education to change. However, a stubborn resistance to change is so embedded in the culture and structures of higher education have made it nearly impossible to. Some of those structures are the foundation of higher education like faculty tenure and shared governance.
In this episode of the EdCast, Rosenberg emphasizes the need for a shift in mindset and incentives to push for meaningful change in the field and to ensure its sustainability and relevance.
What does it mean to raise a grateful child? Developmental scientist and psychologist Andrea Hussong from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says it’s a lot more than teaching your child about basic manners. In fact, it’s a lot deeper than that and parents play a crucial role in modeling gratitude, how they create opportunities for children to experience gratefulness, and even talking to their children about it.
After studying parents and children, she recognized components of gratitude: what we notice, how we think or feel about it, what we do and how we enact grateful behaviors.
“One of the big things that gratitude does that I think is so important for kids is it helps us find people in our environment that care about us.” Hussong says. “It strengthens our relationship with them, and it makes that support network surround us with a little more care. And we know social support is so important, particularly now, when we're dealing with these pandemics of loneliness and isolation. We really need that.”
In this episode of the EdCast, Hussong shares strategies that can help your child develop a deeper understanding of gratitude, how you can foster it in the hearts and minds of your children, and the way to pivot as your child becomes a teenager. She also addresses the potential impact of gratitude on mental health.
Tony DelaRosa doesn’t think teachers can wait for policy mandating the inclusion of all races – especially Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) – in the classroom. The majority of states do not require curriculum about AAPI. Delarosa's aim is to support educators on how to do this necessary work on a group that’s historically and systemically invisible in the United States.
In DelaRosa’s new book, "Teaching the Invisible Race," he emphasizes the importance of being pro-Asian American in the classroom, which involves recognizing the intersectionality of Asian American identities and their connection to other racial and social justice movements.
"With my work, I'm challenging educators to think about how do you get Asian American in dialogue now? You're already talking with your kids. That's great. Step two is how do you actually get the community talking and involved? And that's another level. That takes years of practice..." he says. "And also a second level is that we need this even more in places where there's not Asian Americans. Much more important because if you're not going to get exposed to them by people, what is your way to build your racial literacy about Asian America if it's not in front of you? It has to be that school. School is the places to do those things.”
In this episode of the EdCast, he addresses the challenges teachers may face in implementing Asian American education and the need for racial literacy and the importance of failure and reflection in the learning process.
Harvard Associate Professor Nadine Gaab wants to see the whole system surrounding children and reading development change – starting in utero. Earlier intervention can be the ultimate game-changer when it comes to identifying children with dyslexia, but also other learning differences.
“When it comes to learning differences such as dyslexia, we are largely focused on a reactive deficit-driven wait to fail model instead of the development of preventative approaches,” she says. Gaab is a neuroscientist who researches the development of typical and atypical language and literacy skills in the pediatric brain, and pre-markers of learning disabilities.
"What we could show is that some of these brain alterations are already there in infancy, and toddlerhood, and preschool. So what we can conclude from this is that some children step into their first day of kindergarten with a less optimal brain for learning to read. So you want to find them right then, right? And that has tremendous implications for policy," she says. "You don't want to wait and let them fail if you already can determine who will struggle most likely and who will not."
While there have been some efforts to mandate universal dyslexia screening, it is only one small part of what needs to be done to take steps toward addressing the needs of children. The latter is something that Gaab envisions an entire community -- beyond just the school walls -- being a part of from pediatricians to bus drivers and even librarians.
In this episode of the EdCast, Gaab discusses the what we know and don’t know about dyslexia and literacy development, and why the need for intervention – as early as preschool -- could be the most impactful thing that happens.
Changing a school can be challenging, but possible when you have a group of folks committed to making change, says Justin Cohen. He is a writer and activist who authored, "Change Agents: Transforming Schools from the Ground Up." As part of his research, he spent time speaking to educators in various schools that had successfully implemented change to better understand how they were able to do so. There's no real secret to making change, he notes, but rather there were key steps that these schools did including being open to change and giving the teachers the keys to drive and implement it.
"Teachers know more than anyone what needs to happen," he says. "It's when the outsiders and the people with clipboards and the policymakers who haven't set foot in a school, since they dropped their kids off at private school, have a take. That's what I think gets people's backs up. And so when educators come together and talk, they know the challenges. They are deeply aware of what needs to happen, in a lot of cases, and are pretty disempowered when it comes to enacting or adopting the changes."
Sometimes that even means going rogue from the district, he admits. In this episode of the EdCast, Cohen shares the habits of schools that have managed to implement change and how you can too in your school.
The Supreme Court’s decision to end race conscious admissions and -- actions taking place in many states to curb diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts on college campuses – has raised the question: what is next for DEI in higher education? Rich Reddick, a leading thinker on DEI in higher education, knows that the field needs to regroup and rethink the future of diversity – something on the minds of most college administrators.
“Many folks this summer, we all were sort of in a funk, you know. It's just disappointing to know that the work and the research that has gone for the last 40 years, sort of, being dismissed,” says Reddick, the associate dean for equity, community engagement, and outreach for the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
“I remind people in both Fisher cases, there are amicus briefs submitted by the Fortune 100 and the military saying [diversity] is something that's critical to our ability to be competitive. Having a diverse population and having students have an opportunity to learn from each other and expose to each other's identities is such an important part of what makes us competitive economically, socially, politically. So that can't go away,” he says, reminding that this is a time for applicants to lean into diversity in college admissions and for colleges to lean on partners in higher education to continue their commitment to diversity.
In this episode of the EdCast, Reddick shares his reaction to the Court’s decision, how it has impacted and changed his work with college administrators, and ways for those doing the challenging work of diversity today to stay committed to the fight.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing how we work with implications for the future. A recent study, conducted by edX Founder Anant Agarwal and Workplace Intelligence, reveals how AI is already impacting the workforce. With the explosion of AI, 87 percent of executives are already struggling to find talent for jobs. In order to prepare students for the future -- this means educators must also learn to incorporate AI in their work and classrooms, he says.
Agarwal compares the adaption of AI in education as similar to other technological innovations like the Internet. “While students should learn how to use AI to research stuff and how to find different kinds of content, we need to help them understand how to use it in their day-to-day lives and at work, much as we brought in search engines and the Internet into the education process without fighting it," he says.
In this episode of the EdCast, Agarwal discusses why everyone needs to upskill in AI and how educators can begin learning more about AI in order to figure out the best approach in the classroom.
The field of out-of-school learning time is vast and supports 10 million children a year. Despite this, the programs are often viewed as glorified babysitting and tremendously undervalued. Harvard Sociologist Bianca Baldridge began studying these programs many years ago, citing the impact they had on her own life and how little was known about them.
"I do think it is important for people to understand that as a society, we really depend on the sector in ways that we may not realize. So it's not only supporting the education system, the school system, because schools can't do everything. They never have. They never will," she says. "When parents are working, working late, young people have a place to go. That really supports the economy and thinking about parents having more time and space to work. And it provides young people with an opportunity to explore what they love, hone in on particular skills, engage with their peers, and also engage in relationships with youth work professionals."
In this episode, she shares insight into the out-of-school learning sector, its unique impact on children's lives, the challenges it faces, and ways the sectors can work together.
When the pandemic hit, Stanford Economist Thomas Dee knew it was important to track enrollment as a means of understanding what children are experiencing. He discovered that 1.2 million students didn't enroll in public school. Dee's data indicates not only where these children went but also a significant number of children unaccounted for.
A closer look at this data provides some insight into aspects of academic recovery that might also be missing.
"So much of our academic recovery discourse is focused on the kids still in public schools, and particularly those older kids who are in the kinds of testing windows that draw our attention," he says. "But the enrollment data are telling us really that some of the most substantial reductions in enrollment are among younger students, who to this day haven't yet aged into testing windows and won't until we hit the fiscal cliff, when the federal resources available to school districts run out."
The implications for such significant enrollment changes range from challenges in instruction, how to distribute funding properly, to possible layoffs and school closures.
John Silvanus Wilson Jr. believes higher education institutions have something to learn from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) that can change the future of democracy.
“What's in their DNA, what's in their history, and what remains on many of the campuses is a model for what needs to happen in this country and in this world now if we are going to save a democracy and save the planet in that order, by the way, which is unfortunate because a broken democracy cannot save a broken planet,” Wilson says.
Wilson, currently the executive director of the Millennium Leadership Initiative for Aspiring Presidents, has a long history with HBCUs as a graduate and later president of Morehouse College, and also the leader of the White House Initiative on HBCUs under the Obama Administration.
While HBCUs have long been viewed through a lens of deficiency and survival, Wilson notes that these institutions actually are preeminent in character – something that is missing from many institutions nationwide. He calls on higher education to focus more on producing citizens who aspire to common good rather than personal gain. “I think all of American higher education has to heed what John Dewey said and begin to deliberately shape people who will leave and not just be selfishly concerned about their own well-being but about the well-being of society, the shape and condition of democracy,” he says. “This is critical.”
In this episode of the EdCast, Wilson reflects on HBCU history and how it can inform the future of higher education and democracy.
While the pandemic has challenged literacy development and outcomes for many students – that doesn’t mean America is currently in a literacy crisis. Harvard Professor Catherine Snow, a pioneer with decades of research in language and literacy development, says she’s puzzled by the public discourse about a literacy crisis.
There are many districts that did well weathering the storm of COVID. Snow reminds that the negative impacts on children’s reading test scores is not evenly distributed.
In this episode of the EdCast, Snow discusses the current state of American literacy, and how despite knowing what works, we continue to question and confuse various modes of instruction and the science of reading.
Melinda Mangin stresses the importance of creating welcoming gender inclusive environments -- regardless of whether anyone in your school identifies as transgender.
“If you imagine a quarter of your students somehow see themselves as gender nonconforming-- they like something that's not stereotypically appropriate for their assigned gender-- then we're talking about a lot of kids,” says Mangin, a professor at Rutgers University who is an expert in inclusive schools for transgender people. “I think it's really incumbent upon us to move away from seeing gender as a problem, and waiting to fix a problem, and trying to reframe it as this is an opportunity to be more expansive in how we understand a concept, and to create space for that expansiveness to present itself, and really just shifting our mindset about the work that we're doing. We're not fixing a problem. We're creating opportunities for genuine authenticity for kids.”
Many educators struggle to understand how best to do this work, and it comes with many fears, she says. Given the current climate of hate and laws against transgender people, she hopes educators will still do their best to affirm student’s identify and work on developing gender neutral school cultures.
In this episode, she discusses steps educators can make to develop more trans inclusive schools and efforts all schools should take toward building more gender inclusive school climates.
When it comes to navigating a child’s digital life, there are many challenges facing today’s parent, says Katie Davis. While an overemphasis is often placed on screen time limits, Davis says this is often a simplistic approach to managing children’s digital media use and families need to go deeper.
Davis, an associate professor at the University of Washington, has long researched the impact of digital technologies on young people. In her latest work, she explores a wide range of technology and its impact on children at multiple stages of development – from toddler to twenty-something. She reflects on her own experience as a parent, and encourages families not to stress about the challenges of raising children in the age of digital media. “We do our best as parents to steer our children towards positive technology experiences, and we do our best to monitor what they're doing, ultimately, the challenges are bigger than what we can solve within our family, and it really takes more than individual families to address these challenges,” Davis says. “It takes government regulation, and it takes technology companies changing their practices.”
In this episode of the EdCast, Davis talks about how children engage with technology at each stage of development and how they can best be supported.
Social psychologist Geoff Cohen says a crisis of belonging is destroying us. One in five Americans suffers from chronic loneliness. Young people are struggling with high levels of anxiety and mental health issues at times when they desperately need a sense of connection and belonging.
Although most of us know what it feels like to be excluded or question our belonging, Cohen says we don't do the greatest job of recognizing that feeling when it happens to others. In fact, we often threaten other people's sense of belonging, he says. It's having a serious affect on our wellbeing.
The good news is there are small ways we can change and even nurture belonging as educators, parents, and citizens. In this episode, he shares what we need to do to truly create places of belonging.
Educators need to do more to address the basic social emotional needs of immigrant children if they are to advance in learning, says Harvard Professor Carola Suárez-Orozco. She is the director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, where she's focused on the practices that can change immigrant children’s lives in the classroom. Immigrant children make up 27 percent of US student population. Immigrant children face many challenges and also have many strengths and resiliences. However, those qualities often go unnoticed in the quest to learn English. Suárez-Orozco doesn't dismiss learning English as important, rather she wants educators to gain a better understanding of who immigrant children really are in order to succeed.
Parental rights movements have gained much momentum in recent years with huge potential to impact the future of public education. University of Massachusetts (Lowell) Associate Professor Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire, also hosts of the education policy podcast "Have You Heard," say there's more happening with these movements than meets the eye. For the past few years, parents and schools have been embroiled in controversy on everything from banned books to curriculum choices to mental health clinics on campuses. This isn't the first time in education history where we've seen such movements, but Berkshire and Schneider say we need to pay closer attention to the political agendas behind them, and what this means for public education. In this episode, they reflect on the history of parental rights movements, the political agendas at play, and how these movements impact educators and students.
Despite growing concerns about generative artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, in education, Harvard's Chris Dede isn't overly worried. As a researcher on emerging technologies, he's seen many decades where new technologies promised to upend education. But Dede recognizes artificial intelligence requires educators to get smarter about how they teach in order to truly take advantage of what AI has to offer. As the associate director of research for the National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education, Dede says AI raises the bar and it has the power to significantly impact learning in powerful ways. In this episode of the EdCast, Dede talks about how education needs to get smarter to work with artificial intelligence.
Longtime educator Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade thinks schools have been focused on equality for too long and need to fundamentally rethink it. He says equality is not producing the results that schools really need of providing all students with a quality education. While visiting schools many years ago, he noticed educators used the terms "equality" and "equity" interchangeably. Then, he started tracking what that actually means and the data demonstrates it doesn't work. What would schools look like if they were truly equitable places? In this episode of the EdCast, Duncan-Andrade reimagines what education could look like in America if we dared to break free of the system that constrains it.
Mostly everyone has had some connection to hip-hop, especially students today, according to Harvard Lecturer Aysha Upchurch. It's more than just rap music, hip-hop is a cultural movement consisting of MCing, DJing, breaking, graffiti, and knowledge. It's been a part of our lives for almost 50 years. When we think about education, Upchurch says, it's important to consider hip-hop as part of it. As the director of HipHopEx, an experimental lab at Harvard that explores hip-hop pedagogy, Upchurch has experienced firsthand what can happen when education welcomes hip-hop with open arms. In this episode of the EdCast, Upchurch breaks down what hip-hop is and isn't, and ways that educators can incorporate hip-hop into their relationships with students and schools.
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Many elementary schools around the nation have little time or support to focus on social studies. It may explain why we see topics like Thanksgiving reduced to simple acts of gratitude or longstanding myths opposed to its more complex history. University of Colorado Boulder Assistant Professor Noreen Naseem Rodríguez says the lack of social studies in elementary curriculum is "heartbreaking" and really necessary for democracy. But it's not about just teaching any social studies, it's about making an effort to teach an anti-oppressive social studies -- or one that tells the full story about the nation and all its people.
“When we think about anti-oppressive social studies, we're really thinking about ways to bring those who have been marginalized for so long to the center, and to find ways to teach social studies so that every child in a classroom can see themselves reflected in who is a part of a community, who is a part of this nation's history. And it isn't just about the great things that have happened in this nation, but really engaging with some of that complexity in ways that are appropriate for young children,” she says. “We don't want to terrify them, we don't want to traumatize them, but making sure that students feel seen and that they have a sense of belonging no matter who they are, what their identities are. And that requires us to really throw out a lot of the stuff that's traditionally been used in classrooms.”
In this episode of the EdCast, Rodríguez shines the light on the current state of social studies in elementary schools and why it needs to change. She shares ideas about how educators can lean into teaching uncomfortable narratives and some of the challenges to doing this work.
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Harvard Lecturer Laura Schifter wants more schools taking climate action. Schools are major contributors to climate issues in ways that educators and administrators may not even realize. Schifter says it goes beyond just the high use of energy, but also school buses and high food waste. The good news is schools can do a lot to shift its carbon footprint and make it part of student’s education at the same time.
Schifter, who leads the K12 Climate Action Initiative at the Aspen Institute, aims for 100,000 schools to run entirely on clean, renewable energy in 10 years. But what is it going to take to get there? In this episode of the EdCast, Schifter outlines the reasons why schools must act now and shares the many resources available to make change a reality.
The latest National Assessment of Educational Progressed showed big declines in students' math performance -- in some cases as low as 20 years ago. The results showcased the effects of the pandemic and in particular how hard it was to teach math, say Harvard experts Heather Hill and Jon Star. In this episode of the EdCast, they share why the scores dropped significantly, how challenging it can be to teach math, and ideas on how to move forward from this moment.
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Children's imaginations are complicated and impressive, says Harvard Professor Paul Harris. Yet, often times, when we watch children pretending, we write it off as fantasy or child's play. What are educators and parents missing in those moments? How can adults be better informed about the nature of children's thinking? From how children mimic reality while pretending to why children develop fears to how they differentiate between make believe and what we tell them, Harris' decades of research demystifies children's thinking. In this episode, Harris takes us on a journey through children's imaginations and contemplates how educators and parents can better use children's imaginations for learning.
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The upcoming election has the potential to greatly shift the landscape many superintendents are working in around the nation. The work of superintendents has never been more challenging, say Senior Lecturer Jennifer Cheatham and Claremont Graduate University Professor Carl Cohn, given the ongoing polarization today. That divide is impacting superintendents day-to-day work, making it incredibly hard to focus on key things like teaching and learning, equity, or even relationship building. “There've always been challenges working with the typical political characters, board members, unions, the stress of the job, supporting communities through crises,” Cheatham says. “These are not necessarily new for them. They're just amplified putting even more pressure and stress on superintendents and resulting probably in even more personal sacrifice.” Superintendent turnover is at an all-time high, with one in every four superintendents considering leaving the job, they say.
In this episode of the EdCast, Cohn and Cheatham examine the current state of the superintendency and share ideas on how to manage in fraught times.
What can happen when parents challenge a curriculum? How can movements against curriculums take hold? There's a lot more to it than you might think, according to University of Hawaii at Manoa Assistant Professor Ethan Chang. Chang's research explores how a group of white parent activists challenged ethnic studies in California, catching the attention of news media nationwide. Although the movement didn't eliminate ethnic studies as part of the curriculum, it had good and bad repercussions. In this episode of the EdCast, Chang details the strategies activists used to challenge the curriculum in California schools, and why it behooves us to better understand the tactics made by counter-curricular movements.
What does it mean to be a school leader when the unimaginable happens? Frank DeAngelis, retired principal of Columbine High School, knows the answer firsthand. DeAngelis has dedicated much of his time in the past 23 years since the mass shooting at Columbine High School, helping other school leaders. Today he is part of the growing number of principals, who've endured school shootings, and work together as part of the Principals Recovery Network. In this episode, he reflects on the Columbine shooting, what he has learned, and about a new guide to help other school leaders work through responding to traumatic events like shootings.
Harvard Researchers Carrie James and Emily Weinstein give the low-down on teens' behavior online. As part of a multiyear study, they surveyed more than 3,500 teens uncovering information about everything from why they sext to how they navigate friendship dilemmas online. What teens do and why is far more complex than many adults give them credit for. As a result, Weinstein and James say that adults are missing key opportunities to truly guide their teens, instead falling back on tired and useless messaging. In this episode of the EdCast, they provide a glimpse into teens' online world and offer strategies for adults eager to connect and help with the young adults in their life.
Many school districts are beginning to see pandemic learning losses greater than they imagined. It’s time to figure out what to next, says Harvard Professor Tom Kane, an economist studying catch-up efforts. He wants districts to be empowered to make the best decision going forward. In his latest research, he’s helping districts determine how to plan for these losses and shares what interventions might provide the most bang for the buck. In this episode, Kane shares troubling information about how these learning losses have the potential to shape the future of education and how what we do now can get learning back on track.
Stewart Kwoh believes education is the best tool to fight back against ongoing anti-Asian American violence and damaging stereotypes. As co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project, Kwoh has been dedicated to developing curriculums and trainings for educators. Despite many of the lesson plans and tools being available for free, Kwoh admits it has taken time for education to embrace this rich history. In this episode, he shares the importance of learning about Asian American history and what are the roadblocks to embracing such a curriculum in our schools.
Harvard Professor Sarah Dryden-Peterson knows that we can do a lot better for the nearly 30 million refugees in the world. As an expert on refugee education, she says education needs to create better supports for displaced children whose education is disrupted, dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about the future. In her latest research, she shares how governments and international agencies have been hindered in this work and how refugee teachers and students are leading the way to better educational supports. In this episode, she reflects on the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and offers insight into what we've learned from other humanitarian crises.
A silver lining of the pandemic, says Harvard Professor Fernando Reimers, was the push for education to innovate. Through the pandemic, Reimers set out to study how education systems around the world sought out innovations, even in places that had few resources. While it was reassuring how many education systems worldwide tried to make changes, Reimers discusses how he saw a dip in that creative ingenuity over time during the pandemic and why. In this episode, he also shares the unique ways that universities collaborated with education systems and how the pandemic impacted global citizens.
Juliana Urtubey, the 2021 National Teacher of the Year recipient, knows firsthand the importance of valuing all parts of a student’s identity. As a first generation, bilingual immigrant, Urtubey brings all parts of herself into the classroom. Today, as a special education teacher working at the Kermit R. Booker, Sr. Innovative Elementary School in Las Vegas, she leans into her diverse classroom and community, fully celebrating it.
In this episode, she shares experiences and ideas for embracing student identity, and also how teachers can be better supported in their work.
Harvard Professor Dick Light has visited 260 college campuses talking to administrators, faculty, and students to figure out what sets a great university apart from an okay one. It turns out there are simple and affordable steps higher education administrators can do to make impactful changes on their campuses. Light has long studied the work of higher education and has plenty of stories to share about what happens when a university gets it right versus what happens when it goes wrong. In this EdCast, he's sharing the secrets of university success and even offers some advice to prospective students trying to decide whether their top choice is a "great" university.
Since the start of the pandemic, education has grappled with a looming threat of teacher shortages and a mass exodus of teachers. Elizabeth Steiner, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, has released two studies in the past year exploring job-related stress among teachers and recently school leaders. She says the changing modes of instruction, changing guidance on quarantining, mask and vaccine debates, and what's happening at home affects educators. They are one of the most stressed and depressed professions. In this episode, she reflects on the study's findings and shares what might help keep teachers in the job.
For the past decade, college enrollments have steadily been on the decline. The pandemic appears to have accelerated such drops with reports of more than a million fewer students attending college today. Chris Gabrieli, the chairman of the Board of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, agrees that this decline is a crisis with the potential to affect many different parts of society beyond just a person's future. He talks about how higher education is moving much too slowly to abate these shifts young people are making away from college. In this episode, Gabrieli outlines why we are seeing such declines in enrollment, shares how simple ideas like early college can lure young people back to college, and why we need to act now.
When Gloria Ladson-Billings set out in the 1990s to adapt critical race theory from law to education, she couldn’t have predicted that it would become the focus of heated school debates today.
In recent years, the scrutiny of critical race theory – a theory she pioneered to help explain racial inequities in education – has become heavily-politicized in school communities and by legislators. She says it has been grossly misunderstood and used as a lump term about many things that are not actually critical race theory. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor discusses the current politicization and tension around teaching about race in the classroom and offers a path forward for educators eager to engage in work that deals with the truth about America’s history.
Before the pandemic hit, Harvard Professor Stephanie Jones and Lecturer Emily Hanno were already tracking young children's development as part of the Early Learning Study at Harvard. As the pandemic began unfolding, they started to see shifts among the thousands of families and children participating in the study. Families reported a rise in temper tantrums, anxiety, and a poor ability to manage emotions, especially among the young elementary-aged children participating in remote learning. These findings may not come as a surprise to the many families who dealt with remote learning during the pandemic. However, Jones and Hanno say children's well-being and these experience matter now even as we inch toward a possible endemic. In this episode of the EdCast, they talk about how educators and families need to invest in social emotional learning before learning loss or lost classroom time. They share ways to support educators facilitating classroom experiences for children that allow them to process the experiences they've had. They also offer easy strategies for families to check in with their young children's well-being.
Many parents want to raise kind and compassionate children, but in today's world it can be difficult to figure out how. Traci Baxley, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University, is a mother of five children and believes parenting can be a form of activism. She is the author of "Social Justice Parenting: How to Raise Compassionate, Anti-Racist, Justice-Minded Kids in an Unjust World." In this episode of the EdCast, she shares ideas for how to create an environment where kids can see themselves as part of a bigger family and offer support to take action in the world.
What is driving an increase in college completion rates? It's not student characteristics or higher student enrollments, says Jeff Denning, an associate professor at Brigham Young University. Denning, an economist noticed the increasing trend started in the 1990s, and upon looking deeper discovered grade inflation is driving numbers up. In this episode, Denning explains this change and what it might mean for higher education.
COVID has challenged many education systems worldwide. This is especially true for developing countries that faced significant learning issues prior to COVID. How far did COVID set these education systems back? How can countries like Brazil move forward? Claudia Costin, the founder and director of the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policies at Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil, discusses how COVID has impacted education in Brazil and offers a path forward.
Math class doesn't seem the likely place to practice gratitude, but Michael Fauteux discovered that it had the power to change it. While teaching a 9th grade math class, Fauteux begin implementing moments of gratitude and soon started to see impacts on student learning. Through Fauteux's non-profit GiveThx that uses digital thank you notes and research based lessons to nurture mental health and improve academic success, he's sharing the practice in classrooms around the country. Since its launch in 2018, there have been over 300,000 gratitude notes sent by over 20,000 students. In this episode, he discusses what motivated him to launch the nonprofit and how gratitude can help student social emotional learning and more.
Christopher Emdin wants schools to embraces a whole student's identity. For far too long, public education has been stuck where it was not designed for all students, especially students of color, he says. Emdin, an associate professor at Teachers College, has long focused on issues of race, class, and diversity in education. Now, he's proposing a new educational model to help teachers and students celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. He reimagines schools where educators use authenticity as a driving factor in their work. In this episode, Emdin shares his philosophy on being ratchetdemic, how educators can become ratchetdemic, and why it matters.
What are children learning about climate change in American schools? That question set award winning journalist Katie Worth to uncover how climate change education is being taught. As part of her research, she visited several states, talked to teachers, scoured text books, and spoke to students and their families. It turns out climate change education is just as contentious in the classroom as it is in politics. In this episode, she shares points of friction happening between teachers within the same schools and how students are often unable to connect environmental disasters in their own communities with climate change. Additionally, Worth discusses how the fossil fuel industry sometimes plays a firsthand role in children's education. She shares the potential repercussions of raising a generation of children unable to understand the effects of climate change on their world.
Mistakes are supposed to be part of learning. However, Maleka Donaldson knows how we convey mistakes and respond to them as educators can significantly impact a child's learning experience. Donaldson is an assistant professor at Smith College where she studies teacher-student interactions and responding to mistakes in early learning. In her book, "From Oops to Aha: Portraits of Learning from Mistakes in Kindergarten," she examines instruction in the classrooms of four public school kindergarten teachers showing the varied ways these interactions happen, and how factors beyond the teachers’ control shape their approaches to teaching and contribute to structural inequities.
Higher education needs major change and reinvention to provide more opportunity and social mobility for everyone. This is what Paul LeBlanc hopes to see in the future. As the president of Southern New Hampshire University for 18 years, LeBlanc has led tremendous change including becoming the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education and to offer a full competency-based degree program. In this episode of the EdCast, LeBlanc shares insight into why and how the institution made these groundbreaking changes. He also discusses the future of higher education and a need to get back to some of the initial focus that drove higher education in America – its students and opportunity.
The school nurse's job encompasses much more than you'd think. Even before COVID, the school nurse was the "health hub" of the school. Yet 25.2% of schools don't even have a nurse. Linda Mendonca, the president of the National Association of School Nurses, discusses the need for school nurses and how they are doing much more than most of us realize. She offers guidance for the school community, especially administrators, on how to make sure your school nurse is a part of important conversations.
It's a contentious time to be a school board member in America. Michael Casserly, a strategic adviser for the Council of the Great City Schools, reflects on the current state of school board meetings happening around the country. He also provides insight regarding the purpose of school boards, what a board needs to do to function well, and how to manage controversy.
There's a lot of conversation in education about how to use this summer to make up for lost academic time in COVID. But depending on the student and the situation -- summer school may or may not be the right solution. Catherine Augustine, a senior policy researcher at RAND Corporation, has spent many years examining what makes summer school effective. She advises that while summer school isn't magic, it can also be beneficial for some children. Additionally, she breaks down some of the differences between summer school and extended learning, and offers guidance to families trying to figure out what to do with their children this summer.
Jessica Lahey wondered how to keep kids from developing addictions to drugs and alcohol. She thought about it in her job as an educator at an inpatient drug and alcohol rehab for adolescents. She also pondered this as a parent and an alcoholic. Lahey knows that preventing substance abuse isn't cut and dry. In her new book, The Addiction Inoculation, she explores substance abuse risks and what parents need to know to keep their children safe.
DC Public School Chancellor Lewis Ferebee was making strides on student academic gains, growing enrollments and creating the positive environment that he wanted for the nearly 50,000 students in the district. Then COVID happened. Like many education leaders, he faced unprecedented challenges to deliver distance learning, properly ventilate school buildings, extend supports and reopen schools. Ferebee shares what it has been like to lead the district though this time and some of the unique steps he has taken, as well as what has worked and what hasn't.
The pandemic has exposed gender inequities that don't often get talked about in education. It doesn't matter whether women work in early childhood, or higher education, or somewhere in between, these inequities play out similarly across the field. Jennie Weiner, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, studies how to make education -- especially leadership -- more inclusive and equitable. While education has long been a "highly feminized profession," Weiner explains the unique way this has worked against women in the field. She shares the importance of gender as we work toward an antiracist society and strive for a more just world. She also suggests steps toward change.
How has the end of adolescence changed or has it at all? Harvard Professor Nancy Hill and Lecturer Alexis Redding set out to better understand changes in adolescent development across generations. When they discovered an untapped archive from the 1970s, they expected to uncover huge changes, especially considering how the world shifted in the past 50 years. Instead they found common ties among the generations. They share how these generational similarities offer insight into how we can better support adolescents at home and in college. They also debunk this idea that today's adolescents are "coddled" and "overparented."
Systemic racism has deeply permeated all aspects of our schools to the point it's gone viral. Racist curriculum and racist acts of teachers have trended on social media, even though it's long been a problem in schools. Bree Picower, an associate professor at Montclair State University, says it's more than 'just a few bad teachers' and really a complex problem that needs to be managed on multiple levels from teacher education programs to the classroom. She's a teacher educator who has studied how curriculum choices perpetuate White supremacy and the strategies educators can use to disrupt them.
President Biden's recent insistence that standardized testing should happen this year has been met with reluctance in many states. Harvard Professor Andrew Ho explains the importance of moving forward with standardized testing and what it can tell us about the impact of COVID on students. Ho is a psychometrician who studies educational assessments. He explains why we must consider this more an "educational census" rather than an "assessment" and how to achieve that. He also discusses how much we actually know about learning loss, and how testing may offer insight into targeting supports.
Think that propaganda is an outdated thing of the past? Well, think again. Propaganda is everywhere -- in the news, entertainment, politics, education, social media and more. Renee Hobbs, a media literacy expert, says it's vital that adults and children better understand how to identify and analyze propaganda. Hobbs, the director of URI's Media Education Lab, and the author of "Mind Over Media," is leading the way in what propaganda education looks like in our classrooms. She shares the history of propaganda education in America, and some of the ways pedagogy can incorporate lessons on propaganda in almost every subject today.
Developmental Psychologist Susan Engel discusses the importance of nurturing young children's ideas, and why we need to pay closer attention to what they think. Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology at Williams College, has long explored children's curiosity and how they learn to pursue ideas. From a young age, children's obsessions with dinosaurs or puddles or even topics like death are opportunities as educators and parents to nurture their ideas and interests. Engel shares ways for educators and parents to do this type of work, and contends that it's vital in schools and at home.
What will the future of college be like post-COVID? If one thing is sure, COVID has already significantly altered college admissions. Princeton Review Editor-in-Chief Robert Franek breaks down some of the changes in college admissions like the test optional movement and whether to take the SATs. Franek also addresses how college application rates seem to be trending upward and whether high school juniors and seniors should consider deferring or attending the next few years of college.
Jarvis Givens tells the history of Black teachers and their covert actions in the classroom during the Jim Crow South. An assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Givens latest research delves into the theory and practices of Black educators, which he calls "fugitive pedagogy," and how it has been passed down from the enslaved and beyond. This changes the deficit lens often taken when discussing Black education in America, revealing a powerful narrative that still impacts educators today.
The latest research on COVID and schools emphasizes the importance of reopening but far too many schools remain closed. Harvard Professor Meira Levinson discusses how efforts to reopen often stall due to a lack of trust in the school district. Levinson, who co-authored The Path to Zero Report, which provides guidelines on how to safely reopen, emphasizes how even with the best safety protocols, ventilation, and adequate supplies in place that districts face an even bigger issue: how to rebuild trust among the many key players it serves.
Introducing the new podcast Pivot Out Loud -- stories of education and life in a year of disruption. In this episode, Harvard EdCast host Jill Anderson recounts what it's like staying and working from home with a young child. She shares the struggle of trying to balance her child's academics and play along with working full-time.
Listen to more episodes: https://pivot-out-loud.simplecast.com/
What does education look like in a world turned sideways? Covid-19 forced teaching and learning to change overnight, transforming what it means to be a student, an educator, and a parent. How did people adapt and adjust? Pivot Out Loud explores — telling stories of education and life in a year of disruption. Hosted by Lory Hough, editor of Ed Magazine, and brought to you by the producers of the Harvard EdCast at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Educator's have always benefitted from self-care, and in today's challenging times, it is especially important. Harvard Lecturer Jackie Zeller discusses the what it means to practice self-care and how it can benefit more than just the educator. Zeller, a licensed psychologist, will be teaching a new course this spring at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on self-care and wellness. In this episode, Zeller discusses the benefits of self-care, ideas for how to create a practice of self-care, and a growing awareness in the education field around supporting wellness.
Disclaimer: This piece is meant to be solely informational in nature. It is not meant to provide professional care or recommendations. This piece includes general considerations, but people should contact their own providers for individualized advice and recommendations.
Educational sociologist Anindya Kundu recognized that students need more than grit to succeed in school. He studies the role of student agency, and how focusing on student potential can lead to growth and success in life, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Kundu, a Senior Fellow of Research at Labor Market Information Service, at the Center for Urban Research at The Graduate Center, CUNY, defines agency and offers ways for school leaders and educators to take steps toward developing student agency.
How does the world solve complex problems like climate change? One answer may be to teach science in more complex and personal ways. Through the research project, Learning in Places, Professors Megan Bang and Carrie Tzou are developing innovative and equitable field-based science lessons. In this episode of the EdCast, Bang and Tsou share ways to make science more personal and how to better connect children's learning to the natural world.
In this episode, Kristi Nelson, the executive director of a Network for Grateful Living, discusses why some people have an easier time finding gratitude than others, the role of education in being grateful, and how to implement strategies and education in order to cultivate more grateful living.
How much has college teaching really changed in 150 years? Not very much, according to Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In his latest book, The Amateur Hour, Zimmerman traces the history of undergraduate teaching practices in the United States and how it has yet to reach a level of professionalization. In this episode of the EdCast, Zimmerman discusses how colleges and universities got to where they are today, and what it might take to change the future of college teaching.
America seems more divided than ever. Paula McAvoy, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, has long focused her work on helping educators teach young people how to live together in this world. Educators can use the recent presidential election as a tool. In this episode of the EdCast, McAvoy discusses how to make the most of your "political" classroom.
Education research is often disconnected from the reality of practitioners in the field. Carrie Conaway, a senior lecturer at Harvard and an expert on how to apply education research in practice, gets into the details of how to bridge the gap between education research and practice. In this episode, she discusses the way education leaders can use existing education research and also begin to implement their own evidence-based research to figure out what works.
In this encore episode of the Harvard EdCast, which originally aired on February 13, 2019, Tony Jack discusses the consequences of conflating access and inclusion — and the barriers that low-income students face when they get to college -- a situation even more important in the wake of campus closures due to COVID.
We don't often hear about the 15% of students who attend rural schools. It seems this population is often left out of national conversations about the impact of COVID on education. Mara Tieken, an associate professor at Bates College, is an expert on rural schools and has been helping many rural school districts cope throughout the pandemic. In this episode, Tieken talks about some of the ways rural schools are getting through the pandemic and ideas on how to include rural schools in the national conversation.
Times are troubling for many higher education institutions around the country. With many enrollments down and huge drops in student applications for federal financial aid, it's not just institutions struggling but low-income college goers are facing major disruptions as well. Bridget Terry Long -- the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an economist -- is concerned about every student and how the pandemic may impact their education and futures. In this episode, she speaks candidly about the many challenges facing higher education institutions, college goers, and what it's like to lead an institution during a pandemic.
Many people question the state of democracy in America. This is especially true of young people, who no longer share the same interest in democracy as the generations before them. Harvard's Danielle Allen has long studied what citizens need in order to succeed in democracy and how our social studies and civics education can impact this. In this episode, Allen discusses how we got where we are today, the unique role of education, and what it takes to reinvest in education for democracy.
With many children learning remotely this fall, Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy – a leader in online learning – knows that it’s a daunting task for everyone involved to deliver the best and most high quality experience. In this episode of the EdCast, Khan shares some of the most effective teaching strategies for remote learning, and how parents can help support online learning at home. He also gives practical tips for how to manage teaching young children online.
Only about 14 percent of Native Americans attend college and many often leave before graduating. TaraJean Yazzie-Mintz has spent much of the past three decades working to improve access to education for Native people. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, she addresses the barriers to higher education for Native people, and how higher education institutions can do a better job at welcoming and keeping Native people in this space.
The pandemic set off a race for schools to launch remote learning and to keep children from falling behind. But at what cost? In this episode of the EdCast, Harvard Lecturer Uche Amaechi discusses the tension that exists for schools trying to find a balance between continuing education in equitable ways among all students.
With more than 55 million children out of school due to the pandemic, school leaders are facing the adaptive challenge of all time. The challenges go far beyond closures. Harvard Professor Deborah Jewell-Sherman shares what is on the minds of school leaders throughout the country, and advises how they can stay grounded and plan in such a difficult time.
What is the role of schools in teaching students, especially students of color, how to face oppression and develop political agency? Are there ways that some educators succeed in doing this in one school but not in another school? Professors Daren Graves and Scott Seider were eager to find the answers and set out to research five mission-driven high schools over four years. In this episode of the EdCast, they share the ways that educators and school leaders can help young people better understand and challenge racial injustices.
Despite family meal times being hugely beneficial to kids, only about 30% of families manage to eat together regularly. Anne Fishel, executive director of the Family Dinner Project, knows it's not always easy to find that time but it also doesn't have to be so hard. Through her work, she helps families find fun, creative, and easy ways to make meals a reality. As many families adjust to stay-at-home orders from the Coronavirus, there is a silver lining in that now there is time to enjoy a family meal or two.
With many schools closed around the country due to the Coronavirus, educators and parents may have growing concerns about how long students can go without formal instruction. Jennifer McCombs, a senior policy researcher for the RAND Corporation, has long studied the effects of summer break on learning -- particularly for at risk students from low-income families or students performing below grade level. In this episode of the EdCast, McCombs discusses how what we know from summer learning loss might guide educators, districts, and parents as they set forth on learning when school is closed.
This newest generation of college students know that algorithms tend to skew the truth online, but many feel it is par for the course. Alison Head, a researcher and director of Project Information Literacy, explores how algorithmic-driven platforms are shaping the ways college students access news and information and its potential to change the college landscape.
Many school districts are facing challenging decisions about how to prepare and respond to the novel Coronavirus including whether to close and try distance learning. Harvard Epidemiologist Bill Hanage and Education Ethicist Meira Levinson explore the public health issue and its potential impact on schools and families. They also offer guidance for practitioners and parents.
Harvard Lecturer Laura Schifter explains disproportionality and why so many students of color are placed in special education, often in separate classrooms from their peers. While income status is sometimes accepted as the reason behind this phenomenon, Schifter says that doesn't tell the full story. In this EdCast, Schifter shares recent research into this issue and discusses the challenges facing special education.
There's much debate in the literacy world about what's the best way to teach children to read. With two out of three children struggling to learn to read, the nation is questioning what actually works. Harvard Professor James Kim discusses why learning to read is so challenging and shares how his latest model called MORE offers another way.
Children aren't the only people compromising their privacy online. Grown ups are also taking to to digital media and technology, and oversharing information about the children in their lives too. Leah Plunkett, a law professor and parent, wants adults to think twice before talking about children online. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Plunkett, author of "Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online," discusses all the way adults -- including educators -- overshare details about children and how to take steps to safeguard their actions.
When Joe Feldman, author of Grading for Equity, looked closer at grading practices in schools across the country, he realized many practices are outdated, inconsistent, and inequitable. Today he helps educators develop strategies that tackle inconsistent grading practices. In doing so, Feldman tells the Harvard EdCast how shifting grading practices can change the landscape of schools and potentially the future for students.
Although more children have developmental language disorder (DLD) than autism -- most people have never heard of it. Dr. Tiffany Hogan, the director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at MGH Institute, wants greater awareness of this language disorder, especially among educators and parents. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, she discusses what DLD is and how it can affect children's learning ability.
Many educators struggle with unconscious bias in their roles at school -- often in ways that can unknowingly perpetuate racism and negatively affect students. In this episode of the EdCast, Tracey Benson and Sarah Fiarman offer ways to address these issues directly and outline how educators can start this work in their schools. Benson, an assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Fiarman, director of leadership development at EL Education, are authors of the new book, Unconscious Bias in Schools.
When many people see the college price tag, they believe it's financially out-of-reach. But Wellesley College Professor Phillip Levine, who studies college affordability, says that people often don't realize there's a difference between the price of college and what a family might actually pay. Through the development of Myintution.org -- an online tool that helps families uncover the actual cost -- he hopes more students will achieve their college dreams.
Harvard Professor Andrew Ho thinks test scores can often simplify how we view student performance, school effectiveness, and educational opportunity. By taking a more comprehensive look at data like test scores and learning rates in districts, we may be able to better identify and contextualize how well a school is doing beyond just average test scores. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Ho discusses his work with the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and how it provides data to help scholars, policymakers, educators, and parents learn how to improve educational opportunity for all children.
Many college and university leaders recognize the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work being done on their campus, but that doesn't always mean it's done for the right reasons. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Richard Reddick, associate dean for equity, community, engagement and outreach at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses the rise of DEI work in higher education and how this work should create more courageous spaces on college campuses.
Students are struggling with mental health issues on college campuses. Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker, a founding director of McLean Hospital's College Mental Health Program in Massachusetts, says there's a lot of things we can all do to help the college mental health crisis. Pinder-Amaker discusses the factors leading to mental distress on campus, how colleges can create better responses, and really how everyone plays an important role in this issue, especially what happens long before students get to college.
Sociologist Rebecca London knows recess is an afterthought in many schools day. Too often, it's just seen as a break or a way to get some physical exercise for kids. She wants to see educators rethink how to use that time to better support young students. In this episode of the EdCast, London shares ideas from her new book, "Rethinking Recess," how to create a more inclusive recess, and why taking away recess -- especially as punishment -- is a bad idea for kids.
David Wilson used college as a path out of poverty. Now, as the president of Morgan State University in Baltimore, he wants that to be the reality for other children too. But, for so many kids today, getting to college and paying for college is a challenge. After 25 years in higher education leadership, President Wilson grapples with issues of access for students every day. In this episode of the EdCast, he talks about why this is a pivotal time to change higher education and how to tackle issues of rising costs associated with college.
Dr. Janice K. Jackson knew taking the role as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools would be challenging. She has inherited a history of problems in the district, but refuses to make her leadership about the blame game. In this episode of the EdCast, she discusses how she's facing the challenges before her. Even with a teacher strike looming, Jackson's pragmatic leadership and "We'll get through it" attitude frames her decision-making as the head of the third largest school district in the country.
The books children read in the classroom today look a lot like they did decades ago. Kim Parker, cofounder of #Disrupttexts, wants to change that. In this EdCast, she addresses the challenges facing educators trying to diversify books in their classroom. With diverse books regularly appearing on the American Library Association's most challenged and banned books in libraries and schools, Parker discusses this and our inability to move beyond the literary canon. She offers ideas for educators trying to take steps to incorporate diverse books in their practice and how parents can be supportive allies in the process.
Regardless of how you might feel about immigration, Harvard Professor Roberto Gonzales thinks we need to better understand its implications and how it affects everyday life of immigrants and beyond. In this episode, Gonzales discusses the immigration crisis in America and his new effort, the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, to connect researchers, policymakers, and immigrant communities together in dialogue, supportive action, and shared learning.
Harvard researchers Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine talk about what they discovered while studying nontraditional, innovative high schools, and what we can learn from the pockets of great work happening around the country.
In this EdCast extra, Harvard Senior Lecturer Richard Weissbourd along with Nicolas Burgess, 17, and Dequan Franks, 19, from Jacksonville, Florida, speak about the EVAC movement, experiences as "at-risk" youth, and address the immense inequities facing some students.
Harvard Psychologist Rick Weissbourd guides parents (and high schools) to be better ethical role models, especially in the college admissions process.
Educator Tina Owen-Moore speaks about the creation of the Alliance School in Milwaukee and strategies to combat bullying.
Mandy Savitz Romer, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, shares misconceptions about the profession, and how the school counselor role should change to better support children.
Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen discusses the world of global education, and how educators can incorporate a global approach in the classroom.
Vanessa Siddle Walker, professor of African American educational studies at Emory College, discusses the role of black educators in desegregation efforts and why school integration didn't end up working as hoped.
Sepehr Vakil, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, talks about the importance of looking at computer science education beyond just the technical – and what a more ethical and power balanced computer science course might look like in education.
Harvard Professor Marty West talks about the wave of teacher strikes happening throughout the country and the complexities of teacher compensation that make it difficult to raise salaries.
Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former dean of freshmen at Stanford University, talks about the dangers of overparenting and how it can make or break a child's success at college.
Justin Driver, a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, reflects on the history of Supreme Court education rulings and foreshadows legal issues that may be percolating in public schools today.
Sarah Cohodes, an assistant professor at Teachers College, talks about the state of charter schools and whether we can transfer effective charter school practice to traditional public schools.
Tony Jack, author of The Privileged Poor and assistant professor at Harvard, discusses the experiences of low income students as colleges try to diversify student population, and ways we can change it for the better.
Todd Rogers, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and also director of the Student Social Support R&D lab, talks about discovering an effective intervention against chronic absenteeism, how to get more students back in class, and what seems to work in targeting absent students.
Dr. Stanley Andrisse, director of From Prison Cell to Ph.D., shares his story and discusses the school to prison pipeline, and how higher education can remove barriers for formerly incarcerated people so they can use education to transform their lives.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf shares why she has focused so much of her term on education, and particularly the creation of Oakland Promise, which aims to get more kids to acquire postsecondary education.
Lecturer Todd Rose discusses the importance of personalized learning in the quest for success, and how success will look different in the future.
Craig Paxton, executive director of Axium Education, shares the work being done to reach the millions of children living in rural communities throughout South Africa and the importance of providing education for this population.
Catherine Brown, vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress, provides insight into sex education standards around the country and the shift to do more.
Natasha Warikoo, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, discusses the Harvard trial and whether college admissions can ever truly be fair.
Irvin Scott, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, talks about why faith leaders can be key players in educational outcomes for children.
Ben Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri, gives an insider look at what happened during the 2015 Mizzou protests that led to resignations, decreased enrollment rates, and budget cuts.
Andria Zafirakou, the 2018 Global Teacher Prize winner, shares how the arts can be a powerful tool of inclusion and resilience for children.
Stanford Professor Sean Reardon talks about the downward trend in private school enrollments, what this tells us about the middle class in America, and why it’s important for everyone to pay attention to who goes to private school.
Doris Santoro, an associate professor at Bowdoin, explores how many teachers are demoralized not burnt out in the profession. She also discusses how school leaders can stave off this phenomenon and gives sound advice for teachers.
Randall Curren, a professor at the University of Rochester, discusses why it’s ethically indefensible for schools to continue sponsoring tackle football.
Early childhood education expert Junlei Li spoke to the Harvard EdCast recently about the meaning of high quality in early childhood education, how Fred Rogers' legacy influenced his work, and what deep and simple actually looks like in practice.
Activist Minnijean Brown-Trickey discusses the Little Rock Nine and the importance of uncovering and understanding the truth in America.
Stanford University's Denise Pope, also co-founder of Challenge Success, shares what we need to think about when it comes to choosing summer enrichment programs for our children, and offers some alternatives to children's rigid academic programs in the summer.
San Diego State University Professor Jean Twenge talks about her research that examining teens, smartphones and unhappiness.
Vicki Colbert, Yidan Prize winner, reflects on her work and research with Escuela Nueva.
Bob Schwartz and Nancy Hoffman, co-founders of the Pathways to Prosperity network and HGSE faculty, discuss what they’ve learned about preparing students for the workplace.
UC-Berkeley Professor Calvin Morrill talks about how a high school changed with increased security policies, and shares some perspective on how this might inform the current debate about school security.
CJ Anderson, Super Bowl champion for the Denver Broncos, reflects on his community activism work and shares tips for other non-profit leaders.
Angel Rich, founder and CEO of The Wealth Factory, examines the intersection of financial literacy, technology, and education.
Children's television producer Angela Santomero shares the inspirations behind her hit shows like Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, and talks about how parents can use television in smart and healthy ways.
Stephen Wolfram, CEO of Wolfram Research, reflects on the evolving role of computational literacy and AI in education.
Carol Dweck, Stanford professor of psychology, examines mindset, motivation, and parenting tips in the context of recently receiving the Yidan Prize.
Rick Weissbourd, faculty director of Making Caring Common, discusses the launch of the Caring Schools #CommonGood Campaign.
Jackson Katz, an educator, activist, and creator of the Mentors in Violence Prevention program, discusses the significant role men play in preventing gender violence and creating more gender equality in light of movements like Metoo.
John Wilson, former president of Morehouse College and former executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, talks to Domonic Rollins about educating black boys, obstacles on the road to college, and other issues affecting student equity.
Elmo (along with executive vice president Sherrie Westin) from Sesame Street visit the Harvard Ed School campus to discuss the global work Sesame Workshop is doing to educate young children displaced by conflict and persecution.
Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris shares how childhood adversity creates toxic stress that can impact health long term, and particularly how intervention and response through collaborative efforts can significantly alter children's futures.
Researcher and Author Carla Shalaby shares what she discovered from following four "troublemakers" as they made their way at school.
Georgetown University Professor William T. Gormley, Jr., discusses the importance of teaching critical thinking skills, especially in these times of “fake news.”
Columbia University Assistant Professor Raygine DiAquoi shares what she discovered about how black parents talk to their sons today about race and discrimination.
MIT Professor Mitch Resnick, author of “Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play”, talks about creativity in learning and explains why kindergarten is the greatest invention of the last millennium.
Chezare A. Warren, Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, reflects on urban teacher preparation, culturally responsive teaching, and critical race theory in education.
Psychotherapist Lynn Lyons talks about her work training educators to respond to student anxiety, and provides insight on what schools get right or wrong about anxiety in children.
John Palmer, Associate Professor and Chair of Educational Studies at Colgate University, reflects on refugee education in the Korean peninsula and beyond.
Vanessa Grigoriadis, author, explores what’s really happening behind closed doors on America’s college campuses.
Documentary filmmaker and girls' education advocate Zuriel Oduwole discusses what inspired her to become an advocate for better access to girls' education across the world.
Mark Emmert, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reflects on the evolving role of college athletics, amateurism in college sports, and his favorite moment as a fan.
Journalist Linda Wertheimer, author of Faith Ed: Teaching about Religion in an Age of Intolerance, looks at the challenges faced by public schools when incorporating lessons about world religions into their classrooms.
Chinese-American journalist Lenora Chu arrived in Shanghai in 2010 with her family enrolling her son in a top-performing school. Chu discusses the culture clash she experienced in her book, “Little Soldiers: An American Boy, Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve," and what America could learn from China.
Reshma Saujani, Founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, reflects on her organization's mission and why it is so crucial and important to the world.
Erin Castro, assistant professor at the University of Utah, reflects on co-publishing in the Harvard Ed Review with an incarcerated student of hers.
Jeff Perrotti, founding director of the Safe Schools Program for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning, discusses issues facing transgender students and how schools can provide support.
John Merrow, former education correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, shares insights from his new book "Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education."
Helen Janc Malone, Ed.D.’13, and Santiago Rincón-Gallardo, Ed.M.’07, Ed.D.’13, discuss trends reshaping the field of education and their new book, Future Directions of Educational Change: Social Justice, Professional Capital, and Systems Change.
Mike Palmer and Esther Lee, Ed.M.’14 discuss designing digital learning and their pedagogical approach at Kaplan.
Christopher Cerf, Superintendent of Newark Public Schools, reflects on his work and the history of Newark Public Schools.
Rick Weissbourd, HGSE faculty, discusses a new report looking at how young people struggle with romantic relationships and deal with widespread misogyny and harassment.
Colby College Professor Lyn Mikel Brown talks about how to empower young female activists.
Rebecca Holcombe, secretary of education for the state of Vermont, talks priorities and progress in leading the state's unique education system.
Maureen Costello, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, reflects on the historical and current importance of providing anti-bias education resources — and how they can better society.
Author Karin Chenoweth talks about her latest book, "Schools that Succeed," and how educators can break down the link between academic achievement and socioeconomic status.
Colby College Professor Mark Tappan discusses how to create good men and the problems with toxic masculinity.
Tommy Chang, superintendent of Boston Public Schools, reflects on his leadership, vision, and why he chose education as a career.
Pulitzer-prize winning writer Ron Suskind discusses being a father to his Autistic son, and how it inspired the book and film, "A Life Animated," and his autism activist work.
Sixteen-year-old Natalie Hampton shares her experience with bullying and how it prompted her to create the app "Sit With Us."
A moderated conversation with HGSE scholars on how educators can navigate ethical dilemmas in the classroom — and protect students from bullying, confront divisions, and foster inclusion.
University of Central Arkansas Assistant Professor Jesus Cisneros, also cofounder of DREAMZone, discusses the unique challenges facing undocumented students and higher education, and how to keep the dream alive.
Former Virginia Secretary of Education Anne Holton discusses how to be a champion for public education, women as leaders, and her new role as an education board member.
Pulitzer-Prize winning Journalist Paul Salopek discusses the Out of Eden Walk -- a 21,000-mile journey where he retraces the migratory pathways of our human ancestors.
Ashley Ford, writer and blogger, discusses how her Tweet about paying off school lunch debt inspired people to raise $150,000.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, activist and minister, reflects on the current political climate and shares his thoughts on the role of education as a means of fighting inequality.
Sr. Kathleen Ross, president emerita at Heritage University, identifies effective strategies that faculty have used to help New Majority students build the necessary skills to succeed in college.
Nicole Hockley, founder and managing director of Sandy Hook Promise, shares thoughts on how to prevent gun-related deaths so that no other parent experiences the senseless, horrific loss of their child.
Dejian Liu, founder of NetDragon Websoft Holding, discusses the intersection of tech and education -- and how that brought him to Harvard.
Sam Wineburg, Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, examines how youth determine whether information is real or fake on the Internet — and what can be done to help them make those decisions.
Marybeth Gasman, Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, reflects on the challenges in hiring a diverse faculty at the college and university level.
Ross Hall, Director for Education, Ashoka Europe, discusses his unique work on improving the world.
Natasha K. Warikoo, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, reflects on the notions of race, merit, and privilege in elite universities.
Christopher Gray, founder and CEO of Scholly, explains the mission and impact of his college scholarhsip app.
Dr. Jill Biden, Second Lady of the United States, discusses the educational experiences of the over 2 million military- and veteran-connected students in our K-12 classrooms.
Angela Maria Kelley, executive director, Center for American Progress Action Fund, reflects on the first 15 years of the DREAM Act, legislation to provide undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children a path toward legal status through education or the military.
Mable Chan, president and founder of China Personified, discusses “One In A Billion” a podcast about China, through the voices of Chinese millennials in America.
Kyle Schwartz, third-grade teacher and author, explains how one question can change everything for our kids.
Jerome T. Murphy, scholar and former dean of HGSE, shares his perspective on helping education leaders thrive under pressure by developing the inner strengths of mindfulness and self-compassion, expressing emotions wisely, and maintaining a clear focus on the values that matter most.
Hanan Al Hroub, winner of the 2016 Global Teacher Prize, speaks about her experiences as a Palestinian educator and her unique approach to instruction.
Harris M. Cooper, professor at Duke University, explains the reasons why all children should be doing homework.
Donald Leu, professor of education at the University of Connecticut Neag School of Education, explores how today’s educator must envision new ways of reading online.
Robert Smith, co-author of the book "Striving for Equity" examines making progress toward narrowing opportunity and achievement gaps in traditional school districts with diverse populations and multiple, competing agendas.
Peggy Orenstein, author of the book "Girls and Sex" examines how teens can better navigate from shame and regret to integrity and wellness when it comes to sex.
Judy Lam, Chancellor and Board Director at Wuhan College, reflects on the state of public and private higher education in China.
Sonia Nieto, educator and author of the book "Brooklyn Dreams: My Life in Public Education," looks back on her formative experiences as a student, activist, and educator, and shows how they reflect and illuminate the themes of her life’s work in multicultural education.
Fernando Reimers, professor at HGSE, shares a curriculum that is designed to empower global citizens around the world.
Rick Hess, co-editor of the book 'Educational Entrepreneurship Today,' reflects on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur in education.
Robin Hauser Reynolds, director of the film "Code: Debugging the Gender Gap" discusses both the message and movement associated with having more women and minorities code.
Julie Goodridge, lead plaintiff in the landmark Massachusetts case Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, reflects on her life's journey and discussed her time at HGSE.
Meira Levinson, co-editor of the book, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics, shares challenging questions of ethics, justice, and equity that educators and policy makers confront on a regular basis.
John R. Connolly, Co-Founder and Executive Director at 1647, reflects on how to design and implement family engagement strategies that support student learning and success in school.
Ellie Drago-Severson, professor at Teachers College, reflects on the value of constructive feedback, examining her new co-authored book, "Tell Me So I Can Hear You."
Paul Tough, NYTimes best selling author, examines how to make kids more motivated, engaged, and productive in the classroom.
Adam Seldow, Head of Education Partnerships at Facebook, reflects on the landscape of personalized learning and discusses why Facebook is partnering with Summit Public Schools.
Harvard professors Bob Selman and Joe Blatt reflect on 21st century learning through transmedia storytelling.
Sarah Fiarman, Lecturer at HGSE, discusses her new book "Becoming a School Principal: Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn."
Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, reflects on the global constraints that girls and women face to receiving an education and what UNESCO is doing to help.
Steve Seidel, member of the HGSE faculty, discusses passion driven learning with Cristina Pato, member of the Silk Road Ensemble.
Lisa Lahey, HGSE faculty and author of the book "An Everyone Culture" discusses a radical new model for unleashing your company’s (or schools’s) potential.
Diane Moore, Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard University, examines both the mechanics and importance of teaching religion to a global community.
Lindsay Sobel, Massachusetts Senior Executive Director of Teach Plus, reflects on the pulse of the common core state standards in MA schools.
Alejandra Y. Castillo, national director of the Minority Business Development Agency at the U.S. Department of Commerce, examines whether or not the United States will continue to be globally competitive in an ever-changing economic and technological landscape.
Sandra Boynton, children's book author and illustrator, reflects on her eclectic career in the arts and examines the role of joy in her work.
Larry Cuban, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, reflects on the stability and change of teaching history in American schools.
Rodrigo Mendes, founder of an institute dedicated to inclusive education, reflects on his global quest for improving social change amongst people with disabilities.
Robert Putnam, Harvard Kennedy School professor and author of "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis”
reflects on what educators can do to help restore some measure of social mobility in our society.
David Deming, associate professor at HGSE, and Beth Schueler, doctoral student at HGSE, reflect on lessons learned from the state's successful school takeover in Lawrence, MA.
Monica Higgins, professor at HGSE, shares news of an upcoming opportunity that aims to provide strategies that enhance and expand what works in education.
Joseph Davis, superintendent of the Ferguson-Florissant School District, examines the foundational role of schools in a community under the national spotlight.
Teresa Sullivan, President of the University of Virginia, reflects on leadership, her role models, and tips for developing a strong culture in higher education.
Kaya Henderson, Chancellor, DC Public Schools, reflects on the complexity of education reform and examines successes and challenges during her time as chancellor.
Marty West, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, discusses the big changes in federal legislation replacing "No Child Left Behind."
Tom Hehir, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, reflects on the state of disabilities education as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Landon Patterson, the first transgender Homecoming Queen at her school in Missouri, reflects on her story of courage and love.
H. Richard Milner IV, author and professor at the University of Pittsburgh School for Education, examines ways in which we can confront poverty and race in schools and classrooms.
Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity, examines the value of blended learning in the schoolwide ecosystem.
David Deming, associate professor at HGSE, examines test based accountability as it relates to college graduation rates and future earnings.
Chester Finn, author of the book "Failing Our Brightest Kids” discusses the global challenge of educating high-ability students.
Vanessa Rodriguez, advanced doctoral student and author of the book, "The Teaching Brain,” examines the intersection of education, neuroscience, and everyday experience
P. David Pearson, Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California - Berkeley, examines the theory and practice in reading comprehension.
Rick Hanson, author and psychologist, reflects on how educators can build inner strengths and be more mindful leaders.
Dale Russakoff, author of "The Prize," examines the troubled education reform story of Newark and reflects on what can be learned from its failure to provide system wide reform.
Stephen Ervin and Kristin Sullivan, Learning Spaces Week Co-Chairs, reflect on the future of learning spaces in education.
Peter Stokes, author of the book "Higher Education and Employability" examines new models for integrating study and work in the context of 21st century learning.
Karen Willemsen, education director for Define American, reflects on how educators can help undocumented high school students graduate informed, empowered, and thinking about furthering their education.
Bill Nave, author and research consultant, explains how and why teaching can be redesigned for classrooms in order to “reach every child.”
Roberto Rodriguez, deputy assistant to President Obama for education, examines the intersection of public policy and education, and reflects on a career that brought him from HGSE to the White House.
Farah Pandith, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, reflects on inclusion and exclusion through the lens of religious differences.
Cevin Soling, author of "The Student Resistance Handbook," shares his controversial opinions on the role of schools in the education of American youth.
Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), reflects on the challenges facing states in the increasingly politicized field of education.
Jennifer Bryan, psychologist and author, discusses gender and heteronormativity with HGSE's Rick Weissbourd.
David Kirp, author and professor, argues that there is a way to rebuild the public education system and close the achievement gap for all students.
Karen Brennan, assistant professor at HGSE, shares tips for engaging students in summer coding.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), shares her thoughts on how to improve the teaching profession and why we need more excellent teachers in this country.
Jane Hirschi, author of the book 'Ripe for Change: Garden-Based Learning in Schools,' reflects on garden-based learning in public K–8 education.
Rick Weissbourd and Eve Ewing, researchers at HGSE, examine how to speak with youth about turmoil, strife, and community challenges--with a particular focus on what has been happening recently in Baltimore.
Andres Alonso, HGSE professor and former CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, reflects on the recent protests in Baltimore and examines their impact on schools and children in a broader national context.
Kathy Boudett, director of the Data Wise Project, shares details of her new edX course called "Introduction to Data Wise: A Collaborative Process to Improve Learning & Teaching."
David Weinstein, founder and CEO of Write the World, shares his vision for helping students develop the writing strategies and communication tools essential for success in school, career, and life.
Alicia Lebrija, president of Fundación Televisa, reflects on why she is passionate about education and shares her hopes for the upcoming Latin America Education Conference at HGSE.
Daniel Koretz, professor of education at HGSE, reflects on the Atlanta cheating scandal and its impact on policy.
Anya Kamenetz, NPR's lead education blogger, sits down to discuss high-stakes testing in American schools and the effects they are having on children, teachers, and society.
Part 1 March 23 2015 Admitted Student Conf Call About The Practicum.WMA by Harvard Graduate School of Education
March 25 2015 Admitted Student Conf Call About Race And Equity.WMA by Harvard Graduate School of Education
Part 2 March 23 2015 Admitted Student Conf Call About The Practicum.WMA by Harvard Graduate School of Education
Anne Marcus, cofounder of Excptional Lives, and Chris Spence, educational developer, reflect on ways of improving disability awareness on 2015 World Autism Awareness Day.
Jack Jennings, founder and former CEO of the Center on Education Policy, reflects on the history of the federal government's involvement with education reform.
Carmen Fariña, Chancellor of the NYC Department of Education, shares her vision and goals for leading the nation’s largest school district.
Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, shares his story of what it means to be American.
Jeff Hobbs, author of 'The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace' reflects on the lessons from his new book.
Stephanie Wilson, NASA astronaut, speaks with 9-year old guest co-host Grace Laplante about the importance of female role models in STEM careers, her adventures in space, and shares lesser known facts about astronaut ice cream.
Sheryll Cashin, professor of law at Georgetown University explains how the social costs of racial preferences actually outweigh any of the marginal benefits when effective race-neutral alternatives are available.
Stephen Heyneman, professor at Vanderbilt University reflects on the role of corruption in educational settings around the world.
Fernando Reimers, professor at HGSE, reflects on the increasingly important role global education plays in schools around the world.
Will Crossley, president of the Piney Woods School, reflects on education leadership, being the first alumnus to lead the school in its 105-year history, and whether he enjoys eating chicken nuggets with students.
Andres Alonso discusses the upcoming institute 'Leadership Institute for Superintendents and District Leaders.'
Andres Alonso, former CEO of Baltimore Public Schools and current HGSE professor, provides an insightful perspective on the complex role of the school superintendent.
Jacqueline Jones, president of the Foundation for Child Development, reflects on the dialogue and unique collaborations between researchers and practioners in the field of early childhood education.
Jeff Riley, superintendent/receiver of Lawrence Public Schools, shares his playbook for leading a successful school district turnaround.
Simon Coyle, founder of The Brilliant Club, shares his international plan to widen access to top universities for outstanding pupils from non-selective state schools.
Bobbie Burnham, early childhood educator, shares successes and strategies from her time working in the Minnesota Dept. of Education.
Shawn Ginwright, author and activist, responds to the crisis of hopelessness among youth of color in urban America.
Eric Mazur, professor of physics at Harvard, discusses his upcoming Master Class titled 'Confessions of a Converted Lecturer.'
Claude Steele, author of the book 'Whistling Vivaldi,' explains his research on stereotype threat and provides solutions for mitigating its negative effects.
Marit Dewhurst, director of art education at The City College of New York, explains the power of using art as a way to engage students in addressing issues of social injustice.
Nonie Lesaux and Stephanie Jones, members of the faculty at HGSE, examine the latest thinking, research, and practice in building and sustaining high quality Pre-K systems, schools and classrooms.
Mark Yudof, former president of the University of California, reflects on the changing nature of higher education in America and looks to the future of the post-secondary education experience.
Richard Rothestein, visiting scholar in education at HGSE, shares insights into how education has been affected by racial-isolation policies that primed Ferguson for this summer’s events.
Justin Reich, adjunct lecturer on education at HGSE, reflects on the design process of his new course, 'Massive: The Future of Learning at Scale.'
Jerry Murphy and Metta McGarvey, faculty for the upcoming PPE institute, 'Inner Strengths of Successful Leaders,' share insight into the growing practice of mindful leadership.
Rick Weissbourd, co-director of the Making Caring Common Project, outlines a new way for schools to examine their culture and environment through the power of big data.
Pasi Sahlberg, author of the book 'Finnish Lessons' reflects on what the world can learn from educational change in Finland. #ICYMI
Matthew Lambert, author of the book 'Privatization and the Public Good' reflects on the momentous challenges plaguing present day public universities.
Catherine Riegle-Crumb, associate professor at UT Austin, shares insight into the gender divide in schools and how this relates to gender disparities in STEM careers.
Natasha Warikoo, associate professor at HGSE, analyzes how students in elite institutions understand merit in admissions, looking at schools both in England and the United States.
Kathy Boudett and Liz City, co-authors of the book 'Meeting Wise,' reflect on how meeting planning can become a key strategy in the service of school improvement.
John Chubb, president of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), reflects on the future of independent schools and examines how school administrators can lead in a changing context.
Professor Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, explains some of the science behind early childhood development and how education can help.
New college presidents reflect on being a first.
Order of speaking:
Alicia Harvey Smith, River Valley Community College, Claremont, NH
Elizabeth Davis, President of Furman University in South Carolina,
Laurie Leshin, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA
Joanne Berger-Sweeney, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
Participants in the "Harvard Seminar for New Presidents" reflect on the program and being part of a diverse cohort.
Order of talking:
Elizabeth Davis, President of Furman University in South Carolina,
Laurie Leshin, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA
Joanne Berger-Sweeney, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
Alicia Harvey Smith, River Valley Community College, Claremont, NH
Ted Mitchell, Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, reflects on the great importance of equity in education and the national movement to expand college readiness, college access, and college completion.
Eric Waldo, executive director of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Reach Higher Initiative, reflects on the origins and goals of the HGSE/White House co-sponsored event, "College Opportunity Agenda: Strengthening School Counseling and College Advising."
Jin Li, professor of education at Brown University, examines the differences between western and eastern learners.
Rick Weissbourd, senior lecturer at HGSE, shares findings from his new 'Making Caring Common' project report examining the real messages adults are sending about values.
Mike Johnston, Colorado state senator, reflects on his commencement speech (and protests), his vision for American education, and best practices for thoughtfully communicating in broader education discourse.
Ronald Ferguson, faculty director of the Achievement Gap Initiative, discusses his upcoming PPE Institute 'Closing the Achievement Gap: Strategies for Excellence with Equity.'
Jeff Shea, Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, reflects on his craft and examines his focus on global education in the classroom.
Josh Wyner, author of 'What Excellent Community Colleges Do' examines the characteristics of high performing community colleges and how they prepare all students for success.
Dr. Bobby William Austin, the developer of the initiative and editor of the report reflects on the 2014 RTB Conference.
Julie Young, president and CEO of Florida Virtual School, examines the history and growth of the first statewide Internet-based public high school in the United States
M. Night Shyamalan, filmmaker and author of “I Got Schooled,” shares his unique journey as a curious, education reform outsider looking for data informed answers on how to close America's education gap.
Patrick Sharkey, associate professor at New York University, discusses urban neighborhoods and the persistence of racial inequality --analyzed through the lens of his new book "Stuck in Place" and the upcoming Askwith Forum.
Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith College and former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, reflects on an exciting year involving a new job, book, and Twitter account.
Wendy Kopp, CEO and Co-Founder of Teach for All, candidly reflects on her experiences leading Teach for All and Teach for America, with thoughts on the future of both organizations.
Hiro Yoshikawa, professor of globalization and education at NYU, discusses his new co-edited book, 'Improving the Odds For America's Children' and its tie in with an upcoming Askwith Forum celebrating 40 Years of the Children's Defense Fund.
Temple Grandin, world famous animal scientist and autism activist, sheds insight into the way she thinks, reflects on the state of autism awareness, and even reveals her favorite Claire Danes movie.
Sarah Dryden-Peterson, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, reflects on how education systems fare during periods of great turmoil and strife within a country.
John King Jr., commissioner of education of the State of New York, shares his perspective on the common core --its perils, pitfalls, and opportunities.
Robert Kegan, professor at HGSE, discusses the mechanics, challenges, and excitement in teaching his new HarvardX course called, "Unlocking the Immunity to Change."
Greg Duncan, co-author of the HEPG book "Restoring Opportunity" discusses the crisis of inequality and the challenge for American education in a historical and practical context.
Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College, re-examines the expression of Martin Luther King's "dream" for America, while redefining the dreams we have for ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Eileen Rudden, co-founder of LearnLaunch, reflects on the state of entrepreneurship and ed tech - with anticipation for LearnLaunch's annual conference in Boston on February 28th.
Richard Weissbourd, lecturer on education at HGSE, discusses whether love can be effectively taught in schools, reflects on the state of sex-ed, and examines where love is best modeled in the media.
Thomas Menino, former mayor of Boston, reflects with HGSE's Rick Weissbourd on his leadership role in helping reshape Boston schools and shepherding education policy over the past two decades.
Justin Reich, HarvardX research fellow, examines the effectiveness of edX's open online courses through quantitative and qualitative research.
Pedro Robledo, one of the leaders of the LGBT movement in Argentina, shares his deeply personal story of equal rights, education activism, and role in the adoption of quality bullying legislation in his country.
Jessica Marshall, chief strategy officer at LightSail Ed, explains how an adaptive, tablet-based literacy platform is revolutionizing how students are gaining 21st century skills.
Michael Lombardo, CEO of Reading Partners, shares his organization's 'secret sauce' for closing the reading achievement gap.
Lee Teitel, author of the book "School-Based Instructional Rounds" shares his evolving research on one of the most innovative and powerful approaches to improving teaching and learning.
Gerald A. Lieberman, author of "Education and the Environment" provides an innovative guide to creating a new type of environmental education that combines standards-based lessons with community investigations and service learning projects.
Anant Agarwal, president of edX, discusses common misconceptions with online learning, new models for leadership, and how social media will play a critical role in the future of digital learning communities.
Helen Janc Malone, editor of the book, "Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform" discusses the collaborative process of editing a book with diverse authors and opinions about education reform.
Emiliana Vegas, chief of the education division at the Inter-American Development Bank examines the transformative relationship between banking and education in developing countries, while reflecting on her time at HGSE as a student.
Andrew Kelly, co-editor of the book, "Stretching the Higher Education Dollar" shares insights into the future of higher education and explains how true reform can take place.
Elizabeth Englander, author of the book "Bullying and Cyberbullying" discusses what every educator needs to know about this subject.
Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity, discusses the future of blended learning as it relates to improving schools and districts across the country.
Randy Testa, vice president for education at Walden Media discusses the educational and historical power of Walden Media's new film, "The Watsons Go to Birmingham."
Roberto Gonzales, assistant professor at HGSE discusses his research on the impact of immigration policy as it relates to educational success in our country.
Lindsay Page and Ben Castleman, education researchers, discuss the effects of "summer melt" and share resources on what they're doing to help prevent it.
James Ryan, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education reflects on his vision for HGSE, the role of education schools, and whether he roots for the Red Sox or Yankees.
Jeffrey Sachs, economist and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, shares his thoughts on the importance of strengthening education in an increasingly crowded, globalized world.
Richard Hopper, president of Kennebec Valley Community College, reflects on his time at the "Harvard Seminar for New Presidents" and names his 'bucket list' commencement speaker.
James Meredith, civil rights activist and author, reflects on his life's work, legacy, and solutions for improving Mississippi schools.
Noam Chomsky, linguist and philosopher, discusses Paulo Freire's writings, the future of online learning, and the things in the world he doesn't know.
Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, provides insight into the future of early childhood education in America and what he hopes it will look like.
Jal Mehta, associate professor at HGSE, reflects on our country's troubled quest to remake schooling.
Karl Pillemer, author of the book, "30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans" reflects on what he's learned from discussions with older Americans.
Michael Sadowski, author of the book, 'Portraits of Promise" shares the perspective and voices of successful immigrant students from across the country.
Howard Gardner, professor at the Harvard Ed School, reflects on his academic "greatest hits" and shares insight on where he does his best thinking.
Richard Lee Colvin, author of the book 'Tilting at Windmills' shares his thoughts on school reform, San Diego, and America’s race to renew public education.
Rick Weissbourd and Betsy Groves, HGSE faculty and experts in the field of children psychology, outline tips for how both parents and teachers can properly discuss with their kids the meaning and impact of the recent tragedy in Boston.
Emily Bazelon, author of the book "Sticks and Stones" shares insight into writing about bullying while reflecting on her own experience with it.
John Merrow, education correspondent for PBS NewsHour, reflects on why this is both the best of times and the worst of times in education journalism.
Elliot Washor, cofounder of Big Picture Learning, and collaborator Charlie Mojkowski discuss their new book, "Leaving to Learn: Designing a Student Experience that Reduces Dropouts and Produces Deep Engagement in Learning."
Jeffrey R. Henig, professor of political science and education at Columbia University, reflects on the erosion of the “special status” of education decision-making over the past 50 years.
Jessie Woolley-Wilson, President and CEO of Dreambox Learning, shares insights into the future of adaptive learning and data in education technology.
Richard Robbins, director of the documentary "Girl Rising" reflects on how his film is hoping to create greater awareness around girls education across the world and launch a movement.
Catharine Bellinger and Alexis Morin, co-founders of 'Students for Eduction Reform" (SFER) share their story of education entrepreneurship while students at Princeton.
Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, reflects on the Newtown shooting, school violence, gun control--and how above all, we must continue to protect the world's children.
Jon Schnur, cofounder of 'America Achieves' and 'New Leaders for New Schools' reflects on his own education story while sharing personal insights into President Obama's education policies over time.
Rick Hess, education writer and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, reflects on his personal story of learning and his role in the education reform movement.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Assistant Professor Natasha Warikoo, Ed.M.'97, discusses her new book Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City.
Three UNESCO HIV education specialists discuss the role of teachers and schools in educating students around HIV/AIDS awareness and the importance of World AIDS Day.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Wendy Kopp, founder and president of Teach For America reflects on 20 years of leading this national teaching corps and talks about how it has changed American (and global) education.
World Bank Lead Economist Halsey Rogers discusses the World Bank Education Strategy 2020 and how we can make the next decade one in which all children and youth, everywhere, are in school and learning.
Wynton Marsalis, musician and educator, opens up on how the spirit of music informs his unprecedented series of ongoing Harvard lectures.
Daniel Barnz, director of the film "Won't Back Down" reflects on why writing/directing a movie about education was just a perfect fit.
Charles Willie, professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, reflects on the challenges of desegregating schools in Boston in the 1970's.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for "Superman", discusses his film and its impact on education reform.
Qian Tang, Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO discusses how WTD is experienced around the world.
Jim True-Frost, cast member of the HBO series "The Wire" discusses portraying Baltimore public school teacher Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski and the impact his character has on education in media.
Cevin Soling, director of the education documentary "The War on Kids" discusses his controversial views on the American school system.
Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association discusses the perception of unions, his personal legacy, and how to make the teaching profession more of a dream job for young Americans.
Taye Diggs, author and actor, along with Shane Evans, illustrator, discuss their new book "Chocolate Me!" on the Harvard EdCast.
Whitney Tilson, investor and champion of education initiatives, from KIPP to TFA, discusses genuine school reform and reflects on why he spends his free time committed to this fight.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools discusses progress of the charter school movement and why politics is so integral in education reform.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Bill Symonds, director of the Pathways to Prosperity Project, discusses the project, its implications, and how the country has reacted.
Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, shares new research on the lingering effects of toxic stress during early childhood.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Warren Simmons, Executive Director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University shares his insights on improving urban schools in America.
Direct download: simmons.mp3
Tony Danza, actor and author of "I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had" shares experiences from his year as a rookie teacher at Northeast High.
Educational rappers Scott Free and Shoeless Jeff discuss how they are using hip hop and 'smart songs' to effectively teach social studies both inside and outside the classroom.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Sir Michael Barber, head of McKinsey's Global Education Practice discusses a new international report, hope for U.S. public schools, and what is means to be a reformer.
Susan Sclafani, vice president of programs for the Pearson Foundation shares insight into the new digital curriculum being developed to adopt the common core standards.
Alexander Russo, author of the book "Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors" discusses how one of the toughest schools in the country was turned around.
Scott Seider, author of the book "Character Compass," shares his research on how powerful school culture can point students toward success.
Paul Reville, secretary of education for Massachusetts, sheds light on the future of education policy with four more years of the Obama administration.
Janet Connors, social justice activist in Dorchester, MA reflects on the unique philosophy of restorative justice and examines how it can bring peace into difficult situations.
In this podcast, Professor Fernando Reimers, director of the Ed School's International Education Policy Program, discussed the importance of global citizenship.
Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, authors of the book, Make Just One Change, explain why teaching students to ask their own questions just may revolutionize the classroom.
Carnell Chosa and Regis Pecos, cofounders and codirectors of the Leadership Institute and Summer Policy Academy at the Santa Fe Indian School share a brief history of educational sovereignty and Native American education in New Mexico.
Alberto Retana, Executive VP of Community Coalition in LA discusses community organizing in the context of the 2012 National Community Organizing and School Reform conference held at HGSE.
Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, shares new research on the lingering effects of toxic stress during early childhood.
Roland Barth, founder of The Principals' Center at HGSE reflects on the unique and evolving position of school leader.
Oprah Winfrey, media icon and philanthropist, reflects on helping Lady Gaga launch the Born This Way Foundation during her visit at Harvard on Feb 29th, 2012.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, discusses protests in Madison, the continued need for unions, and shares a bit about her own personal life outside of work.
Rainn Wilson, actor and activist shares details of the denial of higher education rights to people of the Bahá'í Faith in Iran, while discussing the film 'Education Under Fire' at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Rebecca Morris, assistant professor of library and information science at Simmons College, describes the evolving landscape of school libraries and reframes the perception of the 21st century school librarian.
Paul Penniman, executive director, Resources for Inner city Children (RICH), explains the plight of not being able to read in high school and what he's trying to do to help.
Richard Murnane, professor of education at HGSE shares new research on how family income affects education equality.
Niobe Way, author of "Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendship and the Crisis of Connections" reveals the intense intimacy among teenage boys during adolescence yet explains as boys become men, they become distrustful, lose these friendships, and feel isolated and alone.
Michael Hitchcock, writer and producer of the TV show "Glee," shares his behind the scenes perspective on writing student storylines and prosocial messages for the popular school based program "Glee."
Nan Keohane, former president of Duke University and Wellesley College shares her story of leadership and offers insight on how gender has influenced her career.
Michael Brown, co-founder and CEO of City Year reflects on how City Year is strengthening human capital through a year of national service in the education sector.
Tim Daly, president of TNTP and his brother Brendan Daly, defensive line coach for the Minnesota Vikings discuss how the teaching profession can learn from fundamentals of the NFL.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Mel King, educator and founder of the South End Technology Center shares his thoughts, wisdom, and perspective on education over eight decades in the South End of Boston.
Meira Levinson, political philosopher at HGSE reflects on the challenges of teaching 9/11 in the classroom and how to explain these events as both a mother or teacher to children born after September 12th.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, John Merrow, education correspondent for The PBS NewsHour and president of Learning Matters discusses education reporting, the influence of teachers, and changes in over 35 years covering education in the media.
U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Elizabeth Thompson discusses the role of education in sustainable development, an upcoming 'Earth Summit' in Rio, and life at the U.N.
Martin West, assistant professor of education at HGSE shares surprising new data on the public's perception of school reform.
Lisa Henson, CEO of The Jim Henson Company, reflects on her father’s creation of the Muppets and the family company’s continuing impact on children’s learning with shows such as “Dinosaur Train” and “Sid the Science Kid.”
Martha L. Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School shares her thoughts on the convergence of education and law, her new book 'In Brown's Wake', and teaching a young Barack Obama.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Lois Lowry, author of The Giver and Number the Stars discusses children's literature, reading, and her books (slowly) being made into movies.
Marian Wright Edelman, president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund reflects on her work defending the cause of children, her life and leadership, and preparing for countless commencement speeches over the years. Marian Wright Edelman has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. Under her leadership, CDF has become the nation's strongest voice for children and families. The Children's Defense Fund's Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
Lawrence Blum, author of the book "High Schools, Race, and America's Future" reflects on his experience teaching a rigorous high school course on race and racism.
Lee Hirsch, director of the documentary "Bully" shares stories of the film and explains why this subject is so personally important to him.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Professor Daniel Koretz, an expert in school testing, discusses inappropriate test prep in schools and how, unfortunately, there is little parents can do about it.
Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, shares insights into his unique style of teaching, the future of his work, and how he's dealing with celebrity.
Thomas Kane, deputy director of education for the Gates Foundation and HGSE professor, discusses findings from the MET Project on measuring teacher effectiveness.
Kim Smith, co-founder and CEO of Bellwether Education Partners discusses incubating educational entrepreneurs, the role of business and education, and the importance of balancing work with family.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Gary Knell, President and CEO of Sesame Workshop, shares lessons from Sesame Street, why kids (and adults) still love it, and which Muppet he calls his favorite.
Martha Kanter, under secretary of education, U.S. Department of Education, shares progress of President Obama's 2020 College Graduation Goal and how to improve both college access and completion.
Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights reflects on bullying, international human rights, and whether she'd rather be a Kardashian or Osborne.
John E. Roberts, author of the book "Instructional Rounds in Action" reflects on how an invaluable guide of doing 'rounds' can provide a framework for systemic improvement in schools.
Joel Klein, former chancellor of NYC schools and CEO of Amplify, shares his story and his quest on incorporating innovation and technology into the classroom.
Eve Sullivan, founder and president of Parents Forum discusses how raising children connects all families, regardless of background or social status, and that all families can be strengthened by improving communication and increasing emotional awareness.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Adrian Fenty, former mayor of Washington D.C., shares his thoughts on reforming public education in the district, hiring Michelle Rhee, and being a movie star.
Domonique Foxworth, NFL cornerback and president of the NFL Players Association shares his personal story of being a lifelong student athlete.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Professor Hiro Yoshikawa, author of Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Children, discusses his new book.
Drew Faust, president of Harvard University, discusses her time as president, the opportunities and challenges currently facing the university, and how she reflects on her own journey.
Eric Schwarz, co-founder and CEO of Citizen Schools, discusses the importance of extended learning time and the vision for his service based organization.
John Jackson, president and CEO of The Schott Foundation reflects on closing the opportunity gap in public schools across the country.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, discusses educational reform, his brother's book, and what Barbara Bush read to him as child.
Richard Elmore, professor of educational leadership at HGSE, provides insight into the people and programs attempting to strengthen the quality of leadership in the education sector.
A conversation with three Gaza principals participating in the HGSE Programs in Professional Education institute "Leadership: An Evolving Vision."
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, John Wood, founder and board chair of Room to Read, speaks candidly about pursuing one's dreams, fulfilling the Carnegie legacy, and finding creative ways to save money for his nonprofit.
Nancy Lublin, CEO of DoSomething.org shares her data driven advocacy work and the organization's initiatives of preventing bullying.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Anne McGill-Franzen, director of the Reading Center at the University of Tennessee talks about the importance of summer reading in low income communities.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Scott Seider, Ed.M.'04, Ed.D.'08, author of Shelter: Where Harvard Meets the Homeless discusses the role of the university in its community.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty discusses his research on how important your kindergarten class may be when it comes to earnings potential.
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) discusses LGBT issues in K-12 education.