Human Restoration Project: Recent Episodes
Human Restoration Project
Listen, discuss, and share progressive thoughts on education.
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On Friday, July 31st, we hosted Dr. Ginie Servant-Miklos for a Q&A about her book Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It. This was the conclusion of our Pedagogies of Collapse book club, where we met biweekly to discuss the book and its implication for education. Here is the full unedited Q&A. I wanted to give you a heads up that this conversation gets heavy pretty quickly, includes explicit language, and remind you that HRP is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3), and the views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute an endorsement.
We all grew up playing games — I fondly remember playing Go Fish with my grandma and her next door neighbor, as a 90s kid who grew up with an NES, it felt like every console generation was a leap forward in graphics and game quality, and, regardless of who you’re cheering for, tomorrow’s World Cup final will be watched by an estimated 2 billion people.
But even though at some point many of us stop playing games—even if we don’t stop paying attention to them—we hold onto the experiences, the feelings, and the lessons: what they taught us about ourselves, each other, and the world around us. And it’s because games play an important role in human development and tell us so much about societies and cultures at large, the relationship between play, games, and learning has always been a focus of our work. It’s also been the lifelong interest of my guest today, game designer, artist, author, and researcher, Dr. Mary Flanagan.
Mary Flanagan is the founder of Tiltfactor game studio, whose tabletop and digital games intentionally tackle a number of social issues. The tagline on the Tiltfactor homepage reads “Game design for social change” with the challenge, “Can you make a more just and equitable world with games? At Tiltfactor, we believe we can.” Mary has also authored several incredible books, including the pivotal Critical Play about radical game design, and coauthored, Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Given Mary Flanagan’s unique and consequential focus, I wanted to sit down with her to see what we can learn at the intersection of play and critical pedagogy.
Playing Oppression : The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games
Critical Play: Radical Game Design
Critical.play on Instagram
http://tiltfactor.org/
https://resonym.com/
Hey there, Nick here at Human Restoration Project. We took the longest break in our podcast’s history last month, and I hope you were able to take a break, too. We’re back for biweekly releases through the summer starting today with Dr. Sarah Benson. Sarah is Associate Professor in Inclusion and Disabilities at the University of Birmingham campus in Dubai where she teaches students from around the world as Head of Subject group for the School of education and lecturer for inclusion and special needs programs.
"Inclusion" has become a word everyone nods along to but almost no one defines the same way, And since so much of special education has historically been about sorting and labeling kids in relation to an imaginary average. I was so curious to ask Sarah, what does genuine inclusion require of us, and of schools, and what would it mean to restore the humanity of a special education system that was built to put kids into buckets?
Sarah and I also talked a bit about HRP Australia, which is a real thing you can check out at humanrestorationproject.au. HRP Australia is headed by Vaughan Cleary, former Learning and Teaching Head and Senior Deputy Principal at Assumption College in Kilmore, Victoria, and I’ll be headed down there at the end of this month to visit schools and experience Australian education firsthand.
Also a quick reminder that we’re reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know it for our HRP Summer Book Club, and there’s still time to join us. You can learn more at humanrestorationproject.org/book-club.
Episode notes:
HRP Australia
HRP Summer Book Club - Pedagogies of Collapse
‘I’m Determined’ at James Madison University
This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!
I’m back this week with another narrated piece from our upcoming Progressive Education Primer. If you like this format and want to have more narrated essay content, or if you can’t stand it, leave a comment on YouTube or Discord to let us know. This one is written by our Executive Director, Chris McNutt, titled Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real.
HRP Book Club
Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access
Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real, Chris McNutt
Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com
Progressive education is a world-building project rooted in the radical hope that schools can become something fit for human beings.
This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!
The HRP team has been on the road for 3 of the last 4 weeks. At the end of April, we were on the ground working with Third Coast Learning Collaborative schools in Michigan. Last week, we were in Boston for school visits, meeting with folks at the Boston Museum of Science about an upcoming grant partnership, and I went to prison with Jennifer Berkshire to sit in on her journalism class at MCI-Shirley. At the time of recording, I’m headed to Ohio to present student listening reports to school districts who held focus groups this year based around student agency. This is all to say I don’t have an epic 90 minute conversation or hour-long topical deep dive for you this week, but what I will offer is an audio reading of the opening piece from our revised Progressive Education Primer, it’s called We Are Worldbuilders. See you in two weeks!
HRP Book Club
Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access
We Are Worldbuilders, Nick Covington
Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com
This conversation started 2 years ago, when I ran into Kelly McMahon at a summer conference. Kelly’s a kindergarten teacher at Hoover Community School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I was curious about what that label “community school” means in practice for teachers, students, and the community served by this new model for the area.
I’ve since learned that just because your kids attend Ames Community School District, for example, that doesn’t mean they attend a “community school.” Kelly put me in touch with Dave Greenberg and Angelia Ebner, senior policy analysts and community schools program specialists at the National Education Association, who have helped build and support thousands of community schools, as Angelia described it, from “coast to coast and border to border.”
And no exploration of the community schools model could be complete without including the story of Sustainable Community Schools in Chicago. Just last year, Major Brandon Johnson announced a near doubling of the number of community schools in the city, bringing the number to 36.
I spoke with foundational community organizer, advocate, and elected Chicago Public Schools Board Member, Jitu Brown, about how organizing for Sustainable Community Schools defused the push by elected officials for school closures, privatization, and charter-ization of Chicago Public Schools. For Jitu, the title of School Board member may be new, but he is Chicago born and raised, and he’s been organizing around education and all of its related issues since the 90s.
While there were just hundreds of community schools in the United States 15 years ago, today there are over 5,000 and growing in nearly every state in the nation. A consistent refrain from every person I spoke with for this episode was that community schools are the future of public education and the alternative to narratives about “failing public schools” that favor privatization as a solution.
NEA - What are community schools?
NEA - 5 Steps to Kickstarting Community Schools in Your District
NEA Community School Measurement Guidance Tool
Chicago Sustainable Community Schools
Eve Ewing - Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side
You can read out directly to Angelia & Dave @ NEA:
aebner@nea.org | DGreenberg@nea.org
Montessori schools are some of the few that wear their pedagogy on their signage: Cottontail Creek Montessori School. Montessori Children’s House. Acappella Montessori. (just to name a few of the dozen or so in Iowa). While the majority are private schools, there’s a growing number of public Montessori schools and programs as well. I think because of these two factors, being largely private and one of the only public-facing pedagogies around, you don’t necessarily have to be acquainted with the Montessori method to develop an opinion about it.
We recorded this in two sessions, one with Andrew Faulstich – Director of Education at Oneness Family School and co-founder of Developing Education – and Dr Ayize Sabater, school founder, co-founder of the Black Montessori Education Fund, and former Executive Director of Association Montessori International-USA. And a second session with Kelly Jonelis, Montessori Adolescent Program Director, Math Specialist, and Co-Founder of Developing Education.
In this episode you’ll hear the journeys that brought them to Montessori education, what Montessori is and is not, and what otherwise “mainstream” education can learn from the ideas and practices first developed by Dr. Maria Montessori over 100 years ago.
Recommended Reading & Media List:
The Montessori Child: A Parent's Guide to Raising Capable Children with Creative Minds and Compassionate Hearts - Simone Davies & Junnifa Uzodike
Erica Maretti - The Best Weapon for Peace
Montessori - The Child and Adolescence
Montessori - Psychogeometry
Montessori - Citizen of the World
Montessori Potential - Paula Preschlack
Diverse Families, Desirable Schools - Mira Debs
Montessori - From Childhood to Adolescence
Montessori - Education and Peace
Breaking the Paradigm Podcast w/ Andrew Faulstitch
Breaking the Paradigm: You ARE Good at Math with Kelly Jonelis
Dr. Ayize Sabater - WPFW 89.3 DC #YouMustLearn, Thursdays 6pm - wpfwfm.org #YouMustLearn
This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!
Spring Break has officially sprung for so many schools across the country. Whether you’re a teacher, a parent, a student, or a combination of any of the above, we hope you have a well-deserved and restful break. We’ll be taking a break this week too and be back on April 18th with a deep dive into Montessori education with an incredible team of Montessori educators, Andrew Faulstitch, Dr. Ayize Sabater, and Kelly Jonelis. Here’s a quick preview, and see you back here in two weeks for the full episode.
HRP Book Club Sign-Up: https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/book-club
Read Pedagogies of Collapse for free through Open Access on Bloomsbury
There’s a quote from the great conservationist John Muir that goes, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." My guest today, Gary Stager, has been working in education since before I was born, and I turn 40 this summer, so the sense that you get talking to Gary about teaching and learning is that when you try to pick out anything by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
Gary has been prolific as an author and educator, and as the line in his official bio reads, “When Jean Piaget wanted to better understand how children learn mathematics, he hired Seymour Papert. When Dr. Papert wanted to create a high-tech alternative learning environment for incarcerated at-risk teens, he hired Gary Stager.” This work was the basis for Gary’s doctoral dissertation in Science and Mathematics Education. He’s worked across several continents, collaborated on a project that won a Grammy Award, and led seminars and taught students in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
In this conversation, Gary shares the defining experiences of his education as a student and how those shaped his values as a teacher, we talk about today’s pedagogical authoritarianism and its contrast to Reggio Emilia, his optimism about the reclaiming the role of technology in education, and, ultimately, reclaiming the art of teaching.
If you’ve ever heard Gary speak you know he’s a compelling storyteller, and I found myself in this conversation like a kid at storytime, awed at the wealth of energy, wisdom, and experience he brings to our collective endeavor. This could have easily been a 3 hour episode, and part of keeping the runtime down was editing out a lot of my active listening interjections to keep up the flow of Gary’s stories.
Tomorrow, I’ll be trading Iowa for a couple days in Los Angeles, where the HRP team will be presenting for the third year at LearningInspirEd’s Student Power Summit. It’s in LA this year in partnership with Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world. The founder, Father Greg Boyle, is quoted on the Homeboy homepage saying, “We imagine a world without prisons, and then we try to create that world,”. And I’m really looking forward to meeting and talking with the people there to learn more about how Homeboy works. A bit of a facetious question that sticks in my head is, in the high-stakes data-driven world of schooling, what piece of content or curriculum did these guys miss that would’ve made the difference? And more seriously, what is it about the environment at Homeboy Industries that schools can learn from? I’ll have more on that when I get back.
But until we build that world wi thout prisons, there will need to be programs for incarcerated people and people in transition from prison to public life, too.
That’s where this conversation with Jennifer Berkshire came about. Of course you know Jennifer from her years of hosting the Have You Heard? Podcast with her co-host Jack Schneider, and their coauthored books The Wolf At The Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars. But for the past couple of years, Jennifer has also been teaching journalism and education policy in the Boston College Prison Education Program at MCI-Shirley, a medium security prison for men in central Massachusetts. Recording isn’t allowed in the prison facility, but in 2025 Jennifer spoke with some of the men in her program who had been released from MCI-Shirley and were finishing their degrees on the Boston College campus, and she gave me permission to use those clips here.
As you can hear, the program was a life-changing experience for these men, and it’s been life-changing for Jennifer too.
This conversation with Jennifer was one of the most eye-opening I’ve had in a long time, and it’s always such a pleasure to talk with her. I’ve included links to several pieces of media we talk about in this episode, podcasts and articles created by inmates, books written by prison educators, and more, so check out the show notes for those links as well.
John Lennon - The Tragedy of True Crime
Ear Hustle Podcast: “The daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration”
Have You Heard #202 - College Inside, College Outside
Article - BC Prison Education Program Shatters Stigmas and Builds Better Futures
Article - In prison, I embraced the SEL skills I should have learned in grade school
Whether it was during her nearly two decades as a middle school humanities teacher or as diversity coordinator or grade-level team leader, my guest today kept returning to the same question: why does school so often feel like the opposite of learning?
Lauren Porosoff’s answer isn't a new program or a new curriculum, instead she offers a holistic way of thinking about how systems are connected to outcomes. And Lauren joins me today to talk about compensatory programs: the wellness kits, the diversity posters, the one-off professional development workshops that schools layer one on top of the other to signal that they value belonging, creativity, or student wellbeing, without ever changing the underlying framework for how students and teachers actually spend their time. In this episode, we talk about why schools reach for these fixes, why they backfire, and why they may be especially vulnerable to attack precisely because they're so superficial.
Lauren's website is theteachernerd.com, and her book (one of many!), Teach for Authentic Engagement, is available from ASCD.
Jailbreak Your PD
The Trouble with Compensatory Programs
The Grammar of Inclusive Instructional Design
Teach for Authentic Engagement
In a 2021 interview, Michael Sandel, author of the book The Tyranny of Merit argues that if merit can be understood as competence, a good thing to be clear, “The principle of meritocracy, simply put, says that if chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings.” But as we grapple with meritocracy, or systems built around the idea that those who get ahead are deserving, he says, “What makes merit a kind of tyranny is the way it attributes deservingness to the successful.” How are we supposed to understand the great problems of our time: United States’ incredible wealth and income disparities, child poverty, life expectancy gaps, infant mortality, student debt, or even incarceration rates through a lens of meritocracy? Sandel offers, “To rethink meritocracy requires, among other things, rethinking the mission and purpose of higher education.” But what about education inequality and the construction of affluent white suburban public schools as “Good Schools”, where the social and economic advantages of their proximity to wealth compound upward into higher property taxes, more funding, smaller class sizes, more course offerings, higher test scores and higher graduation rates?
And that’s a lens my guest today, Yong Zhao, Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies & Educational Psychology at the University of Kansas, wants to expand into redefining the purpose of K-12 education more broadly, from meritocracy to human interdependence.
He’s co-authored an open-access piece for the ECNU Review of Education by that name that you can search yourself or find in the show notes, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. “[Meritocracy’s] focus on ranking individuals according to flawed metrics fosters unhealthy competition, overlooks diverse human talents, fails to account for unequal starting points, and ultimately hundred both individual fulfillment AND societal progress,” they write, “We propose an alternative framework, the Human Interdependence Paradigm, which….emphasizes cultivating unique individual greatness, realizing [it] through applying it to solve meaningful real world problems for others, [and] fostering a sense of purpose and mutual reliance. The Human Interdependence Paradigm [for education] aims to create learning environments that promote collaboration, social intelligence, and ultimately, a more equitable and flourishing society.”
You can email Prof. Zhao @ yongzhao.uo@gmail.com
From Meritocracy to Human Interdependence: Redefining the Purpose of Education
The Dark Side of Meritocracy, Noema Mag
“This is a book about my life, about admitting ‘I was wrong,’ and about how important it is to say it out loud,” is how our guest today, Diane Ravitch, begins her 2025 memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.
What follows is her incredible life’s journey spanning nearly nine decades, from learning to write as a left-hander using a quill pen at her Texas public school to becoming one of the most influential leaders of the modern conservative American education reform movement. Having spent the first half of her professional life in education policy advocating for national standards, testing, and accountability reform alongside charter schools and so-called school choice programs; as a founder of Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Assistant Secretary of Education during the George HW Bush administration, and serving on the board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress or NAEP (the “gold standard” of achievement assessments), however, as the opening quote reveals, after seeing this vision of education reform in action, she very publicly changed her mind about all of it.
Diane has now spent the last 15 years vigorously challenging the same education reform movement she helped build. Co-founding the Network for Public Education, and writing several best-selling books critical of testing, corporate influence in education policy, and privatization. “We must have a more generous, contemporary vision of public schools and what they can be,” she writes. “I will use whatever time I have to fight for the ideals I believe in, to love the people who mean the most to me, to do whatever I can to strengthen democracy in my beloved country, and to advance the common good.”
An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else (Columbia University Press)
HRP is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3), and the views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute an endorsement.
“Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?” The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call.” At least, that’s what Mike Pompeo, the former CIA Director and former US Secretary of State, told a reporter in 2022.
Three years later, Randi Weingarten’s rebuttal takes the form of a book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, in which the long-time President of the American Federation of Teachers, representing nearly 2 million members, mounts a defense of democracy, teachers, and our public schools, arguing that “Public schools are laboratories of civil society and, at their best, embody the multifaith, multiracial coexistence that is our nation’s best future…Fascists fear teachers because education is essential to democracy.”
At its core are conjoined and fundamental questions I think we took for granted, until recently, as settled consensus in the United States of America: What is democracy? What is the role of public schools in a pluralistic democratic nation, and why are both worth keeping?
To help us answer these questions and understand why fascists fear teachers is none other than AFT President, Randi Weingarten.
Why Fascists Fear Teachers (AFT website)
If you’ve taught or attended a high school course in the last decade, you’ve probably watched a Crash Course video. Their dozens of playlists on topics from Biology and Environmental Science to Economics and World History hold hundreds of videos and have collected over 2 billion views. Maybe even just hearing the title conjured John Green’s urgent cadence and the characteristic cartoon aesthetic in your mind, or the show’s outro, if you couldn’t hit the pause button fast enough, where John thanks the producer, the graphics team, and mentions, “The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer…”
Today, Mister Meyer not only continues to teach, but earlier this year reached out to me about a new film project he’s working on with his brother Luke, scheduled for 2026 release, tentatively titled THE TEACHERS PROJECT. It’s described as “a compelling, character-driven journey into the lives of American educators as they navigate the intensifying culture war that has enveloped the nation’s schools since 2020. As political battles over sanctioned ideas, books, and lesson plans range from national headlines to local school boards, the film reveals the devastating consequences of this chaos and conflict for teachers, students, communities, and the future of American education.”
And Raoul joins me to talk about Crash Course, the state of history teaching and the often untold stories of teachers wrestling with all of it.
@mistermeyer on BlueSky
How do you define creativity?
Would you be able to spot creativity in the wild?
What about creativity in the classroom?
This endless human quest to define the seemingly undefinable, and somehow make it useful for educators, is what today’s guests Tom Rendon and Zachary Stier set out to do, bringing together philosophy, neuroscience, and site visits, in a years-long collaboration that became Creativity in Young Children: What Science Tells Us and Our Hearts Know.
In this conversation, Tom and Zach help me understand the counterintuitive ways creativity shows up in the world, in the human condition, and how we can cultivate creativity and connection in the classroom.
Most of us probably experienced a homogenous version of literacy in our English classes: read a book, answer a few questions along the way, and compose an essay at the end about how we viewed a key theme. Rinse and repeat. And in our current age of high-stakes testing and high-stakes literacy, some kids are lucky to ever encounter a book at all; however, those same students are also surrounded by the narratives and themes of English class - in the messages they send and receive and the virtual communities they participate in, the media they consume and discuss with their friends, and in the video games they play. The goal of my guests today is to expand our vision of what that English class could be and induct students into something of an animistic perspective of literacy, as you heard from one guest in the opening: that the narratives and themes of English class are everywhere for those equipped to see them as such. Their Reader-Player Interactivity Framework aims to give teachers and students the tools and confidence to do just that. Their paper, linked in the show notes, is a collaboration between Karis Jones, Brady Nash, Virginia Killian Lund, Scott Storm, Alex Corbitt, Beth Krone, and Trevor Aleo, of which Karis, Brady, Virginia, and Trevor joined me for this conversation.
Article: The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework: How Do Readers Navigate Diverse Varieties of Narrative Texts?
Unsilencing Gratia: a tabletop RPG book designed to be an easy introduction to collaborative storytelling, usable in a classroom setting.
We Know Something You Don’t Know: a tabletop RPG that invites you into the lives of students making their way day-by-day through the education system.
You can reach any of our guests by email:
Trevor Aleo: aleotc@gmail.com
Karis Jones: karis.michelle.jones@gmail.com
Virginia Killian Lund: vkillianlund@uri.edu
Brady Nash: bradylnash@gmail.com
We’re recording this episode the week the Iowa DOGE Task Force released their final 136 page report – you heard that right, that’s the state-level version of the Department of Government Efficiency convened by our governor back in February, tasked with maximizing return on investment of Iowa taxpayer dollars.
As you can imagine, among their recommendations are ideas from the Return on Taxpayer Investment Working Group about improving education results “aimed at delivering greater value for taxpayers.”
Fortunately for Iowans, this working group assembled a crack team of experienced education experts for the job, including the CEO of an ethanol plant, the former Chair of the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, and the chair of a civil engineering firm. Among their recommendations are to:
"Establish a merit-based compensation framework –including a bonus structure, teacher professional development and incentives for those in high-need schools in order to improve student outcomes and financially reward high-performing teachers.”
Merit-pay is of course a tried, tested, and failed idea. But teacher salaries are just one thread in the complex tapestry of how states pay for public education and the ideological tug of war in our public debates over school funding – how we pay for buildings, pensions, special education, Title 1, school food programs…every cost that goes into making schooling work…or not.
If the Iowa DOGE report and the policy agenda that will inevitably follow could be titled As Privatized as Possible – doubling down on outcome-based school funding and accountability measures and even recommending AI-based bus route optimization to “cut costs and improve service”...what’s the alternative?
My guest today asks, “What would it mean to democratize school resources? What would it mean to have truly public schools, down to the very means of resource creation and distribution that fuels them…what will it take to make school as public as possible.”
It’s also the title of his upcoming book, As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools out this December. You can preorder it now from The New Press.
David Backer is the author. He’s an associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University whose research, teaching, and organizing focus on ideology and school finance. A former high school teacher, his research has appeared in a half dozen scholarly journals like the Harvard Education Review as well as popular venues like The American Prospect and Jacobin. And you can find him on social media @schooldaves.
As Public As Possible (The New Press)
@SchoolDaves TikTok
When I sat down with James Mannion to talk about the educational polycrisis back in July, his long-time colleague, friend, and collaborator Kate McAllister was right there by his side. After the recording, Kate & I spent a long time catching up about her work and its intersection with our own, and we immediately vowed to remember to hit record the next time we chatted.
Kate McAllister is both a co-founder of The Human Hive and the founder of The Hive in Cabrera, a school for ChangeMakers in the Dominican Republic, where she joined me from for this conversation. Kate has over 20 years' teaching experience and has spent much of that time training and developing teachers and educators all over the world. She is a passionate educator, published author, fellow of the Chartered College of Teachers and The RSA. The Hive, founded back in 2020, is Kate's answer to the question "what if?" What if learning could be different? What if we did education with not for others? What if we can become more self-determined in our learning? What if education can help regenerate the planet?
And as you’ll hear in this episode, Kate’s personal and educational journey is a remarkable reflection of her dedication to the fully human messiness of growing and learning in community with others.
The Human Hive
Today’s episode is Dr. Sarah Fine’s keynote, the Quest for Authenticity: Lessons in Powerful Learning from the Fringes, from our Conference to Restore Humanity back in July of this year.
As Dr. Fine argues, the limits of our grammar of schooling and the metaphors we use to think about teaching and learning are constraining, but there is nothing inevitable or inherent about them. This is the throughline in her observation of co-constructed and collaborative humanized learning spaces, where inevitability gives way to possibility predominates.
Not only is it possible to change the grammar of schooling, but that humanizing grammar already exists within even the most traditionally structured school, Sarah argues, in electives, clubs, and extracurriculars, in the periphery. These spaces, she points out, offer “the hallmarks of a learner-centered system: trust, safety, & authentic care, where learners and educators codesign coursework.” As Sarah and her co-author Jal Mehta urge in their 2019 book, In Search of Deeper Learning, “We need to change student learning, so we need to change schools, so we need to change systems.”
Video version on the Human Restoration Project YouTube channel
Q&A w/ Dr. Sarah Fine
The reach and impact of our food systems – that is, the complex, interconnected, and globalized web of institutions, resources, and processes that bring food from the farm, to the table, and into the waste stream – is universal: every single one of us has either worked in ourselves, or known people who work growing, raising, producing, processing, packing, transporting, preparing, or serving the food we all eat.
In the food we consume, we become connected to the conditions, the labor, and the people of the food system that produces it. Fully 1 in 10 American workers, over 17 million people, work in paid frontline food system jobs. And millions more work at home to plan, shop, prepare, and in many households, grow the food their children and families eat.
There are massive implications for schools as well, as they participate in the food system directly to bring literally billions of meals to children each year, and as labor in the food system impacts the families, children, and communities our schools serve.
My guests today are Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa M. Mares, associate professors and co-authors of Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain, available from University of California Press in September. Their book captures the grim realities faced by food workers alongside the opportunities for solidarity at every point in the system while amplifying the successes and challenges faced by movements to make food work, good work.
“As long as people are suffering to get food to our plates,” they write, “we need to center food workers in any vision for a just food system.”
Will Work for Food book from UC Press
Please note that Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and that this interview is not an endorsement of Morales as a candidate for office.
Before Howie Morales became Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico, before he was ever a state senator, he was a teacher and a state-championship winning baseball coach in rural New Mexico. He also holds a Master’s in bilingual education and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction. So it’d be difficult, it seems, to understand what he’s accomplished in those elected positions except through the lens of his experience in the classroom. And he joins me to talk about that experience, how it informs his work and achievements in office, and the challenges New Mexico public school students, families, and teachers still face.
In the opening pages of my guest’s book, she recounts a colleague's bumpy plane ride that provided the insight for the title of the book, Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: “We are facing turmoil in education, and the job of good leaders is to 'tame the turbulence'...educators have been caught in this turbulence; it permeates our profession and we haven't been able to get above it. As a result, it is the role of leaders to help teachers see how even small, simple shifts can change a child’s experience of school.”
Rooted in real-world stories, Taming the Turbulence offers solidarity and actionable strategies to education leaders committed to centering the needs of all learners in increasingly polarized societies.
And the author, Jennifer D. Klein, is an experienced educator and advocate for student-centered, experiential learning as a catalyst for positive social change. With two-decades of classroom teaching across a number of diverse international settings, as a teacher in Costa Rica and a school leader in Colombia, she now focuses on inspiring and training educators worldwide, working with groups like What School Could Be, The Institution for International Education, and The Buck Institute. Her previous books include The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K–12 Classrooms Worldwide Through Equitable Partnerships and The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, coauthored with Kapono Ciotti, who we spoke with about that work back in episode 159.
You can connect with Jennifer at principledlearning.org
Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership from Corwin
“Any assessment of the potential of AI to contribute to education must begin with an accurate understanding of the nature of the outputs of AI,” my guests today write, “The most important reason to resist the use of AI in universities if that its outputs are fundamentally bullshit – indeed, strictly speaking, they are meaningless bullshit.”
That particular term of art may appear to be attention-seeking or dismissive of the issue of AI entirely, but it’s actually the root of a much deeper philosophical critique, like the late anthropologist David Graeber’s notion of “bullshit jobs”, but leveled at Generative AI and the way it distorts the purpose and function of teaching, learning, and education itself. My guests today are Robert Sparrow and Gene Flenady, professor and lecturer, respectively, in philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where they join me from, and they are collaborators on two recent articles: Bullshit universities: the future of automated education and Cut the bullshit: why Generative AI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors. As a heads up, we’re gonna be saying bullshit a LOT, sometimes in an academic context, sometimes not so much.
Bullshit universities: the future of automated education
Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors
Back in December 2024, I got an email from Tom Rademacher raving about an upcoming book from a teacher who is now a licensed counselor that read, “The thing that hooked me when I read it the first time was a whole part on teachers recognizing their own triggers to their anger and stress and learning to understand and adapt to them... but the whole thing is gorgeous.” The author was of course my guest today, Maria Munro-Schuster, and the book, which is now in print, is The Empathetic Classroom: How A Mental Health Mindset Supports Your Students – And You, which the HRP team was more than thrilled to contribute the forward:
“The Empathetic Classroom provides therapeutic self-reflection activities and prompts for educators and colleagues, the psychological theories underpinning them, guidance for applying them with students, and scalable activities for classroom implementation. Maria Munro-Schuster’s call to consider the mundane over measurement is essential in improving the current state of education. This proactive approach acknowledges that we are all learners and that all of humanity has something to gain from this mission. We can create school climates that are no longer so arid that a single spark or gust of wind sets everything ablaze. If we can do this we may find that the fires are more manageable and less frequent.”
Order: The Empathetic Classroom (Teacher Created Materials)
“The problems we face are not the fault of any single individual or organisation. They are often the by-product of good intentions. And yet, alongside children and young people and their parents and carers, it’s educators who are most exposed to these pressures – who confront them every day, and try to make it all work regardless,” writes today’s guest in a piece from May titled Confronting the educational polycrisis.
Joining us from Brighton, UK Dr James Mannion is a keynote speaker, teacher trainer, researcher, consultant and author with a passion for educational and political reform. He is the co-founder and Director of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organisation specialising in implementation and improvement science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. A former teacher of 12 years, James has an MA in person-centred education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge. He is also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, of which I have been a huge fan for a long time. In fact, HRP contributed the very first video essay we ever made to a virtual arm of James’s Rethinking Education Conference back in 2022. This conversation crossover has certainly been a long time coming!
“We have multiple crises on our hands,” James writes, “They interact and have become entangled. This makes them difficult to resolve - but resolve them we must.” And my hope today is that even if we can’t untangle the polycrisis today, we can at least get a better grasp and perhaps loosen their hold on our education systems.
https://drjamesmannion.substack.com/
https://makingchangestick.substack.com/
https://www.educationpa.org/
https://wssnow.org/
https://www.ucyottawa.com/invitation-to-the-rcen-book-club/
“We are a community affair. We’re Autistic, ADHD, OCD, PTSD, Tourettes, schizophrenic, bipolar, apraxic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, dyscalculic, non-speaking, and more. We’ve collectively experienced rare diseases, organ transplants, various cancers, many surgeries and therapies, and lots of ableism and SpEd. We’ve experienced #MedicalAbleism, #MedicalMisogyny, #MedicalRacism, #MedicalTrauma, and #MedicalGaslighting. We understand chronic pain, chronic illness, and the #NEISvoid “No End In Sight Void”. We know what it’s like to be disabled and different in our systems. We know what it is like to live with barriers and what it means to not fit in and have to forge our own community. Disabled and neurodivergent people are always edge cases, and edge cases are stress cases. We can help you design for the edges, because we live at the edges. We are the canaries. We are “the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream.“
And that’s just the opening statement on Stimpunks.org.
Stimpunks has been among HRP’s closest allies over the years, and I am so grateful to be joined by an amazing cross section of Stimpunks today -- Ryan Boren, Chelsea Adams, Norah Hobbs, and Helen Edgar, who also runs Autistic Realms – to speak to their roll your own, DIY, Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People.
Chelsea had to step away during recording so you’ll hear her voice just in the first half. This episode was a long time coming, and I hope you enjoy it. You can connect with Stimpunks and find all of the resources mentioned in this episode at Stimpunks.org.
Mentioned in this episode:
Stimpunks Website
Community Discord
Mutual-Aid
Map of Monotropic Experiences
The Five Neurodivergent Love Languages/Locutions
10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
At the time of recording, New York Magazine had released an article titled “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College: How ChatGPT has Unraveled the Entire Academic Project” which launched a thousand takes. The piece outlines an arms race, characterized as “a siege on education” between college professors, sneaking white-text Trojan horse prompts like “mention Dua Lipa” to confound the chatbots, and students, one of which is quoted as saying, “the ceiling has been blown off” cheating. One ethics professor elaborates to add that, “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate. Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” Which captures, in my opinion, the overall tone of the piece: college is an expensive and fixed game that students endure on their way to credentials and that institutions are powerless in a losing battle to stop. Education and learning have…little to do with it. But it’s also a chicken-egg issue where institutions of higher education are themselves contributing to the same attitudes they’re complaining about: if students copy-paste a prompt from Blackboard into the chatbot, copy-paste the output, and submit it all to be read and graded…by an AI…whose problem is that?
My favorite take on the topic of AI in education is a satire meant to be read in the bulldog diction of philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Zizek: “That AI will be the death of learning and so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, and we are free! While the ‘learning’ happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want.
This is all to say that the conversation with my guest today, Texas educator Chanea Bond, was prompted by all of this, as she shared the New York Magazine piece with the challenge, “Somebody invite me on your podcast to talk about this article!” and three weeks later…here we are. I’m hoping today to get Chanea’s insight on the impact of AI in education and so much more facing teachers, students, and schools in 2025.
EduTopia - Why I'm Banning Student AI Use This Year by Chanea Bond
For as much as schools are a necessary collaboration of communities and families, we haven’t spent much time, if any at all, on this podcast focused on parenting itself. Well that changes today, as I’m joined by Steve Shapiro and Nancy Shapiro-Rapport, siblings, and co-founders of Our Family Culture.
Our Family Culture is a platform dedicated to helping families build strong, intentional cultures rooted in shared values, traditions, and meaningful connections. Through stories, guides, and community support, it empowers families to create lasting legacies centered on purpose and togetherness.
https://ourfamilyculture.org/
Founder’s Discount: FOUNDER
Our conversation today is with educator, author, and Director of National Faculty at PBLWorks, Ryan Sprott, about one of the most contentious topics in education today, that is Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation: A Memoir and Primer for Pedagogical Transformation, which is also the title of his self-published book. In this conversation we be talk about his experience teaching an inquiry approach to teaching contentious topics. In part time project-based inquiry, his students in Texas, of all places, engaged with some of the most difficult open-ended, wicked questions around, as Ryan refers to them, “A question to open hearts and minds”–
What is the purpose of a border and what has shaped your answer to this question?
How can we improve energy policy and what has shaped your answer to this question?
And what is the purpose of school and what has shaped your answer to this question?
Students visited the Texas border with Mexico, worked with immigrant aid organizations and hosted dialogue with Border Patrol agents. They visited Texas oil fields to speak with oilmen on the ground, engaged in interviews, documented their experiences in field journals, created collaborative community art projects, and so much more. You’ll hear student testimonials about how they came away transformed forever by the experience.
Ryan Sprott @ PBLWorks
Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation (Amazon)
I’m joined today by Dr Chloe Keegan. Chloe Keegan is Lecturer of Early Childhood Education in the Froebel Department of Primary and Early Childhood Education in Maynooth University, Ireland.
Dr Keegan is an early childhood expert with over a decade of experience as an educator, researcher, and policy advocate. Her work focuses on children's rights and power, play and participation, and influencing practice and policy in early education. She completed her doctoral thesis at Maynooth University, developing an innovative method using GoPro cameras to involve children as co-researchers in studying power dynamics. Her research also explores the impact of play bans on children’s well-being, moral development, the influence of stereotypical media on children’s views of sex, gender, and race, and participatory art-based methods in children’s research and video-based reflective practices.
Connect w/ Dr Keegan on LinkedIn
Full thesis: It's Like a Baby Jail
https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/conference
“True light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms (as read by Zoe Bee)
In stressful, uncertain times, when cynical powers attempt to divide and isolate us, community and solidarity are acts of resistance. But there are no superheroes here, and no simple answers to be found, only the Quest for Connection.
In 2025, we’re responding to the need for community and solidarity in uncertain times by turning Conference to Restore Humanity into a model for humanizing critical discourse and dialogue: bringing together students and teachers, researchers and doers, thinkers and visionaries to explore complex topics in education and illuminate a path forward together.
Our virtual Conference to Restore Humanity 2025 runs July 21st through the 23rd. To make this year as accessible and sustainable as ever, we’ve cut the ticket price to just $50. You can learn more about Conference to Humanity and register on our website at humanrestorationproject.org/conference
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Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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My guest today is Nika Dubrovsky. Nika is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally, her children’s books have been translated into several languages and, remarkably, as you’ll hear in the episode, Nika is directly responsible for bringing Russian translations of Dr. Suess to post-Soviet Russia.
Nika is the co-creator of Anthropology For Kids alongside her late husband: Anthropologist, best selling author, and activist, David Graeber, who passed away suddenly in 2020. A4Kids.org is an open-source platform which experiments with new educational formats. After David's passing, Nika also founded the David Graeber Institute as a platform to develop ideas and projects that continue his legacy.
Most of Nika’s projects are dedicated to the building and maintaining of social relationships, among which are the “Museum of Care”, a nomadic ‘anti’ institute, and the Playground of the Future, a collaborative and interactive art project imagining playgrounds as a space of collectivity and care. “Playgrounds are vital public spaces,” she writes, “—they bring communities together, bridging generations and social divides. They’re also about fun and play, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we need when making collective decisions. A network of community-built playgrounds, designed around Visual Assemblies, could become spaces where people gather, play, and make decisions together.”
https://museum.care/playgrounds-notes-from-the-curator/
Anthropology For Kids
https://museum.care/
Radical Playgrounds: From Competition to Collaboration
Cities Made Differently (MIT Press)
David Graeber Institute
This is the latest in our “spotlight series”, the first of 2025, where we reach out to schools who are engaged in awesome work, and talk to teachers, school leaders, and students about it to shine a light, inspire, and influence others to do the same. As with all learning, process is the point, not perfection, and there’s so much to learn from these schools as we reimagine education in our communities.
Empower[Ed] is a personalized, competency-based education program designed to give high school juniors and seniors control over their learning. We integrate core academic subjects with real-world, community-embedded projects and Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses. Students primarily work independently, demonstrating mastery through projects that align with their passions and career interests. Empower[Ed] fosters learner agency, helping students build critical skills like problem-solving, time management, and collaboration, while crafting personalized learning paths that prepare them for success beyond high school. It’s a flexible, self-directed learning experience aimed at making education more relevant and engaging.
Empower[Ed] School Page
Empower[Ed] Community Impact ArcGIS
With the help of Teacher-Powered Schools, Socol-Moran Partners, Stimpunks, and What School Could Be, we’ve completed the lineup for our 4th annual virtual Conference to Restore Humanity for July 21-23, focused this year on the Quest for Connection. Tickets are just $50 and you can find out more info at humanrestorationproject.org/conference
We’re excited to have members of the team from Story Xperiential with us for today’s episode, which was recorded way back in 2024. Developed by veterans from Pixar and Khan Academy, Story Xperiential brings the art of professional storytelling into the classroom, giving students the tools to craft and share their own stories using the same creative process as major studios.
The program is structured to fit into school schedules, offering a two-part curriculum: Storytelling Essentials, where students develop a story outline into a story reel, and Mastering Storytelling, where they expand their work into a full narrative. Through self-paced lessons, hands-on projects, and a moderated peer feedback system, students not only learn the technical aspects of storytelling but also gain confidence in their creative abilities.
One unique aspect of Story Xperiential is how it can be integrated into every subject area, aligning with interdisciplinary content standards -- bringing together social studies and ELA, for example, or STEM and fine arts -- while also fostering skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and visual communication.
In this episode, we’ll explore how Story Xperiential is being implemented in schools, hear about the impact it’s having on students, and discuss how storytelling can be a powerful tool for learning and self-expression.
You’re gonna be hearing a few voices in this conversation. HRP director Chris McNutt is hosting this one, who you’re probably used to hearing on this show, and he’ll be talking to a few people on the StoryX team:
Dennis Henderson VP of Education and Strategy
Chief Technical Officer, Tony DeRose
And Chief Learning Officer, Brit Cruise
You can learn more and sign your students up at https://www.storyxperiential.com/
With the help of Teacher-Powered Schools, Socol-Moran Partners, Stimpunks, and What School Could Be, we’ve officially announced our 4th annual virtual Conference to Restore Humanity for July 21-23, focused this year on the Quest for Connection. If you’re interested in joining us, tickets start at just 50 bucks and you can find the full lineup at humanrestorationproject.org/conference
Today I’m joined by Christian Moore-Anderson. And I wanted to have Christian on to talk about the ideas that drive his teaching practice and that he shares in his book, Difference Maker: Enacting systems theory in biology teaching. While that title may seem daunting, Christian’s teaching would immediately look and feel to observers like “just good teaching.” But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Informing his theory and practice of teaching is a set of related ideas that I was largely unfamiliar with before encountering it in his book: cybernetics, systems theory, and enactivism. Cybernetics is simply a feedback loop. Just as someone steering a ship adjusts the rudder based on feedback from the ocean, so too does good pedagogy depend on what Christian calls “recursive teaching”, or a constant feedback loop of action, interpretation, and learning between teachers and students. You can connect with Christian on BlueSky @cmooreanderson.bsky.social.
Difference Maker: Enacting Systems Theory in Biology Teaching - Christian Moore-Anderson
Christian's Recommended Reading:
From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition - Humberto Maturana, Bernhard Pörksen
The Pragmatic Turn: Toward Action-Oriented Views in Cognitive Science Edited by Andreas K. Engel, Karl J. Friston and Danica Kragic
Understanding Systems: Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics - Heinz von Foerster
The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future - Andrew Pickering
Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness - Anthony Chaney
If you go back through the HRP podcast archives, and I encourage you to do just that, you’ll see that we’ve covered just about every topic imaginable in the world of education, with some that keep returning again and again. One area you’ll probably notice a regrettable gap is in early childhood education, PreK-early elementary. One reason is that it’s just out of the experience of the two high school social studies teachers who started the podcast, and another is that foundationally, at least for the classrooms I’ve visited since, PreK-early elementary tends to get a lot more right about developmentally appropriate instruction and schooling than the middle and high school grades that follow. That’s a large part of why I reached out to my guest today to help unpack the ideas that make early childhood education such a powerful and important part of a child’s life.
Heidi Echternacht is co-founder of Kinderchat, a weekly professional conversation, resource library, and online network for early childhood advocates and educators. Created and led by teachers, Kinderchat has hosted global discussions between and among professional educators and in-service teachers for over ten years. Author of The Kinderchat Guide to the Classroom, Heidi has been an educator of children for over 20 years and currently teaches second grade in Princeton, New Jersey.
Kinderchat Substack
Kinderchat.org
Connect with Heidi on Bluesky
Kinderchat Guides
In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia
Peter Gray - Free to Learn
Visible Learners - Mara Krechevsky
Today we're joined by Mike Tinoco. Mike is a full time public school teacher from California, and author of Heart at the Center: An Educator's Guide to Sustaining Love, Hope, and Community Through Nonviolence Pedagogy. Gholdy Muhammad called the book "an urgent call for truth, love, and justice for every educator and community member who deeply dreams of and seeks peace.” Further, Mike is a certified Kingian Nonviolence and Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) trainer who provides workshops around the country. And, he's an award winning beat-boxer.
miketinoco.com
Heart at the Center: An Educator's Guide to Sustaining Love, Hope, and Community Through Nonviolence Pedagogy
I’m thrilled to be joined today by Pernille Ripp — a passionate educator, author, and literacy advocate. She is the author of Passionate Readers: The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child, Passionate Learners: How to Engage and Empower Your Students, and Reimagining Literacy Through Global Collaboration. She’s also the founder of the Global Read Aloud, a program that has connected millions of students and teachers around the world through the shared joy of reading.
And for all of our benefit, Pernille is also a prolific sharer. After teaching in Wisconsin for over a decade, In her BlueSky re-introduction she noted she was “back living in Denmark because she needed to breathe a bit easier.” And she frequently posts about her experience in the Danish education system, “Fun fact about teaching at my Danish school,” she writes, “when we are sick, we’re not required to write sub plans because we’re sick.”
And by most measures, Danes are among the happiest in the world, despite having among the highest tax rates. Healthcare and PreK-College education is free. Hygge conjures cozy seasonal vibes. Denmark has some of the highest public education participation and teacher pay and some of the lowest student:teacher ratios and class sizes among their OECD peers, including the United States. On a more grim note of comparison, the Wikipedia page for “school shootings in Denmark” contains a single entry from 1994, the only school shooting in Danish history. However, as a PDF, the list of school shootings in the United States since 2000 is 169 pages long with footnotes.
Regular listeners of this show will know just how immediately all of this grabbed my attention. In the past we’ve had guests talk about their experiences with everything from the education system in Trinidad & Tobago to the national Chinese college entrance exam, so I am thrilled at the opportunity to dig into both American and Danish society and education systems with someone who has knowledge and experience in both.
Pernille Ripp Bluesky
There are any number of narratives that emerged from the 2024 election and that will be hotly debated over the next four years. However, one of those is not up for debate: that vouchers and school choice lost everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024. In Colorado, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would’ve added “a right to school choice.” And in red-state Kentucky and Nebraska, voucher programs failed by nearly the same proportion that Donald Trump won.
On this show we've focused a lot on culture war issues as they directly impact what and how classroom teachers can teach, and I suspect the culture war will come up in this conversation. But we've never actually dug into the specific issue of voucher programs, which also impact educators, parents, schools, and kids in over a dozen states, with even more to come in an explicit push for a national universal voucher program as a long-term federal policy goal.
My guest today is Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He’s written extensively about education politics, school choice, and culture wars in the United States, and you should definitely give him a follow on BlueSky @joshcowenmsu as he is very persistent in addressing the topic of his latest book, titled The Privateers: How BIllionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. I wanted to have Josh Cowen on to better understand, as we head into a new year and the next administration, how, like unsinkable rubber ducks, vouchers continue to fail to deliver on their promises and continue to be rejected by voters, and yet, we find ourselves on the verge of a nationwide voucher and school choice program.
The Privateers @ Harvard Education Press
Josh Cowen @ BlueSky
The Effect of Taxpayer-Funded Education Savings Accounts on Private School Tuition: Evidence from Iowa
Today we are joined by Dr. Kapono Ciotti. Dr. Ciotti is the Executive Director of What School Could Be, an organization offering a whole host of things: free resources, a flourishing community, coaching services, graduate coursework, and more; plus WSCB is one of Human Restoration Project’s partners. Prior to this work, Dr. Ciotti grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i in a progressive, constructivist school and taught in the same area, then in Senegal, and then became a school leader in the United States and internationally. He’s worked in over one hundred schools across four continents, including as national faculty for the National Association of Independent Schools in diversity, equity, and justice.
Dr. Kapono Ciotti @ Solution Tree
Dr. Kapono Ciotti @ PrincipledLearning
What School Could Be
Today we are joined by Dr. Pepper Stetler. Pepper’s recently released book, A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning with the IQ Test documents her journey alongside her daughter, Louisa, who was diagnosed with Down syndrome. It dives into the history and ongoing problematic issues with measuring intelligence, specifically how school and society uphold and reinforce misused and misappropriated labels. Pepper’s work on disability advocacy has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Washington Post, and she’s also an Art History professor at Miami University.
Book: A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother's Reckoning with the IQ Test
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I was not familiar at all with China’s national college exam, the gaokao, until reading about it in Susan Blum’s book, Schoolishness, and talking with her about it on a podcast episode we released in August – episode 152, you should check it out – and I’m incredibly grateful to Susan for making the connection with my guest today. Zachary Howlett is associate professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, joining me from Singapore, and author of the book, Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Exam in China. I thought at first ah, sure, every country has its school gatekeepers and methods of rationing secondary & post-secondary education – the SAT & ACT in the US, or the GCSE’s in the UK, for example – so how is this any different? But what I was not prepared for in Zachary’s work was the sheer magnitude of the gaokao as a deeply Chinese cultural, economic, political, and even a magical and religious phenomenon that touches every aspect of life, and for which there really is no American equivalent.
The blurb on the back of the book from Karrie Koesel captures it so well, “Zachary M Howlett opens the black box of the gaokao to reveal that it is not only a fateful rite of passage, but also a complex social phenomenon laid in with ritual, magic, dark horses, examination champions, latent, potential, luck, character building, social inequity, and the possibility of changing one's fate.”
Meritocracy and its Discontents book link
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It’s not every day that you get an email from ACLU. If you aren’t aware, since being co-founded in part by Hellen Keller in New York City in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union has been involved in dozens of major cases defending the fundamental civil rights of individuals and causes both popular and very much not so. In 1925, the ACLU represented high school science teacher, John Scopes, in what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. Nearly 30 years later they played a significant role in the Brown v Board decision overturning “separate but equal” education for Black and white students. So when they reached out wanting to do a podcast episode with us about the state of Title IX in 2024, I had to say yes. In the past we’ve done episodes about how classroom teachers can best support LGBTQ students in potentially hostile policy environments, but we are well overdue for a national look at the current rights under Title IX for LGBTQIA+ students, pregnant and parenting students, and for all students facing sex-based harassment and assault and the obligations schools have to protect them.
Jennesa Calvo-Friedman is currently a staff attorney at the ACLU. Previously, she was the Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellow with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. Before joining the ACLU, Calvo-Friedman clerked for the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Ronnie Abrams of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She was the Relman Civil Rights Fellow at the civil rights law firm Relman, Dane & Colfax. Calvo-Friedman received her B.A. from Swarthmore College, and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she graduated first in class, was a Public Interest Law Scholar and Executive Editor of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy.
US Dept of Education Title IX: https://www.ed.gov/titleix
ACLU Title IX Fact Sheet: https://www.aclu.org/documents/title-ix-fact-sheet
General Resources:
https://nwlc.org/respect-students/
https://www.equalrights.org/news/new-title-ix-rule-goes-into-effect-protecting-lgbtqi-other-students-but-not-in-all-states/
Pregnant and Parenting Students:
https://thepregnantscholar.org/titleix-updates-toolkit/
https://www.abetterbalance.org/our-issues/students-rights-emerging-workforce/
Sexual Assault, Sexual Harassment, and Gender Based Violence:
https://www.publicjustice.net/what-we-do/gender-sexual-violence/
https://www.advocatesforyouth.org/campaigns/know-your-ix/
LGBTQIA+:
https://www.glsen.org/title-ix
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/lgbtq-rights#are-lgbtq-students-protected-from-discrimination-in-schools
https://legacy.lambdalegal.org/know-your-rights/article/youth-how-the-law-protects
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If education had a Hippocratic Oath - First, do no harm - grades and grading would be among the first practices on the chopping block.
And in the conversation about grades and grading in school, there are any number of books and blogs educators can look to for figuring out how to de-grade, un-grade, Hack Assessment, and so on, to mitigate the harm grading causes. After all, as these books and blogs reveal, it’s a system educators have a surprising amount of control over. But what about parents who see it weighing on their own kids and young people who feel the weight of the grading system themselves? How do we communicate the real consequences of grades and grading, especially on youth mental health, and the need for change to those on the outside looking in? And what can parents do to help kids who are navigating outmoded grading systems?
“Supporting a child who is trying to navigate an educational system that privileges grades and achievement begins, simply, with compassion and love,” my guest today writes, “When children believe that their worth as human beings has nothing to do with the grades they receive, and when they know that the love of their family comes without conditions, they are better able to cope with the negative messages that grades can so often send.”
Just one of many powerful lines from my guest, Joshua Eyler, who runs the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and is a clinical assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Mississippi. His latest book is absolutely full of insight for people trying to change the system, we’re talking about Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It, currently available from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Failing Our Future
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Stop me if you’ve heard these before:
American public schools are failing,
American students are falling behind their global peers,
The future of American innovation, economic equality, and global competitiveness depends on schools today preparing students for the job market of tomorrow,
School reform is only tool we have to fix these urgent issues
Each of these sentiments have become conventional wisdom at this point, and they’ve appeared in the platforms of both major American political parties if not explicitly, then through familiar buzzwords: school choice, competition, data-driven accountability, college and career readiness, STEM education, and gaps of all kinds: the skills gap, the achievement gap, and the employment gap, to name a few. And when your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails… But it may also be the case, despite the flaws of public education throughout the nation’s history, that American public schools became “failing schools” exactly when they needed to, to fit the needs of politicians and industry, and to fit schooling into the new economic order that came to dominate the last half century.
At the global level, this narrative even fuels reactionary stories of civilizational struggle and the “decline of The West. As an Italian economist lamented for GIS Reports earlier this year, “There are only two ways Western educational systems can reverse the current trend and offer more appealing prospects: Allowing private schooling to flourish and Bringing about radical reforms in state schooling.”
The most likely outcome, he predicts is a steady decline, writing, “the vicious spiral that links poor education to inequality, social tensions, more government intervention and, finally, low productivity and stuttering economic growth will likely dominate the future of many Western countries for years to come.”
This last line captures what my guest today describes as The Fantasy Economy. Neil Kraus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. His most recent book, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, describes in powerful detail how exactly our popular, bipartisan conventional wisdom about America’s “failing schools” and the decline of of the American student came to be: as the result of a deliberate project to shift the responsibility for economic precarity and inequality away from industry and policy and place it squarely on the shoulders of educators and schools. “Ultimately,” he writes, “ we must see the fantasy economy for what it is—a misleading, political campaign in the interests of corporations and the wealthy.”
The Fantasy Economy
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A “solutionary” has multiple definitions, one of which reads, “A person who identifies inhumane, unjust, and/or unsustainable societal systems and then develops solutions to transform them so that they do the most good and least harm for people, animals, and the environment.”
Today we are joined by Zoe Weil who has dedicated her work to creating, spreading the word, and teaching what it means to be a solutionary. She has written eight books including her most recent book we’re talking about today, The Solutionary Way. She’s delivered multiple TEDx talks and keynotes around the world on educating to solve the world’s most pressing problems. And she’s the co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education, which has been making serious strides in implementing the Solutionary Framework in schools around the country as well as in their own graduate program.
Links:
- Solutionary Public Policy Webinar with Caitie Whelan and Zoe Weil
- The Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and the World for the Better by Zoe Weil
- The Institute for Humane Education
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Today we are joined by Angela Stockman. Angela is a veteran secondary English/Language Arts teacher, author, and professional learning facilitator. She has presented at state, national, and international levels and has led curriculum, assessment, and instructional design projects in over 100 school districts.
She has written books and resources on writing instruction, including The Writing Workshop Teacher's Guide to Multimodal Composition, Creating Inclusive Writing Environments in the K-12 Classroom, and the recently released The Writing Teacher’s Guide to Pedagogical Documentation: Rethinking How We Assess Learners and Learning, which we're talking about today.
Links:
- The Writing Workshop Teacher's Guide to Multimodal Composition
- Angela Stockman's website
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Many of you are already working to get your classrooms ready and will be welcoming students for the first day in the next couple of weeks, if you haven’t already. It’s a magical and stressful time of year, so we wanted to release Dr Carla Shalaby’s 2024 Conference to Restore Humanity keynote as a “back to school” special podcast. Carla speaks so powerfully to her own practical experience of human-centered education and why we do what we do: moving away from control, surveillance, and punishment, towards a model based on collective care, inclusion, and restorative practice. We hope you find it a great way to center ways of thinking about classroom management that will help get the school year started off on the right foot and sustain community with students throughout the next several months. As Carla reminds us, "Being good at human being requires a ton of work and investment, and perhaps most of all, an intentional rejection of a culture of disposability, the idea that there's ever such a thing as a throwaway person." If you prefer video, that’s up on our YouTube channel as well, just search for Human Restoration Project.
Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an amazing school year! Let us know if you need anything.
Link to YouTube video
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My guest today is Dr. Susan Blum. Susan Blum is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of I Love Learning; I Hate School and My Word!, as well as the editor of Ungrading.
Her new book, Schoolishness: Alienated Education, and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning is now out on Cornell University Press. It catalogs in great detail the characteristics of a “schoolish” education, that is, school as a self-contained institution with its own logic, grammar, and rules. One that, ultimately, sets students up for difficult re-entry into the rest of their lives in an unschoolish world. Susan draws upon examples of unschoolish learning from around the world and makes a powerful case for a necessary anthropological perspective that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
“If we don't try, nothing will change,” she writes, “It's hard. Hell, it's probably impossible. Schoolishness is probably here to stay, but maybe not all of its elements are inevitable. Entrenched, yes. But inevitable? I don't think so.”
Editor's Note: Susan would like to add a quick correction that her current DuoLingo streak is over 1,100 not 11,000. :)
Susan Blum's Website
Works mentioned this episode:
Susan Hrach - Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning
David Lancy - The Anthropology of Childhood
Edwin Hutchins - Cognition in the Wild
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Today we are joined by Nawal Qarooni. Nawal is an educator, writer, and adjunct professor based in Jersey City, who founded and operates NQC Literacy, a consultancy firm serving PreK-8 school leaders and teachers in holistic literacy instruction, equity-driven practice, and family engagement. She also serves on several committees, including the National Council for Teachers of English Committee Against Racism and Bias, evaluates manuscripts for Reese Witherspoon's LitUp program, and advises the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Advisory Board. Her recent book, Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Elevating Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care is a deep dive into how educators can celebrate and elevate students’ families, while encouraging shared reflections and connections to what’s happening in schools.
We talk about building a collective culture of care that invites in families to build a better education system that supports all learners. We're combining the lens of progressive education lens of the classroom to the greater support structures that raise children toward a better future.
NQC Literacy
Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations Elevating Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care by Nawal Qarooni (Routledge)
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“Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.”
This is how Scottish historian & writer Thomas Carlyle characterized Great Britain’s mechanized, steam powered industrial era in 1829. These changes in the human relationship to production rippled through the world economy with profound social, political, & environmental implications. One loosely organized group, the Luddites, emerged early on to smash the new machines and resist mechanization of the mills.
200 years after Carlyle’s “Age of Machinery”, we find ourselves sold a new Age, the Age of automation and AI, which promises another transformation in the way we live, work, AND learn, with similar social, political, and environmental consequences. At least, the AI-hype cycle is real. Sal Khan’s new book, for example, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing) promises to be “required reading for everyone who cares about education.”
But what should be the relationship of education, automation & artificial intelligence? Should there be one at all? How much power – not to mention student data – should educators cede to the new machine in the Age of AI?
Or…should the answer be a 21st century Luddite revival and mass resistance to the vision of the future offered by Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft?
That, I suspect, will be the argument of my guest today, Charles Logan, a Learning Sciences PhD Candidate at Northwestern University, writing earlier this year for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Ultimately, the Luddites’ militancy and commitment to resistance might be a necessary entry point for how laborers—and teachers, students, and caregivers—can take an antagonistic stance toward AI and automation, and create a new ‘commons.’”
Toward A Luddite Pedagogy
Should We Be More Like The Luddites?
Inspiration from the Luddites: On Brian Merchant’s “Blood in the Machine”
Learning About and Against Generative AI Through Mapping Generative AI’s Ecologies and Developing a Luddite Praxis
Record being placed on a record player.wav by HelterSkelter1114 -- https://freesound.org/s/409036/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
rope-making machinery running.wav by phonoflora -- https://freesound.org/s/201166/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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The story my guest will tell today is of her experience growing up and teaching in Memphis, Tennessee before finding a purpose-driven career change in - I am not joking - the heart of Transylvania. Emma Sisson is the School Director of The Mission School in Sighisoara, Romania.
The work of The Mission, Romania is deeply rooted in the local community in Sighisoara and, as you’ll hear Emma describe it, homebase is an 80,000 sq ft abandoned Soviet textile mill where staff live, work, house a K-3 school, and provide family wrap-around services to Romani children and families.
Romani, or Roma, are a historically enslaved and oppressed underclass in Europe, in Romania in particular, where they are often slandered as a lazy, thieving, “gypsy” underclass. In 2022 the European Union reported that 80% of Roma live in poverty, compared to the 17% EU average. 1 in 5 live in households with no running water. 1 in 3 have no indoor toilet. And fewer than half of Roma children attend early childhood education. The scathing report prompted the EU director of Fundamental Human Rights to ask, “Why do Roma across Europe still face shocking levels of deprivation, marginalization, and discrimination?”
Overcoming structural discrimination and prejudice against Roma people is a key part of The Mission’s mission. The Mission School also works to preserve Roma values and language in the context of education, expressed as a preference for family apprenticeships, experiential hands-on learning, and a rich oral tradition, that have historically put them at odds with the priorities of institutional school-based literacies.
On the other side of the Atlantic, The Mission international is currently recovering from a devastating fire that destroyed their entire campus headquarters in Tijuana, Mexico that served over 500 at-risk youth, so if you’d like to learn more and donate to help support Emma’s work in Romania and rebuild the Tijuana campus, you can do that at themissioninc - that’s the mission eye-enn-see - dot org
https://www.themissioninc.org/
You can reach Emma @ emma.barbara.sisson@gmail.com
Amazon Book Wishlist
Amazon Supplies Wishlist
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In this episode, Anna Saavedra and Morgan Polikoff explore the polarizing landscape of modern education found in their February 2024 report, "Searching for Common Ground.” The report reveals widespread support for public schools alongside significant partisan divides, particularly on topics like LGBTQ identities and racial inequality. From bipartisan consensus on some issues to stark disparities on others, this discussion highlights the complexities of education policymaking and the need for informed dialogue to navigate contentious topics and shape a more equitable future for education.
Links:
How Americans really feel about the teaching of controversial topics in schools @ USC Today
Read the full report online.
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Join us as we delve into the historical and current relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, focusing on the island's education system and its role in shaping Puerto Rico's future. Professor Jenaro Abraham shares his expertise on social movements, politics, and education in the Caribbean, offering key insights into Puerto Rico's quest for self-determination. From the legacy of colonialism to the prospects of statehood versus independence, this conversation explores the complexities of Puerto Rico's identity and its educational landscape.
Additional Resources:
Jenaro Abraham @ Gonazaga
Puerto Rico in the American Century, By César J. Ayala, Rafael Bernabe
CentroPR
Pedagogy of the Hawaiian Islands podcast series
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“Let's start with the bad news.” is how the conclusion to my guests’ book about changing grading practice begins. “No one is coming to save us. No consultant is going to sweep through and fix things for a fee. No new technology, digital, online, or otherwise, is going to change the game.” The game, of course, is school, and the currency of that game is grades.
Jack Schneider is Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor in the College of Education at the UMass - Amherst. He is the Executive Director of the Beyond Test Scores Project. Director of the Center for Education Policy. Co-Editor of the History of Education Quarterly, and Co-Host of the Have You Heard Podcast.
Ethan Hutt is the Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education and associate professor at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Education.
Their 2023 book, Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To), is a thorough, and at times frustratingly pragmatic, exploration of flawed necessity of the load bearing pillars of “real school” – grades, transcripts, and standardized tests – their origins in our nation’s history, the distorting effects they tend to have on the outcomes and goals of education, why nothing has arisen so far to replace them at scale, and why there are no magic potions: “No one is going to wake up one morning and realize that the answer was staring us in the face all along,” they remind us.
Balancing the real with the ideal, they also chart a path toward the possibility for something different, and like the grand experiment of public schooling itself, it’s something we’ll have to figure out and build together.
Off The Mark
Jack Schneider
Ethan Hutt
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In this episode, we talk with Rethinking Schools first-ever Executive Director, Cierra Kaler-Jones, about the past, present, and future of Rethinking Schools, especially as we enter another potentially contentious year of educational culture wars for 2024, and her vision for how educators can demand power for those who need it the most within our school system.
Links:
Rethinking Schools
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Today we are joined by Dr. Emma McMain. Emma works in the College of Education at Washington State University as a postdoctoral teacher and researcher, focusing on assessment for pre-service elementary teachers, cultural considerations in education, and social and emotional learning (SEL). Her work aims to promote social and ecological justice, seeing education as an important site of social transformation.
Dr McMain's recent works include: Drawing the line: Teachers affectively and discursively question what counts as “appropriate behavior” in schools — which dissects the power dynamics of classrooms in determining what is “appropriate” behavior; and The “Problem Tree” of SEL: A Sociopolitical Literature Review — which contextualizes what social-emotional learning actually means in a classroom setting from a variety of perspectives and in history. Particularly, we wanted to reach out and talk more about the idea of SEL as systemic change versus SEL as an add-on, and why this matters as we think about racism, sexism, neoliberalism, and more, especially in the context of SEL in the ongoing culture war and attacks on schools.
More about Dr Emma McMain
Drawing the line: Teachers affectively and discursively question what counts as “appropriate behavior” in schools
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Reimagining education is no small feat, but there is hope on the horizon. MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education. In this series, we'll do the random fun stuff: top 10 lists, current events, things we're thinking about. This is a casual format with limited editing and not as many intense conversations that occur in our mainline HRP interviews. Let us know what you think.
Learn more about our free resources, podcast, writings, and more at https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/
Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit centered on enabling human-centered schools through progressive pedagogy.
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In this incredible final installment of his exploration of the pedagogy of the Hawaiian Islands, Noah Ranz-Lind talks to educators and students at Hanahau‘oli School, a progressive K-6 school in Honolulu. Hanahau‘oli School promises its students an "intimate and nurturing learning community supports connections between home and school and the world, respecting and celebrating the uniqueness of the Hanahau‘oli child while appreciating the interconnectedness that defines our learning ‘ohana. Grounded in tradition yet embracing of innovation, we perpetuate joyous work, committed to being a resource and symbol of learning’s potential." And you will hear ample evidence of the joyous work at hand in this episode!
Links:
Hanahau‘oli School
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Chris sits down with Congressman Jamaal Bowman! serving New York's 16th district since 2021. Bowman was a crisis management teacher in an elementary school in the Bronx, who eventually founded his own public school, the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, a middle school in Eastchester. For years he maintained a blog on changing school policy and standardized testing, with a focus on being deeply involved in the opt-out movement to encourage families to not take the tests, as well as centering pedagogy on social emotional health and restorative justice.
Congressman Bowman’s team reached out to Human Restoration Project to talk about the More Teaching, Less Testing Act (linked below). The policy lessens the number of tests given each year in schools, limiting the number of tests all students take and finding other ways to gather data, such as through a smaller but representative sample size. Please note that Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and that this interview is not an endorsement of Bowman or his electoral campaign.
More Teaching, Less Testing Act: https://bowman.house.gov/_cache/files/8/9/89180377-ee4a-4906-b170-f4ee28d3602e/0D579FD78ABAA89748EA157D3F31CAB1.more-teaching-less-testing-act-bill-summary.pdf
A video of this conversation in available on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/y9Aw4EsH_yc
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On today’s podcast we’re joined by two founders of Ludic Language Pedagogy or LLP. LLP is an open access academic journal and community focused on publishing actionable ideas on “ludic”, or playful, ideas, and language learning, such as through tabletop RPGs, live action role playing, card games, and video games. For example, recently published papers include “Teaching Spanish with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” and “Places, people, practices, and play: Animal Crossing New Horizons here and there.”
James and Jonathan are currently writing a book on ludic pedagogy, and they led a session at our recent Conference to Restore Humanity! on ludic teaching that is definitely worth checking out. This conversation centers the distinction of gamification from game-based learning: what's the difference? Why does it matter? How does it apply to teaching and learning?
GuestsDr. James York is the editor in chief of LLP and a senior assistant professor at Meiji University, where he teaches and conducts research on the application of games, play and literacy. Dr. Jonathan deHaan is an associate editor and associate professor in the Faculty of International Relations at the University of Shizuoka, who focuses on teaching literacy with games.
Resources* Ludic Language Pedagogy * LLP @ Conference to Restore Humanity * Pac Manhattan
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Aloha and welcome to episode 2 in a three part series on Pedagogy in the Hawaiian Islands. My name is Noah Ranz-Lind, and I am a student from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst interning here at the Human Restoration Project.
In this episode, we delve into the research of Dr. Stacy Potes and her place-based pedagogical framework for Hawaiian youth. Stacy Potes, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa College of Education in Secondary Mathematics. Dr. Potes currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in teacher preparation, including Secondary Mathematics Methods and Multicultural Education. Previously, she worked as a Mathematics Lecturer at the University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu for five years and as a secondary mathematics teacher for thirteen years in the Department of Education. She focuses on contextualizing mathematics education by incorporating mathematics, culture, and sustainability. Her research is rooted in Hawaiʻi and influenced the development of a framework that includes place-conscious pedagogy, culturally responsive pedagogy, and critical ethnomathematics pedagogy.
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What you just heard were public comments from three community members of Houston Independent School District, the largest school district in Texas, at the center of a controversial state takeover by the Texas Education Agency. The bell you hear in the audio is a hard cut-off for speakers, whose mics were immediately turned off. After working its way through the legal system for several years, last winter, the Texas Supreme Court greenlit the replacement of district superintendent and the locally elected board of trustees by the head of the TEA, appointed directly by the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, himself. And last month, school was back in session under the newly appointed superintendent, Mike Miles - former US State Department ambassador, charter school CEO, and Dallas ISD superintendent - amid dozens of pedagogical and policy changes that left teachers, parents, and students confused, frustrated, and afraid, as heard in the public comment at the beginning of this episode.
The takeover of Houston ISD sits at the intersection of so many issues impacting American education today - democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism, the so-called parents’ rights movement, testing & accountability measures, poverty, race, and charter schools. On Friday, September 15th, the morning after another heated board meeting in Houston, I spoke with Karina Quesada-Leon, an Houston ISD parent, activist, and former teacher who has been intensely involved in HISD for a decade, and she was generous to speak with me for an hour about the recent history of the majority Hispanic/Latino district, the impact of the takeover on teachers, families, & students, and how they are experiencing the New Educational System of Superintendent Mike Miles, and what’s next for the movement opposed to these reactionary changes.
We are generally not a current-events podcast, but because this is a fast-moving story, we wanted to release it to listeners as soon and as lightly edited as possible. You can also find an overview of the story on our YouTube channel by searching Human Restoration Project. We hope to follow up with Karina and other affected teachers, parents, and students at Houston ISD. If you’d like to reach out to me directly, you can do so by emailing nick@humanrestorationproject.org. And of course you can always find more of our work and support us @ humanrestorationproject.org
Video: The Houston ISD Takeover Punishes Poverty & Subverts Democracy
Twitter: Houston Education Association
Twitter: Karina Quesada-Leon
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Welcome to the first of a three-part series on Pedagogy in the Hawai'ian Islands, where we explore history, philosophy, and progressive developments in Hawai'ian Pedagogy. My name is Noah Ranz-Lind, and I am a student at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, interning at the Human Restoration Project.
In this episode, we delve into the history of education in the Hawai'ian Kingdom, the impact of occupation and colonialism, and the link between Hawai'ian sovereignty and pedagogical practice here in Hawai'i. Today I’m joined by Dr. Keanu Sai. Dr. Sai is a political scientist and senior lecturer at the University of Hawai‘i Windward Community College, Political Science and Hawai'ian Studies Departments, and affiliate graduate faculty member at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa College of Education. He also served as Agent for the Hawai'ian Kingdom at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, The Hague, Netherlands, in Larsen v. Hawaiian Kingdom. His research focuses on the continued existence of the Hawai'ian Kingdom as a State under international law that has been under military occupation by the United States of America since January 17, 1893.
This keynote address was part of Conference to Restore Humanity! 2023: Breaking the Doom-Loop, sponsored by Holistic Think Tank, Cortico & Local Voices Network, Antioch University, Education Evolving & Teacher-Powered Schools, and Unrulr. You can also find a video of the keynote and community Q&A on our YouTube page by searching for Human Restoration Project.
Today we’re joined by Drs. Tanu Biswas and Toby Rollo. Tanu is an interdisciplinary philosopher of education, focused on challenging children’s historical marginalization. She serves as an advisory board member of The Childism Institute at Rutgers, and is an associate professor of pedagogy at the University of Stavanger (Sta - Van - Grr) and an associate researcher at the Doctoral College for Intersectionality Studies at the University of Bayreuth (Bye - Roite).
Toby is an associate professor of political science at Lakehead University, whose focus is on the democratic promises and failures of modern institutions with a specific focus on the marginalization of young people. His chapter in the recent work, Trust Kids!: Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, edited by carla bergman, focuses on centering the child in our ongoing intergenerational fight for peace, justice, and sustainability in our world.
In our discussion, we'll be talking about the connections between colonization, historical marginalization, youth rights, and adultism.
GuestsDrs. Tanu Biswas & Toby Rollo
Resources* Let's Abolish Adult Supremacy! Poster * NO! Against Adult Supremacy * Decolonial Childism - Nurturing Diversity for Intergenerational Sustainability * Childism and Decoloniality - a need for scholarly conversations * Childism and Decoloniality (Video)
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This keynote address was part of Conference to Restore Humanity! 2023: Breaking the Doom-Loop, sponsored by Holistic Think Tank, Cortico & Local Voices Network, Antioch University, Education Evolving & Teacher-Powered Schools, and Unrulr. You can also find a video of the keynote and community Q&A on our YouTube page by searching for Human Restoration Project.
Dr. Darder is an internationally recognized activist-scholar and Professor Emerita at Loyola Marymount University, where for more than a decade she held the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership.
She is an American Educational Research Association Fellow, the recipient of the American Educational Research Association Scholars of Color Lifetime Contribution Award, and an award-winning author and editor of more than 20 books in the field.
GuestsDr Antonia Darder is an internationally recognized activist-scholar and professor. For nearly 40 years, Antonia has worked tirelessly to counter social and material inequalities in schools and society.
Resources* Conference to Restore Humanity * Antonia Darder's Website
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Today, we wanted to provide a brief update on major upcoming projects at Human Restoration Project. Within we'll talk about:
- Ongoing work of the Human-Centered Schools Network (apologies for the audio quality...we are at a "beach house" in Michigan...)
- Our upcoming conference in 2 weeks! (July 24-27)
- Upcoming announcements and podcasts
Thank you for tuning in!
Today we’re joined by Aaron Schorn, Head of Growth and Community at Unrulr. Aaron is an experienced educator who runs an afterschool social entrepreneurship program for young people. And recently, he introduced Unrulr to us at HRP — in short, it’s one of the only edtech tools we’ve ever recommended, and it’s one of the few edtech tools we’d be comfortable sharing on our podcast.
In short, Unrulr is a storytelling tool to showcase learning. It allows young people and educators to take photos or videos of what they’re doing, tag it according to a value, standard, or objective, then share it online privately or publicly. And what really stood out to me was that students can document their journey overtime, creating posts where they group together these moments and showcase a timeline of learning. We see this as a fantastic tool to document learning, share to families and community members, and act as a way to move away from one-and-done grades and toward narrative assessment.
GuestsAaron Schorn, Head of Growth and Community at Unrulr and Director of the Nalukai Startup Camp, a social entrepreneurship program for young people based in Hawaii
Resources* Unrulr's Website
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Today we’re joined by Meredith Broussard. Meredith is a data journalist whose research and reporting centers on ethical AI and data analysis for the social good. She’s an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. And she’s an author, including writing Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World and the recently released More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech.
We invited Meredith on to specifically talk about the intersection of the recent rapid growth of consumer-focused generative AI, such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL-E, etc. as well as their integrations into commonly used education tools like Microsoft Office and soon, Google Documents. And I know that many educators are already worried about the implications of AI in classrooms…but it’s going to be quite jarring when Google Docs has a built-in AI text prompt. In our view, we’ll need to find ways to talk about AI and technology more broadly with students, guiding them in the use of these platforms and problematizing them — as opposed to just banning them outright.
GuestsDr. Meredith Broussard, associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World and the recently released More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech
Resources* Meredith Broussard's website * More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech by Dr. Meredith Broussard (MIT Press, 2023) * AI Stereotypes and Critical Reflections: Who's Being Generated? - YouTube Guide/Lesson by Human Restoration Project
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On today's podcast, we're joined by Dave Runge, co-founder and director of Future Schools. Future Schools is an Australian-based innovative schools organization, centered on exploring what's possible in schools by connecting together like-minds across over 100 school partners. Both in and outside of Australia, Future Schools helps educator teams explore what's possible, evolve their practices, and transform their spaces.
Dave focuses his work on change leadership, recognizing that we need to focus on systemic change to achieve lasting results. And in today's conversation, we'll talk about that change-making process -- why so many spaces feel "stuck" and what we can do to help them branch out.
GuestsDave Runge, co-founder and director of Future Schools who works with over a hundred schools across Australia and internationally to build new systems and reimagine education.
Resources* Future Schools' Website * Pressure from Above, Pressure from Below research study * Conference to Restore Humanity! 2023
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In the late 2000s, the concept of “solarpunk” emerged. In 2022, YouTube channel Our Changing Climate with, my guest today, Andrewism published a video titled “How We Can Build a Solarpunk Future Right Now”, in which they make that the case that "Ultimately Solarpunk envisions a world that might be slower, but more intentional. One that ties humanity closely to the natural world.” Or as Andrewism put in a reply to the video: "A future with a human face and dirt behind its ears."
But if solarpunk is the future with humanity put back in, achieving it means taking control of that future from economic, social, & political forces that seem to be on autopilot to self-destruction, utterly divorced from human desires & human intervention. One path we've imagined already, and its grimy survivalist individualism was the defining feature of Reagan-era science fiction classics. However, in its radical reimagination of economic & social structures, solarpunk resists the nihilism & doomerism of the grim dehumanized technological dystopias that dominate the worlds of, say, Blade Runner, Robocop, & William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Do we have the willingness to challenge the predominant social, economic, & political structures & systems that need to be challenged? To change the very nature of humanity's relationship to the planet? What role does education play in all of this?
GuestsAndrew goes by Andrewism on his YouTube channel. His 66 videos, covering topics from education, liberation, and history, to family, parenting, and of course, solarpunk - have nearly 3 million combined views. Young people from around the world are watching & learning from him and participating in the community he has cultivated around his channel.
Resources* Andrewism's YouTube channel * Fighting Back Against the Future: Imagining a Solarpunk Education * Conference to Restore Humanity! 2023
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Gamification is a long-standing practice across lesson planning and educational technology, but it doesn’t always work out the way we expect. At the end of the day, if the nature of the task is not interesting, then what we’re creating is more about compliance than engagement. In this session, we will host a conversation on what it means to gamify content, learning, and pedagogy: recognizing potential success while advising for potential pitfalls.
This episode is a panel discussion we had with game designer & author, Adrian Hon, on the pros and pitfalls of “gamification” as part of our EduFuturism Learning Series. You can find all of the previous events including Innovative AI Tools for the Classroom…and their Dilemmas and Learning From Video Game Tutorials, as well as register for upcoming events in the series @ humanrestorationproject.org/learning. You can also find this video and others on our YouTube channel by searching for Human Restoration Project.
GuestsAdrian Hon is an award-winning video game designer and is the CEO and founder of Six to Start, co-creator of the world’s most successful smartphone fitness game, Zombies, Run! He previously was the director of play, creating alternative reality games, at Mind Candy.
Resources* Watch on YouTube * You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All * Adrian Hon on Twitter * Conference to Restore Humanity! 2023
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This conversation is nearly a year in the making, from the first messages with my guest back in 2022 - which also happened to be the last of my 9 years teaching AP European History. That year there were over 4.7 million AP Exams taken by 2.6 million students from 23,000 secondary schools. At about $100 per exam…well, you don’t need to get a 5 on the AP Calc exam to finish that equation. And…here we are again, another high-stakes time of the academic year for yet millions more high schoolers seeking college credit from the College Board.
From AP to SAT, the College Board is a billion dollar educational gatekeeper that plays an outsized role in American education in policy and practice, K12 and beyond. In fact, as my guest today outlines in her book, many states have passed laws requiring the College Board play exactly that role: mandating that schools offer a minimum number of AP courses (that require AP trained teachers), offering cash incentives for student test scores, & dictating to universities what scores they will be required to accept for which credits.
Even more recent partisan challenges to curriculum, like the rejection of AP African-American History by the Florida Dept of Education, should also cause us to reflect on the homogenizing and controlling influence of what has become a de facto national curriculum, AND the metrics we use to evaluate success, AND the ways we assess & award credit, AND the philosophies & pedagogies we use in classrooms with students. Somewhere in the recent past, figure & ground inverted, and we not only lost track of what was important - the best intentions of what courses like these could represent - but along the way we ceded a lot of power to a single company and a single brand - Advanced Placement - to determine our educational goals, values, & practices from the top down.
GuestsAnnie Abrams holds a doctorate in American literature from NYU and is currently on childcare leave from her job as a public high school English teacher. She writes in the introduction to her brand new book Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students..
Resources* Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students from Johns Hopkins University Press * Annie Abrams Twitter
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“I learned so much about viewing the world, especially mass media, through a critical eye this year. I learned about what traps we fall into while viewing media and how we can prevent that. I also learned about good vs. questionable journalism tactics and how this can affect how accurate a news source is.”
My guest today, Sam Shain, is a musician, artist, writer, former journalist and current English teacher in Maine. That opening quote was just one student review of Sam’s journalism class from his book Education Revolution: Media Literacy for Political Awareness, available from Zer0 Books. Teaching in the United States has never been more fraught, as teachers across the country are implicitly or explicitly forced to avoid certain topics, texts, and questions that have been labeled divisive, controversial, or - worse yet - political. Of course, these topics also tend to be the most immediate & important, and are accompanied by intense mis- & disinformation - the reality of climate change, systemic racism, COVID-19, and the outcomes of our electoral system, to take some examples from just the last couple of years - all of this seems particularly heightened with the new ability of AI to generate audio, video, and images to spread politically motivated narratives easier than ever before via social media, and a receptive population willing not only to accept them but to participate in spreading mis- & disinformation. As the student testimonial I read earlier testifies to, the gap has never been wider between our vital need to teach critical media literacy and our ability. To do. Just that.
GuestsSam Shain is a former journalist and English teacher. He believes education is the way out of our country's current predicament and teachers and students can lead the revolution in turning this country around. Sam wrote for the Capital Weekly for several years and occasionally contributes to the Kennebec Journal.
In addition to teaching and writing, Sam sings and plays guitar in the band the Scolded Dogs, who play frequently throughout Maine and have released several original albums. Sam lives in Hallowell, Maine.
Resources* "Not Rehired for Teaching Politics": One Teacher's Story * Education Revolution from Zer0 Books
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It only takes a few seconds on Hanaa Elmi’s Twitter timeline for even the most oblivious observer like myself to know that what she is doing is magical. One post from February details several images of student contributions from reflections on Stone Soup and other related readings - child’s handwriting draws your eye to the center of each poster - We take care of each other by…We take care of water by…We take care of the Earth by… - student drawings and reflections surrounding those prompts create the shared understanding - Hanaa also captures “Our Ideas” in the margins - have a spirit of ubuntu (I am because we are), she writes, Be like the Water Walkers, Love water!
Another series of images shows her young students exploring questions like “What’s the heart of the story? What do you think the author wants us to know in our minds & hearts as a reader?”, one student reply reads “Ms. I think the heart of the story is that anger is okay and normal. We just have to breathe.”
Hanaa prompts students to explore the differences & similarities between justice & charity. She quotes from one of the dozens of books her students use, “What are words really? Are they just random letters arranged in different ways? Or do they have magical powers that can inspire and amaze?” A student uses a number string to double 40. Students with clipboards find and sort animals on a number line by their height. They write, draw, & reflect in dream journals. I could go on and on and on… In every post, it’s so obvious that students are deeply engaged & invested in the world & with each other.
Community, love, joy, and learning are self-evident in the work she does with kids.
GuestsHanaa Elmi is an elementary teacher in Windsor-Essex County. She is a graduate of the University of Windsor who roots her work in community: creating thriving spaces that humanize students. She is passionate about creating spaces where students deeply connect with the world around them in just, restorative, and conscientious ways.
Resources* Miss Elmi's Twitter
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Welcome to a brief HRP update with me, Nick Covington, Creative Director here at Human Restoration Project!
As you may have hear, Chris & I are coming off a whirlwind of a week in Columbus, Ohio, where we hosted a team from our Poland-based partners at Holistic Think Tank, Polish teacher representatives from the Polish-American Freedom Foundation, and a rockstar group of American teachers that included a team from our friends in Muskegon, Michigan (be on the lookout for more involvement from them in the future), as well as Trevor Aleo, and Jen Lucas; on the campus of The Ohio State University. The keynote of the conference was from none other than former Finnish minister of education & the author of Finnish lessons, Pasi Sahlberg, speaking not only to the need for systemic change, but the right kind of systemic change: rooted in cooperation, customized curriculum, holistic teaching and learning, trust-based professionalism, and where every school is a good school.
Reimagining education is no small feat, but there is hope on the horizon. MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education. In this series, we'll do the random fun stuff: top 10 lists, current events, things we're thinking about. This is a casual format with limited editing and not as many intense conversations that occur in our mainline HRP interviews. Let us know what you think.
Learn more about our free resources, podcast, writings, and more at https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/
Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit centered on enabling human-centered schools through progressive pedagogy.
Learn more about Holistic Think Tank at https://www.holisticthinktank.com & sign up for the HTT Summit in Columbus, OH on March 4th at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/htt-summit-2023-interdisciplinary-school-subject-ids-tickets-533961311657
See you there!
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Because it is so well researched and presented, Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education, is a frustrating read. To tell the story of privatization, segregation, & the end of public education requires a massive cast. In her book Dr. Noliwe Rooks, my guest today, runs a precise thread from Reconstruction, Nelson Rockefeller, & Brown v Board through to Milton Friedman, every president in my lifetime, Teach for America, KIPP charter schools, Mark Zuckerberg, & more. Segrenomics has the kind of power that will be viewed with suspicion in states most impacted by it which are cracking down on theoretical frameworks that attempt to provide structural, systemic explanations.
An interdisciplinary scholar, Noliwe Rooks’ is the chair of and a professor in Africana Studies at Brown University and the founding director of the Segrenomics Lab at the school. Her work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history and political life in the United States. She works on the cultural and racial implications of beauty, fashion and adornment; race, capitalism and education, and the urban politics of food and cannabis production.
GuestsDr. Noliwe Rooks is a professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and the founding director of the Segrenomics Lab. Her research focuses on the interplay between race, gender, popular culture, social history and political life in the US. She is the author of four books and numerous articles, essays and op-eds. Her most recent book is Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.
Resources* Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education by Dr. Noliwe Rooks * Dr. Noliwe Rooks @ Brown University * Dr. Noliwe Rooks' website
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The thing I appreciate most about Michael Weingarth, and that will become clear as you listen to this episode, is his passionate intensity. He comes off like a man who has received wisdom, like a divine revelation. Yet bolstering that intensity and passion is the deep understanding of a body of literature from subfields of neuroscience calling into question what the current popular model of “raw cognition” - represented by #cogsci, ResearchEd, and elsewhere in professional development - leaves out. As well as how its premature generalization into school settings - often wrapped up in language of “evidence-based” or “research-based” practice - is derived from evidence & research that excludes disability & neurodivergence. The consequence is a school setting whose values & measures, pacing guides, practices & interventions center the mythical “normal”.
In this conversation we talk about the genesis of and the concepts surrounding Michael’s work as the Founder of Penelope Education, which educates teachers on why and how error patterns manifest across subject areas and grade levels- and more importantly, shows teachers how to pinpoint possible root causes and how to collaborate with students to build workarounds. Using neuroinclusive frameworks to create an anti-racist, feminist, anti-ableist education. As a side note, Michael recorded an addendum to his thoughts about cognitive compensation that I’ve added to the end of the episode. I hope you find this conversation as energizing as I did.
GuestsMichael Weingarth is the founder of Pillars of Learning and Penelope Education as an expert on brain science. His framework to examine compensatory patterns of cognition helps students achieve academically.
Resources* Penelope Education * Threat probability in mice calculated in the brain stem - Twitter thread * Annie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind * Mary Helen Immordino-Yang * The Prefrontal Vortex on Discord
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Reimagining education is no small feat, but there is hope on the horizon. MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education. In this series, we'll do the random fun stuff: top 10 lists, current events, things we're thinking about. This is a casual format with limited editing and not as many intense conversations that occur in our mainline HRP interviews. Let us know what you think.
Learn more about our free resources, podcast, writings, and more at https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/
Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit centered on enabling human-centered schools through progressive pedagogy.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Today we’re joined by Susan Harris MacKay and Matt Karlson, the people behind the Center for Playful Inquiry. Susan is a former teacher and pedagogical director at Opal School and Portland Children’s Museum. Her recent book, Story Workshop: New Possibilities for Young Writers showcases the relationship between play, art, and writing. Matt is a former teacher, professional development facilitator, and Director of Opal School’s Center for Learning.
Together they formed the Center for Playful Inquiry, which prioritizes play, the arts, and meaning-making to inspire justice, democracy, and beauty. They work with schools, educators, and community members to build these systems. In this podcast, we discuss why imaginative play is deeply connected to learning, and why we must be skeptical of educational products & strategies aimed at controlling the narrative of learning.
GuestsSusan Harris MacKay is a former teacher and pedagogical director at Opal School and Portland Children's Museum. She is the author of Story Workshop: New Possibilities for Young Writers
Matt Karlson is a former teacher, professional development facilitator, and Director of Opal School's Center for Learning.
Resources* Center for Playful Inquiry's Website * Story Workshop Studio * Story Workshop: New Possibilities for Young Writers by Susan Harris MacKay * School is for learning to live, not just for learning | Susan Harris MacKay | TEDxWestVancouverED
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I’m speaking today with freelance journalist Andy Kopsa whose work has appeared seemingly everywhere: The New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Cosmo, and her most recent piece from the December issue of In These Times that we’ll be discussing today - and that you heard an excerpt of in the introduction - is about her investigation of Des Moines Public Schools’ 2021 shift away from the School Resource Officer, or SRO, program and toward investing in restorative justice, it has the incredible title, The City That Kicked Cops Out of Schools and Tried Restorative Practices Instead
Andy had mentioned in a tweet before our recording that “Iowa is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to public education.” That’s to say, so much of what Andy reported in her piece is directly tied to the particular political context of Iowa in the 21st century - as we get into in the episode - failing to address deep dem ographic divisions & whose embrace of endless cynical, dead-end, culture wars has only deepened divisions. Only ⅓ of predominantly older white Iowans live in rural areas, half of the Black population is concentrated in just 4 cities, of which Des Moines is the largest, and nearly 60% of Iowa farmland owners don’t farm. So while Iowa is an increasingly non-white, urban population, our political & cultural identity is wrapped up in the nostalgia of the white rural family farm, a factor which explains the radicalization & consolidation of political power in the Iowa GOP, who hold a majority everywhere Iowans are represented.
A headline from the November elections read, “Iowa's GOP clout in Legislature, Congress most since 1950s”, and you better believe they are governing as such. While national headlines often focus on larger states like Texas & Florida, the education culture war really started here. Iowa is the canary in the coal mine. That’s an appropriate lens we should bring to the conversation at the intersection of racialized policing & punishment & the role it plays in our schools, particularly when communities of Color decide to go another way & invest in restorative practices.
GuestAndy Kopsa is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in NYTimes, FP, Atlantic, Cosmo, Al Jazeera, Guardian, Playboy, and more.
Resources* In These Times: The City That Kicked Cops Out of Schools and Tried Restorative Practices Instead * ACLU of Iowa: Advocating for Police-Free Schools Toolkit
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Today we are joined by Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond. Joining us on election day, there’s frankly a lot of anxiety around the current state of our world…not just who will win the election but if those results will be accepted, a general cynicism about our future, and especially in the classroom, teachers are reporting extraordinary rates of burnout and nihilism.
Dr. Darling-Hammond has done a ton of work to improve educational policy: both by supporting teachers and by changing systems in schools to support learners, she's advocated for higher standards of the profession and fighting back against authoritarian, behaviorist methods. Yet, given the state of the world today and all the things going on, how do we inspire hope and restore that humanity to professional development...which has at least in my experience been the antithesis of what most would consider that to be?
In this podcast, we discuss:
- Where should we go next? We know that many schools are shifting to more rote practices. This was already happening through various “back to basics” movements, and is reemerging in force in the “learning loss” debate. This is further complicated by the politicization of teaching to new levels, between outcries about CRT, LGBTQIA+ rights, antiracism, etc. - even just using the term “progressive education” at all.
- How do we navigate those waters? What do we build professional development that address this in 2022, where teaching is under attack? What should we be embracing? How can teachers and administrators build these practices?
- How can professional development be used to combat those who wish to discredit educator expertise and shift to hiring unlicensed teachers and/or gig-based workers? How can we ensure that we maintain a high standard for the profession?
- At a systemic level…what does this look like for school administrators? Attempts to do school reform at a national level seems to have always centered on national testing and teacher evaluations, and it’s been a “back to basics” way of looking at education that goes to those non-supported-by-research practices.
GuestDr. Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Docummun Professor of Education Emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She founded the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and served as the faculty sponsor of the Stanford Teacher Education Program, which she helped to redesign. She is the former President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute. Also, she’s the former President of the American Educational Research Association. She’s written over 25 books and 500 articles including The Right to Learn, Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning, and The Flat World and Education. She was the education advisor to Barrack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and volunteer leader of Joe Biden’s transition team for the US Department of Education. And, she began her career as a public school teacher and co-founded a preschool and public high school.
Resources* Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford * Learning Policy Institute * Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning by Linda Darling-Hammond et. al. * The Civil Rights Road to Deeper Learning by Kia Darling-Hammond & Linda Darling-Hammond
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In this episode, co-founders of Human Restoration Project Nick Covington & Chris McNutt detail the impact of the organization in 2022, our plans for 2023, and how we're envisioning the future of our work in reimagining education. Detailed within includes...
- How HRP grew this year and the impact we've made
- Our goals for 2023, including a new pay-as-you-want learning series
- An update on our existing initiatives
- What we're doing with social media
- And how we're looking to speculative fiction for inspiration in our branding (e.g. solarpunk)
Plus, it's Giving Tuesday! We're running a funding drive through the end of 2022. If you appreciate this podcast (or any of our free resources), we would love your support! Visit https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/support to learn more (and score some donor gifts)!
This conversation comes at an interesting time in the broader context of the future of education. In the wake of progress 8 results in the UK and NAEP scores in the United States, there appears to be a narrowing of educational possibilities toward a very particular model of schooling, or at least a model whose proponents have been the loudest in proclaiming victory. It has has gone by many names over the years but recently solidified under the umbrella of #ResearchEd or the “science of learning”. The claim here is that we understand and agree upon the ends of education - that is to raise standardized achievement scores - and it’s simply a matter of aligning the means around “what works” to close gaps, raise scores - and at least in the context of pandemic schooling since 2020 - combat & reverse “learning loss”. “What works” of course, is the reiteration of adult authority with a laser focus on high expectations and results, the centrality of explicit/direct instruction, and above all a strict approach to school discipline. It’s a model listeners in the United States might associate with Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion and listeners in the UK with Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela School, where I imagine the notion of a self-directed education would be greeted with the same incredulity as geocentrism.
Bolstered by these measures of success in national contexts, this model is increasingly decontextualized and exported as the solution to educational ills the world over.
GUESTSDr. Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist and mother of two self-directed learners. She has a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and a PhD in Developmental Cognitive Psychology, focusing on autism. She combines years of hands-on experience of self-directed education with an in-depth knowledge of the psychology of learning and well-being. Her work has been published in The Green Parent, The Psychologist, SEN Magazine, Juno and Tipping Points. She is a regular speaker on self-directed education, presenting at the Freedom to Learn Forum, Homeschooling Summit, and recently was a keynote at the Rethinking Education Conference in London. She is also the author of “Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of Their Own Learning”, which I would highly recommend, and the upcoming book “A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education” to be published in 2023.
RESOURCES* Naomi Fisher's website * Naomi Fisher's Twitter * Changing Our Minds by Naomi Fisher
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This is our third “spotlight series” episode where we’re reaching out to schools who are doing intriguing progressive practices that could inspire and influence others to do the same. Each has a twist on how their school is operated, and we’re bringing in students and teachers to talk about it. They’re not all perfect, and they’d all acknowledge there are things they’d change; but there’s so much to learn from these schools as we reimagine education in our communities.
Today we’re featuring One Stone, a student-led nonprofit in Boise, Idaho. One Stone has a variety of initiatives to help students use their voice to change the world. Two thirds of One Stone’s board are young people, who have voted to establish multiple initiatives including Project Good: an experiential service program, Two Birds: a student-led creative studio, Solution Lab: a business incubator for young people, and now Lab 51 - who we’re talking with today - an independent sliding scale tuition program high school.
Lab51 features interdisciplinary, human-centered problem solving which is a collaboration between young people and mentors. Students engage in a variety of selections including “Deep Dives”, which are two-week passion-driven endeavors like photography or wilderness survival, “Immersions”, which are slightly longer and mostly take place off campus, “Cannonballs” which have students experiencing a wide variety of topics in a short period of time, and finally: service- and project-based learning.
Joining us are four students: Ian, Reya, Lyla, and Ella and Jesse, who is the Director of Strategic Partnerships.
We talk about the fundamentals of Lab51's program, its importance to young people, and how this model could scale and be used within traditional settings.
SCHOOLOne Stone's Lab51, a student-led nonprofit High School program in Boise, Idaho, centered on students navigating their path to purpose, promoting their well-being, and self-directing their learning
RESOURCES* One Stone * Lab51 * BLOB (Bold Learning Objectives) * Two Birds Creative Studio (One Stone's student-driven creative studio, you can sign up to work with them!) * Wayfinding Mentorship Professional Growth series for educators and mentors * Human Centered Design for supporting student-driven learning
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On today’s podcast we are joined by Dr. Antonia Darder. Antonia is an internationally recognized activist-scholar and Professor Emerita at Loyola Marymount University, where for more than a decade she held the Levey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership. Spanning over 4 decades, she has worked to counter social and material inequities in schools and society, including through critical scholarship, activism, and authoring books such as Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power, and Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States. Further, she wrote and produced a student-community driven, award-winning documentary, The Pervasiveness of Oppression.
In this episode, we talk about combating inequitable and inhospitable notions of the school system: from radical individualism which co-opts how students view themselves, each other, and society at-large, to corporate forces that shape policy and curriculum which damage learning outcomes. Instead, we can create a "pedagogy of love" which focuses on care, well-being, meaning-making, and democracy.
GUESTSDr. Antonia Darder is an activist, scholar, and professor at Loyola Marymount University, and author of various works and critical scholarship including Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power, and Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States.
RESOURCES Antonia Darder's website * Antonia Darder's bookstore * Radio and the Art of Resistance: A Public Pedegogy of the Airwaves by Antonia Darder * Teaching as an Act of Love: Reflections on Paulo Freire and His Contributions to Our Lives and Our Work* by Antonia Darder
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Welcome to our latest podcast series: MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education.
Enjoy our content? Leave us a review on your favorite podcast player...it makes a huge difference! (Also...one day both of our mic settings will be correct and this will sound just right!)
Top 5 Cursed Problems in SchoolHello and welcome to Mindfood: a series of more casual content that's easily digestible.
This episode is brought to you by Brad Latzke, Michelle Edwards, and Ann Trapasso
So what do I mean by Cursed Problems? Well…
In 2019, Alex Jaffe gave a talk at GDC (that’s the Game Developers Conference) called “Cursed Problems in Game Design”. Since the video was released in 2020 it has gotten over 600,000 views on YouTube. In the video he says that a game’s essential experiences, why the player came to play, are the player promises. These promises exist both in the heart of the designer and the player: they are the reason a game exists, it’s what we care about at a fundamental level.
A cursed problem, then, is not merely a problem that is difficult to resolve, but is instead an unsolvable design problem, rooted in a conflict between core player promises. The promise of two things that cannot co-exist. The premises of the promises are fundamentally incompatible, they are in violation of one another. Oil and water. You cannot solve cursed problems, rather you have to innovate around them.
The analogy to schools and schooling and the appeal of this discussion to us is if you replace player with student and game with school, it doesn’t take much to realize that many of the promises of school are incompatible with one another, both in the minds of the designers - who often have specific objectives in mind - and in the student experience of the systems and mechanics of school. We thought today that we’d try to unpack the cursed problems of school, the promises of school in the minds of students and educators, the difference in the experience and objectives of school, and analyze what the potential solutions to these cursed problems sacrifice along the way.
These are the central conflicts of schooling!
This podcast is also available on video! See: https://www.youtube.com/c/HumanRestorationProject
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Welcome to our latest podcast series: MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education. In this series, we'll do the random fun stuff: top 10 lists, current events, things we're thinking about. This is a casual format with limited editing and not as many intense conversations that occur in our mainline HRP interviews. Let us know what you think.
Enjoy our content? Leave us a review on your favorite podcast player...it makes a huge difference!
Top 10 Books Every Progressive Educator Should ReadThis episode is brought to you by Anna Westlent, Rivka Ocho, and Alexander Gruber. Today we're looking at the top 10 books every progresive educator should read. These are personal recommendations which have inspired Nick and Chris. Of course, this list isn't all encompassing! Next time you're at the library or on Thriftbooks, definitely check one of these out.
This podcast is also available on video! See: https://www.youtube.com/c/HumanRestorationProject
Welcome to our latest podcast series: MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education. In this series, we'll do the random fun stuff: top 10 lists, current events, things we're thinking about. This is a casual format with limited editing and not as many intense conversations that occur in our mainline HRP interviews. Let us know what you think.
Enjoy our content? Leave us a review on your favorite podcast player...it makes a huge difference!
Top 10 Books Every Progressive Educator Should ReadThis episode is brought to you by Anna Westlent, Rivka Ocho, and Alexander Gruber. Today we're looking at the top 10 books every progresive educator should read. These are personal recommendations which have inspired Nick and Chris. Of course, this list isn't all encompassing! Next time you're at the library or on Thriftbooks, definitely check one of these out.
This podcast is also available on video! See: https://www.youtube.com/c/HumanRestorationProject
Gender is one of the most contentious topics in the United States today, conversations about gender in education have even been the targets of so-called “divisive concepts” laws in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Alabama. The Alabama “divisive concepts” law, for example, would ban any discussion in K12 schools around the idea that Alabama and the United States are “inherently racist or sexist: ” that anyone should be assigned bias “solely on the basis of their race, sex, or religion;” and that anyone should be asked to accept “a sense of guilt, complicity, or a need to work harder” because of their race or gender.
However, schools are as much as any other social institution a place where our constructed biases, expressions, and expectations about the performance of gender, leadership, the perceived attributes of students, and our response to student behaviors deeply influence not only the academic outcomes of school but the lifelong outcomes of students themselves. The focus of my conversation today, The Gender Equation in Schools: How to Create Equity and Fairness for All Students, is not a book directed at the culture war’s so-called “divisive concepts”, but rather a book for educators and parents desiring a framework for understanding the gendered construction of schooling and its impacts as informed by experience, social science, and neuroscience alike.
Joining me today is the book’s author, Jason Ablin. Jason Ablin has served as a teacher, department chair, principal, and head of school. He holds national certification in leadership coaching and mentoring from the National Association of School Principals and has been supporting and mentoring new leaders throughout the country for over ten years. At American Jewish University and in school-based teacher workshops, he trains teachers to create gender aware classrooms and has taught year-long courses to teams of educators in graduate level seminars regarding the relationship between cognitive neuroscience and education. He is also the founder and director of AJU’s Mentor Teacher Certification Program.
GUESTSJason Ablin is a former teacher, department chair, principal, and head of school. He now works at the American Jewish University to train teachers on gender-aware classrooms, and is the founder and director of AJU's Mentor Teacher Certification Program.
RESOURCES* Jason Ablin's Twitter * Ablin Education * The Gender Equation in Schools by Jason Ablin
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Gender is one of the most contentious topics in the United States today, conversations about gender in education have even been the targets of so-called “divisive concepts” laws in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Alabama. The Alabama “divisive concepts” law, for example, would ban any discussion in K12 schools around the idea that Alabama and the United States are “inherently racist or sexist: ” that anyone should be assigned bias “solely on the basis of their race, sex, or religion;” and that anyone should be asked to accept “a sense of guilt, complicity, or a need to work harder” because of their race or gender.
However, schools are as much as any other social institution a place where our constructed biases, expressions, and expectations about the performance of gender, leadership, the perceived attributes of students, and our response to student behaviors deeply influence not only the academic outcomes of school but the lifelong outcomes of students themselves. The focus of my conversation today, The Gender Equation in Schools: How to Create Equity and Fairness for All Students, is not a book directed at the culture war’s so-called “divisive concepts”, but rather a book for educators and parents desiring a framework for understanding the gendered construction of schooling and its impacts as informed by experience, social science, and neuroscience alike.
Joining me today is the book’s author, Jason Ablin. Jason Ablin has served as a teacher, department chair, principal, and head of school. He holds national certification in leadership coaching and mentoring from the National Association of School Principals and has been supporting and mentoring new leaders throughout the country for over ten years. At American Jewish University and in school-based teacher workshops, he trains teachers to create gender aware classrooms and has taught year-long courses to teams of educators in graduate level seminars regarding the relationship between cognitive neuroscience and education. He is also the founder and director of AJU’s Mentor Teacher Certification Program.
GUESTSJason Ablin is a former teacher, department chair, principal, and head of school. He now works at the American Jewish University to train teachers on gender-aware classrooms, and is the founder and director of AJU's Mentor Teacher Certification Program.
RESOURCES* Jason Ablin's Twitter * Ablin Education * The Gender Equation in Schools by Jason Ablin
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The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, were released yesterday, September 1st, prompting a New York Times headline that read “The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading”, the 74 headline added “Two Decades of Growth WIPED OUT by Two years of Pandemic”. Peter Greene, an education policy watcher, called it NAEP Pearl Clutching Day. I myself had tweeted out “With the release of pandemic NAEP scores, we're about to have the worst cycle of education discourse imaginable”, and man did that ring true. Everyone was running to their corners to abolish teacher’s unions, attack remote & hybrid learning and mask mandates - just relitigating every pandemic issue imaginable - and the results brought out the usual resident experts in everything, like Matt Yglesias, who called the scores “A Short-term L for the left that was more supportive of closure”.
While everyone online is jumping to conclusions, we thought it would be important to help provide some context, to step back and take inventory of the data, claims, headlines, and provide context and forecast next steps: what, if anything, could or should we do in response to this report? So I reached out to author and educator John Warner, whose intuition I tend to trust on this kind of thing. John is the author of several books, Why They Can’t Write, The Writer’s Practice and Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education, released in 2020. Thanks John for taking the time to talk with me today. Let’s start with what the NAEP results say and what they mean, and then we’ll compare that to the headlines. So what do the results say and what should we make of them? Why does the framing matter? What context is missing? How could we meaningfully report on these results? What’s missing in the discourse?
GUESTJohn Warner, author of Why They Can't Write, The Writer's Practice, and Sustainable. Resilient. Free: The Future of Public Higher Education. He serves on Human Restoration Project's Board of Directors.
RESOURCES* Podcast: Deciphering Learning Loss w/ Akil Bello * Video: How do we measure learning loss, anyway? * HRP's Learning Loss Handbook
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On today’s podcast we’re talking about PragerU, the infamous and growing conservative nonprofit that’s probably best known for its YouTube channel with recent uploads like “Why I Sued My Daughter’s Woke School”, “What Kinds of Shows is PBS Making Now?”, and “Teachers are Training Marxist Revolutionaries.” Which on its face is quite a silly thing to talk about, but this channel receives billions of views each year and is a stronghold of conservative leaders and talking points.
To help us make sense of PragerU, as well as understand what its goals and objectives are, we’re joined by Rob Dickinson and Tom Cowin from the University of Sussex. Rob and Tom both have backgrounds in international relations and global policy, and together founded FRAMES project in 2020 to analyze contemporary far-right propaganda in the US, with a specific focus on PragerU. This project is virtually the first of its kind, with essentially no coverage of PragerU in academic circles.
This podcast dives into the methodology and role of PragerU in the education sphere, offering educators reasons why they should care, why they need to be informed, and what actions they can take to stop PragerU from propagandizing students/other educators.
GUESTSRob Dickinson, leads the African Cabinet and Political Elite Data project, working with the Scaling-up Packages of Interventions for Cardiovascular disease prevention in selected sites in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa (SPICES) project, and researches how the Trump Administration may fit into historical patterns of neoliberalism as a candidate for a PhD in International Relations at the University of Sussex.
Tom Cowin, delivers undergraduate teaching in International Relations, International Political Economy, and Globalisation and Global Governance at the University of Sussex. He previously held the position Doctoral Tutor Representative for IR, sits on the Management Committee for the weekly PGR-led Chapter Chats sessions and is a Postgraduate Researcher Representative for Sussex UCU.
Both Rob and Tom are co-founders of the FRAMES project to study far-right propaganda in the United States, with a specific focus on PragerU.
RESOURCES* The Alt-Education Pipeline: PragerU (Writing) * Alt-Right Pipeline 2: Electric PragerU (YouTube, Zoe Bee)
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I was introduced to Nick Sousanis’ work through a Twitter connection, shout out to @AndrewJ, as I wanted to spend more time over the summer with what are broadly called graphic novels. Probably like many listeners, I had read comic books as they appeared in pop culture over the years, The Dark Tower adaptation, the Walking Dead, even “classic” graphic novels, I suppose, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell. As a history major, I read the first book of Maus in college. but other than that I never really knew where to go from there. Now, just last month, I had a friend recommend Marjan Sahtrapi’s Persepolis, a graphic memoir of her childhood before, during, and after the Iranian Revolution. I borrowed it from the library, read it in a single sitting, and was hooked. So I immediately put a call out on Twitter on where to go from there and got dozens of suggestions. I’ve spent the rest of the summer catching up on a number of graphic memoirs including the March Trilogy, The Best We Could Do, and Fun Home. Then came Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening.
Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he runs a Comics Studies program. He received his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2014, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comic book form. Titled Unflattening, it argues for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning, and was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Humanities, the Lynd-Ward Prize for best Graphic Novel of 2015, and was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic work. To date, Unflattening has been translated into French, Korean, Portuguese, Serbian, Polish, Italian, and Chinese.
There is an irony here that we are going to attempt to discuss these very visually linked ideas in an audio podcast, but I will also provide links to the excerpts of Unflattening that are available on Nick’s website.
GUESTSDr. Nick Sousanis, Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University
RESOURCES* Nick Sousanis' Website * Nick Sousanis' Twitter * Unflattening * On Graphic Scholarship: A Conversation with Nick Sousanis (The Comics Grid)
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Keynote Transcript: https://writing.humanrestorationproject.org/transcript/dr-henry-giroux-critical-pedagogy-in-a-time-of-fascist-tyranny/
Q&A Transcript: https://writing.humanrestorationproject.org/transcript/conference-to-restore-humanity-2022-keynote-q-a-dr-henry-giroux/
In this extensive episode, we'll be releasing the keynote address and Q&A session from our first speaker at Conference to Restore Humanity: Dr. Henry Giroux.
We are firm believers in free, public access to the pedagogical tools necessary to enact a human-centered education system. And over the next week, we will be releasing almost everything that was presented at our conference, including keynotes, Q&As, and learning track materials. The best things in education should not be gate-kept.
That said, almost all of our conference fees go toward paying our faculty track leaders and keynote speakers. We believe in paying a competitive rate. And to be transparent, HRP used its organizational funds to cover what ticket sales could not. Therefore, if you value this keynote and these resources, your donation ensures that we can continue to host events just like this! Further, your donation highlights that there's a need for events like this, allowing us to secure partnerships and scholarships for grander ideas in the future. If every regular listener donated 25% of the $200 ticket price: $50, we could easily payoff multiple conferences to restore humanity. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/donate to help us out, and stay tuned to our website and social media for conference material releases next week.
Although you'll hear the same words from Henry soon, I wanted to highlight this statement:
""...educators should do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope in their students. They also need to responsibly assume the role of public intellectuals and border crossers within broader social contexts, and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies and a range of other cultural apparatuses, especially those outlets that are willing to address critically a range of social problems.""
Please utilize these resources to plant the seeds of progressive education in your context. Each small step we take together has meaningful, profound change. Always feel free to reach out to Human Restoration Project if we can support or partner with you.
What you're about to hear takes place in two parts: the first is a pre-recorded 35 minute speech, followed by an live hour Q&A. If you'd prefer to watch these sessions, they are released on our YouTube channel, simply search Human Restoration Project.
Our guest today really needs no introduction and it's my honor to have a true legend in education here with us. Dr. Henry Giroux is a renowned scholar who has authored or co-authored over 70 books, including directly working with Paulo Freire on education and cultural studies. He's written hundreds of articles and delivered more than 250 lectures. He is a founding theorist of critical pedagogy, being foundational to the study as he literally coined the term. Starting off as a social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island, Giroux has taught at many universities, served as the co-editor of educational journals, and has served on multiple boards. Today, he serves at the board of directors for Truthout, continues to publish more works, and is the Chair for Scholarship and Public Interest and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar of Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University. Thank you so much, Dr. Giroux, for joining us.
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Today we’re joined by Dr. Sheldon Eakins. Dr. Eakins is an educator who has taught in elementary, middle, and high school settings, as well as an administrator. Currently, he is the Director of Special Education at a school in Idaho. In 2018, Dr. Eakins founded the Leading Equity Center, a professional development service, podcast, and resource hub for spreading cultural awareness, promoting equitable practice, and inspiring change to disrupt inequities in schools.
Each week, Dr. Eakins hosts a livestream and podcast that tackles a disruptive concept, from recruiting diverse applicant pools, to examining critical childhood studies, to being vulnerable with students. We highly recommend his work and would encourage you to check out Leading Equity on your favorite podcast player and visit https://www.leadingequitycenter.com/.
GUESTSSheldon Eakins Ph.D., Director of the Leading Equity Center, host of the Leading Equity podcast, K-12 educator, principal, and director of special education
RESOURCES* Leading Equity Center * Sheldon Eakins' Website * Leading Equity: Becoming an Advocate for All Students by Sheldon Eakins
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This is our second “spotlight series” episode where we’re reaching out to schools who are doing intriguing progressive practices that could inspire and influence others to do the same. Each has a twist on how their school is operated, and we’re bringing in students and teachers to talk about it. They’re not all perfect, and they’d all acknowledge there are things they’d change; but there’s so much to learn from these schools as we reimagine education in our communities.
We are joined by students and faculty from Sora Schools, a 7-12 online-only school currently enrolling students in the United States. They're in their third year of operation. Sora prides itself on its project-based curriculum that centers fun, intriguing activities for students, anywhere.
The school is entirely online with a unique schedule that highlights possibilities of virtual spaces. What made Sora Schools stand out to me were the pedagogical shifts they were making as a result of being online. As we highlight in our Virtual Learning Handbook: teaching a remote class can actually bring about community and intriguing pedagogical shifts — it doesn’t have to simply be isolation and replication of what people had to do in-person! Sora is using this virtual space for some really innovative work.
To learn more, we’re talking today with Keegan, an 8th grader at Sora; Angela Anskis, a humanities expert at Sora; and Garrett Smiley, the CEO and co-founder.
*About halfway through this episode I had a new audio setup...so apologies for the random quality difference! The content is stellar still. :)
SCHOOLSora Schools, a virtual, project-based school for students in the United States
RESOURCES* Sora Schools Website
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In this bonus episode of Human Restoration Project's podcast, we talk about all of the fantastic opportunities available at our upcoming Conference to Restore Humanity! 2022: System Reboot, which is entirely online from July 25th-July 28th, 2022. We detail:
- The goals and reasoning for establishing the conference, including pedagogy, sustainability, accessibility, and representation
- The keynotes, learning tracks, and additional events
- The purposeful design for ensuring everyone can participate and be informed through the conference (and why traditional conferences don't work for everyone)
- ...and other reasons why a virtual-first conference model is not only needed, but necessary
If you're interested in attending, early bird pricing ends really soon from this recording - June 30th! You can sign up at any point at humanrestorationproject.org/conference
Today’s guest is T. Elijah Hawkes. Elijah served as a public school principal for over a decade, including as the principal at Randolph Union in Vermont, and was the founding principal of the James Baldwin School in New York City. Currently, he is a director at the Upper Valley Educators Institute and an advisor at the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University. In addition, he is the author of various articles on democracy, public schools, and adolescence including appearing in The New Teacher Book and Rethinking Sexism, Gender, and Identity. Further, Elijah is the author of School for the Age of Upheaval: Classrooms That Get Personal, Get Political, and Get to Work, which we’ll be talking about in this podcast. Further, his second book, Woke is Not Enough: School Reform for Leaders with Justice in Mind will release soon.
In this podcast, Elijah and I (Chris) will talk about an education that gets personal, gets political, and gets to work. It's all about how we can channel the anger of adolescents toward fulfilling, actionable livelihoods toward changing structures and systems that challenge and oppress them. Further, we'll discuss the growth of extremism, how dialogue has broken down and the difficulties in performing this work.
GUESTST. Elijah Hawkes, Director of Leadership Programs at the Upper Valley Educators Institute and Education Advisor at the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University, as well as aformer principal.
RESOURCES* T. Elijah Hawkes' Website * School for the Age of Upheaval: Classrooms That Get Personal, Get Political, and Get to Work * Strong Schools, Polarized Times from the Upper Valley Educators Institute * Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab * Confronting Conspiracy Theories and Organized Bigotry at Home from the Western States Center * Southern Poverty Law Center * Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld's Articles and Books
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Today’s guest is Deborah Meier, who really needs no introduction for advocates of progressive education. Meier is the founder of the modern small schools movement, that aims to reorganize larger schools into smaller, democratic ones. She was founder and director of Central Park East, a Dewey-inspired progressive school in East Harlem, New York City. She also opened Central Park East II, River East, and the Central Park East Secondary School the same neighborhood. This led her to establish a network of similarly minded schools in New York City, and eventually founding Mission Hill School in Boston.
Meier is an advocate of democratic, progressive, public schools who has served on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, National Academy of Education, The Nation, Dissent, and more. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, as well as the author of multiple books including the recently co-authored These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon our Public Schools. Meier is a huge inspiration to us at Human Restoration Project and we frequently draw on her work in our materials and advocacy.
In this podcast, Meier and I talk about building a coalition of schools, educators, families, and community members to build and protect a progressive public education, discussing the importance of building a public education system that strengthens and models a democracy.
GUESTSDeborah Meier, founding director of Central Park East and Mission Hill School, as well as various progressive democratic public schools, and author of various works including co-authoring These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon our Public Schools
RESOURCES Deborah Meier's website * These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon our Public Schools * The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem*
SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT TO END GUN VIOLENCE* March for Our Lives 2022 National Rally (June 11th, 2022) * Donate: March for Our Lives * Donate: Everytown * Donate: Moms Demand Action * Donate: Sandy Hook Promise * Donate: GoFundMe - Uvalde, Texas * Donate: GoFundMe - Buffalo, New York
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On today’s podcast we are joined by David Buck. David is an English professor at Howard Community College in Maryland who is actively involved in the ungrading movement, as well as focusing on open access resources, open pedagogy, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. To foster and grow the practice of ungrading, David is actively involved in utilizing social and other online media for discussion, including but not limited to his “Let’s Talk Ungrading” Twitter Spaces, which is also an edited podcast, the Ungrading Twitter Community, the Ungrading Book Club, the Ungrading Discord Community, and “Crowdsourcing Ungrading” an open-access book on Pressbooks.
We talk about:
- The desire and need for more spaces to gather and reflect on progressive education.
- What it means to build these spaces in "new media", such as Discord or Twitter Spaces.
- How we can get more young people involved in joining, curating, and creating these spaces (such as on Twitch).
- How we can inspire more educators to lead and grow these spaces, co-created with students.
GUESTSDavid Buck, English professor at Howard Community College and mass-curator and co-leader of various ungrading spaces
RESOURCES* #Ungrading: A Digital Ethnography (Dissertation by Christina Moore) * David Buck's Twitter (and location for Twitter Spaces) * Crowdsourced Ungrading Pressbook * David Buck's Sutori Student Blogs * Ungrading HUB (Discord) * Human Restoration Project (Discord)
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In this episode, Akil & I discuss the history & context of the CollegeBoard and how the AP program in particular fits into CollegeBoard’s vision for “college ready” admissions, how that very vision is undermined by the emphasis on a 3.5 hour exam in May, and what we could be doing instead to crash the gates and actually improve accessibility & equity in the admissions process in the absence of the Advanced Placement signifier.
GUESTSAkil Bello, Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at Fairtest, founding partner and former CEO of Bell Curves, and contributor on test equitability, learning loss, and much more
RESOURCES* Akil Bello's website * Drop the College Board by Chris McNutt
I am joined today by Burton Hable. Burton Hable is a music educator, currently living in Central Virginia. He is a doctoral student in Boston University’s Music Education program, and his research interests lie in how people construct music knowledge in the context of a makerspace. He also serves as the Operations and Building Manager for the Charlottesville Band. Prior to moving to Virginia in the summer of 2018, he taught instrumental music in Iowa for eight years. I’ve also known Burton for 20 years now, as we were high school classmates and played trombone in the same high school band together, and both of us came back years later to teach in the same district we graduated from. In so many ways, Burton and I share a similar journey in arriving at progressive education, and I am grateful to call him a friend and a learning partner for these many years.
As the title mentions, this episode focuses on the niche pedagogy of “constructionism” largely attributed to one man, Seymour Papert, who published his first book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, back in 1980. It’s both fascinating and frustrating that despite 4 decades of research supporting the powerful impact on cognition and the opportunity for collaboration inherent in these ideas, the philosophy and framework of constructionism and similarly modeled “makerspaces” are still only deployed in limited pockets on the fringes of the standard model of school. This conversation gets at the same central premise as so many others on this podcast, that is our limited imagination about “what works” in schools as they are currently structured, and “what works to do what” within music education in particular. What does it mean to be musically literate? To be a musician? Burton Hable imagines the role of makerspaces supported by constructionist pedagogy in music ed as a way to expand and enrich the standard model for students, with the goal of creating a broader collaborative experience for students to engage with all aspects - creating, performing, responding, and connecting - of what it means to be musical.
Connect with Burton @ burtonhable.com or on Twitter @burtonhable
GUESTSBurton Hable, music educator & Operations and Building Manager for the Charlottesville Band
RESOURCES* Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert (open access) * Review: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms by Nick Covington
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Today we are joined by Dustin Hensley. Dustin is the library media specialist at Elizabethton High School in Tennessee. He is an advocate for creating spaces that cultivate a student’s love of learning. He was one of the co-founders of the Bartleby Program, which centers community improvement and entrepreneurship with students, and is one of the winners of the XQ Super School competition, remaining active in the XQ Community of Practice. He currently teaches courses on Community Improvement and Academic Research.
In this podcast, Dustin and I talk about the state of libraries today:
- the purpose of a library
- how libraries interact with students
- political forces attacking books and librarianship
- transitions from libraries to Makerspaces and Fablabs
- and how libraries provide a pedagogy that transforms learning.
GUESTSDustin Hensley, library media specialist, project lead, and grant-writer for Elizabethton High School, part-time professor, co-founder of the Bartleby Program, and active member of the XQ Community of Practice
RESOURCES* A Library Transformed by Dustin Hensley (Getting Smart) * #FReadom movement in Texas * Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop * Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher and Richard L. Allington
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*This podcast contains content regarding suicide and child abuse.
In this podcast we are joined by R.L. Stollar, a Child Liberation Theologian and child and survivor advocate. Stollar is the author of the upcoming book, The Kingdom of Children, which reports on the issues and concerns of the evangelical homeschooling movement. Stollar, who was himself homeschooled, is an advocate of homeschooling who is calling attention to the issues that many face in the system, connecting the concept to faith — which is often juxtaposed with the practice of homeschooling. His work in Child Liberation Theology, which you’ll hear about shortly, centers the idea of young people being leaders in their faith-based decisions.
This is an interesting topic, because it blends ideas that aren’t commonplace in progressive education. Although I am personally not religious, there are fascinating connections between a faith-based education, self-directed learning, critical pedagogy, and more that we’ll explore in this podcast.
As a side note, this podcast also features Thomas White. Thomas is our prior development director who accepted a new position after this podcast aired. Essentially, Thomas did his job so well with us that he accepted a full-time position doing development work, leading to a conflict of interest with his current part-time role. We’re sorry to see him go! Thomas is writing a book on Classical Christian Education, which has a lot of overlap with the upcoming conversation.
We introduce R.L. Stollar as a Dr....but in fact he has not earned a doctorate (yet!)
GUESTSR.L. Stollar, Child Liberation Theologian and child and survivor advocate and author of the upcoming book Kingdom of Children
Thomas White, former HRP development director and author of upcoming book on Classical Christian Education
RESOURCES* R.L. Stollar's Website * Overview of Child Liberation Theology
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This podcast is our first of what we’re calling the “spotlight” series. Every so often, we’ll reaching out to schools who are doing intriguing progressive practices that could inspire and influence others to do the same. Each has a twist on how their school is operated, and we’re bringing in students and teachers to talk about it. They’re not all perfect, and they’d all acknowledge there are things they’d change; but there’s so much to learn from these schools as we reimagine education in our communities.
We are joined by students and faculty from Assumption College, a Catholic co-ed 7-12 secondary school located in Kilmore, Victoria, Australia, featuring 1,200 students, some of whom board on campus. Assumption is doing a lot of fascinating work that would interest people interested in progressive education and reform measures. In the last few years, they’ve transferred to the “MyMAP” program, which stands for Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. Instead of assigning students to traditional classes, students have the option between many different classes that are then mapped to traditional graduation needs. This means that students that have an interest in the arts will have a drastically different curriculum than say, engineering.
To learn more, we’re talking today with Kate Fogarty, the principal; Vaughan Cleary, the Deputy Principal; Kendall Aglinskas, Professional Practices Coordinator and Learning Leader; and Bel Luscott and Billy Carlin, both year 11 students. All of these folks have been at Assumption before and after their self-directed curriculum began.
SCHOOLAssumption College, a Catholic co-ed 7-12 secondary school located in Kilmore, Victoria, Australia
RESOURCES* MyMAP Overview * MyMAP Learning Program (YouTube) * Assumption College Website
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Today we are joined by Dr. Joanne Golann. Dr. Golann is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, and focuses on how culture shapes educational policy and practice. Her recently released book, Scripting the Moves: Culture & Control in a "No-Excuses" Charter School, follows Joanne over 18 months as she observes a “high-performing” charter school, documenting the various regimented structures, student and parent perspectives, what the teachers do...and more - which we’ll begin to talk about in this interview.
GUESTSDr. Joanne Golann, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University
RESOURCES* Scripting the Moves: Culture & Control in a "No-Excuses" Charter School by Joanne Golann * Empty Pedagogy, Behaviorism, and the Rejection of Equity by Chris McNutt * Teach Like a Champion Playlist * Uncommon Schools Playlist
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Our guest today is Keenan Crow. Keenan Crow is the Director of Policy and Advocacy for One Iowa, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance, empower, and improve the lives of LGBTQ Iowans through education, advocacy, and collaboration. Keenan has been active in Iowa politics since 2010 when they interned with Chris Hall’s campaign for Iowa State Representative. Since then, they have been involved with several nonprofit organizations including Planned Parenthood of the Heartland and Cedar Valley Citizens for Undoing Racism. They were also involved in One Iowa’s campus group at the University of Northern Iowa, where they obtained a BA in Political Communications and a Master’s in Public Policy. The campus at UNI is also where I met Keenan, now well over a decade ago.
In this episode, we talk to Keenan about their work at One Iowa Action - and how listeners can get involved in supporting similar groups around the country - current challenges that LGBTQ youth are facing, from book banning to bathroom bills, and what allyship looks like, especially for teachers, in 2022. How can we make our schools and classrooms safe and welcoming places for LGBTQ students?
GUESTSKeenan Crow, Director of Policy and Advocacy for One Iowa and champion for LGBTQ civil rights
RESOURCES* OneIowa * @OneIowa (Twitter) * @KF_Crow (Twitter)
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Joshua Seigal is a highly acclaimed, award-winning professional poet, performer and educator. Joshua uses poetry to develop literacy skills and inspire confidence and creativity in communication. He has worked in hundreds of schools, libraries, theatres and festivals around the world, had books published by Bloomsbury and other major publishers, and has written and performed for BBC television. Joshua Seigal has recently been awarded the 2020 Laugh out Loud Book Award for “I Bet I Can Make You Laugh”, and shortlisted for the 2021 Peoples Book Prize for “Yapping Away”. In this episode, I talk to Joshua about his journey from academia to poetry as well as his own experiences attending British schools and the perspective he has on them now as an adult, and of course we get a bit of a poetry reading near the end. I should add that I recorded this at home with a very busy 3.5 year old, who you may hear throughout the episode. Thank you Joshua, for being very gracious during a chaotic recording on my end!
GUESTSJoshua Seigal, award-winning poet, performer, and educator
RESOURCES* Joshua Seigal's website * @JoshuaSeigal (Twitter)
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A conversation around student loan debt has been happening at the margins of American political life for nearly a generation. By 2012, total student loan debt in the United States surpassed one trillion dollars, with the only relief coming from a pause on interest and federal debt collection that began with the pandemic in March 2020. Today, a majority of Americans, nearly 60% of polled voters, support some kind of forgiveness on the nation’s now 1.7 trillion dollar student loan debt, and borrowers have benefited from the pause on payments, recently extended to May 2022. That’s over two years without a single required payment…and seemingly without a single negative economic consequence. A recent study from the Student Debt Crisis Center also found that nearly 90% of borrowers are not financially secure enough to resume payments.
Is it time to pause these payments indefinitely? Is it past time for mass student loan debt forgiveness? While most of the conversations we have at HRP happen at the intersection of the theory and classroom practice of education, today I am joined by Thomas Gokey, Eleni Shirmer, and Jason Wozniak, as they talk to us about their organization, Debt Collective, make the moral, economic, and pedagogical case for debt cancellation, and let listeners know how to join their grassroots movement.
GUESTSThomas Gokey, organizer and co-founder of Debt Collective, visual artist, adjunct professor at Syracuse University, and activist
Eleni Shirmer, researcherat the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, and organizer with Debt Collective
Jason Wozniak, assistant professor at Teacher's College, Columbia University, and author of the upcoming book, The Mis-Education of the Indebted Student
RESOURCES* @StrikeDebt (Twitter) * Debtcollective.org
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Today we are joined by Dr. Nick Stock. Dr. Stock, a former English teacher, now serves as a researcher for the University of Birmingham. He has published various essays which focus on critiquing education by using philosophy typically seen outside of traditional pedagogy, such as Evangelion, Schools and Futures; Education after the end of the world. How can education be considered a hyperobject?; and Paradise Shall Remain Lost. Readdressing Deschooling through a Miltonian Lens.
Specifically, we invited Dr. Stock on to talk about his recently published work, The Weird, Eerie, Exit Pedagogy of Mark Fisher, which dives into the work of Fisher, who wrote Capitalist Realism, and connects it to pedagogy, something that it isn’t typically associated with.
This podcast covers:
- "Exit Pedagogy", connecting Mark Fisher's capitalist theories (and to an extent, Baudrillard's theories) to education
- "Hauntology" and reimagining a world without capitalism
- Critiques of liberatory and critical pedagogy and their connection to capitalism
- What it means to apply exit pedagogy to the classroom
GUESTSDr. Nick Stock, former English teacher and current researcher at the University of Birmingham, who focuses on an ironist perspective to education through postmodern, poststructural ideas.
RESOURCES* The weird, eerie, exit pedagogy of Mark Fisher by Dr. Nick Stock * Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher * Unpacking "Neoliberal" Schooling, Part 3: Progressive Education: Enter the Matrix by Chris McNutt
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Long time listeners may recognize the title to this podcast: Re:Teaching. Last year, Nick released a series of short podcasts on a separate channel, focused on current events and short-form highlights of writing. We soon realized that by splitting our podcast into two segments, most folks didn't hear any of this series! Enjoy, and there will be even more new Re:Teaching episodes on the way.
This episode is a feature read of Why What Works Won't Work and Why What Works May Hurtby Nick Covington, published in March 2020. Learn more about Human Restoration Project and find a wealth of free resources to create human-centered classrooms at humanrestorationproject.org, and follow us on social media, @HumResPro.
It's our 100th podcast episode! In celebration, Nick and Chris discuss the ongoing pursuits of Human Restoration Project.
And we discuss:* Our accomplishments over the years. * Our favorite events, writings, and podcasts. * Our major upcoming initiatives, which you'll want to stick around for! * Questions from our listeners. * And finally....host a trivia session on science fiction.
In this podcast, Nick and I are continuing our foray into random topics of progressive education! Today's episode centers cognitive science, research movements, and "studies of the brain." Within, we'll be talking about what's currently going on at HRP, articles and books that Nick and I have been reading recently, what's going on in our classrooms, Q&A from listeners via Twitter, and then a pop-quiz for who stays alive.
And we discuss: Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang's work and development in neuroscience * Audrey Watter's Teaching Machines, and the history of B.F. Skinner/behaviorism, especially his behaviorist "Utopian" book Walden Two* * Nick using the "Tier List Maker" for class assignments * Chris using Floop for workshoping and ungrading * Responding to "How do you motivate reluctant learners?" and "What does a student-driven curriculum look like in practice?" * A game show(!) featuring "Doug Lemov (Teach Like a Champion) said what!?" and "Ungrading: The Research." Who will be sent out of the airlock?
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In this podcast we've decided to experiment a bit with our programming. To be honest, right now there's a ton of burnout in the education world, from the pandemic to ongoing struggles of teacher power and support, and the culture war once again resurfacing in the classroom. As educators by day and nonprofit workers by night, we totally get that struggle.
Therefore, we're putting a slight pause on our typical interview format to try out something new. This frees us up from the workload of scheduling, researching, and working with guests. And, it opens up the door for us to produce more casual content. If you like the guest stuff, don't worry - we'll come back to that in early December! But...if you like the new stuff, please let us know.
In this podcast we're going to go through four parts:1. An update of what we're working on at HRP. 2. Article shareouts that Nick and I have been interested in recently. 3. Talking about what we're currently doing in our classrooms. 4. A pop-quiz to see who exits this podcast alive (or something.)
And we discuss:* Militarism and increased nationalism in the classroom. * Simulation theory, Baudrillard, and fatal strategies. * How video game design relates to classroom pedagogy. * Celebrating Columbus Day (and the surrounding debate) and its context to nationalism. * The corruption of large-scale nonprofits, including testing companies and public charter networks.
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Today, Nick and I are continuing our dissection of learning loss via our Learning Loss Handbook. In part 1, we spoke about the myth surrounding "learning loss" and the dire implications it has on our practice in schools. If you haven't listened in yet, I highly recommend checking out that episode.
In this episode we discuss:
- What was lost during pandemic schooling?
- What actions can we take in order to counteract the problems resulted from an isolated, virtual year(s)?
- How can we take these actions even in districts that don't support progressive actions?
RESOURCES* HRP's Learning Loss Handbook * 96: Unpacking Learning Loss: The Who, the What, and the Why * Is Learning “Lost” When Kids Are Out of School? by Alfie Kohn * Is Summer Learning Loss Real? by Paul T. von Hippel
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Today, Nick and I are going to break down Human Restoration Project's recently released "Learning Loss" Handbook, providing an overview of the ideas we present in the book, the faux narrative being created surrounding "learning loss", and offering an alternative for educators to push for and pursue. You can find the free download at humanrestorationproject.org/materials.
Included in this conversation is...
- The history of the term "learning loss"
- An analysis of standardized testing and what we're measuring
- Showcasing the overall negative impacts of standardized testing
- Deconstructing the financial ties to learning loss and the testing industry
- Dissecting the stereotype threat and Pygmalion effect and its potential connection to the negative narrative of learning loss
Next time we'll break down how we counteract this narrative. Stay tuned!
*Apologies for the audio quality, my mic literally broke while recording this podcast! Support our funding drive! :)
FUNDING DRIVEHuman Restoration Project is currently in the midst of our September 2021 funding drive. You can learn more, help us out, obtain donor gifts, and support future podcasts/ resources by visiting Human Restoration Project's website.
RESOURCES* 95: Deciphering "Learning Loss" w/ Akil Bello * FutureEd State Plan Tracking * Introducing "Operation Reverse the Loss" (IES) * HRP's Learning Loss Handbook
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Long time listeners may recognize the title to this podcast: Re:Teaching. Last year, Nick released a series of short podcasts on a separate channel, focused on current events and short-form highlights of writing. We soon realized that by splitting our podcast into two segments, most folks didn't hear any of this series! Therefore, after much delay - and many reminders by Nick - we'll be releasing Re:Teaching over the next few weeks on this channel. Enjoy, and there will be even more new Re:Teaching episodes on the way.
This episode is a feature read of What’s in a grade? GRExit, GPA, College Admissions, and the Mastery Transcript (oh my!)by Nick Covington, published in March 2020. Learn more about Human Restoration Project and find a wealth of free resources to create human-centered classrooms at humanrestorationproject.org, and follow us on social media, @HumResPro.
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Long time listeners may recognize the title to this podcast: Re:Teaching. Last year, Nick released a series of short podcasts on a separate channel, focused on current events and short-form highlights of writing. We soon realized that by splitting our podcast into two segments, most folks didn't hear any of this series! Therefore, after much delay - and many reminders by Nick - we'll be releasing Re:Teaching over the next few weeks on this channel. Enjoy, and there will be even more new Re:Teaching episodes on the way.
This episode is a feature read of A Progressive Response to “Ed. Reform’s Lost Decade” by Nick Covington, published in January 2020. Learn more about Human Restoration Project and find a wealth of free resources to create human-centered classrooms at humanrestorationproject.org, and follow us on social media, @HumResPro.
Today, we are joined by Akil Bello. Akil is a supplemental education and test preparation expert. He's launched two companies, developed test preparation programs, and trained hundreds of instructors. He was the founding partner and CEO of Bell Curves, a test prep company based on community partnerships, worked for The Princeton Review, and now is the Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at FairTest.
Akil and I talk about the advent of "learning loss" after pandemic schooling, the way that testing companies are using this term to generate more tests and test prep software, what was lost in the pandemic, and what we can do as teachers to build back better.
GUESTSAkil Bello, Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at Fairtest, founding partner and former CEO of Bell Curves, and contributor on test equitability, learning loss, and much more
RESOURCES* How Test Publishers Are Poised To Profit From Pandemic “Learning Loss” by Akil Bello * Akil Bello's website * FutureEd State Plan Tracking * Introducing "Operation Reverse the Loss" (IES) * Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave: How the Testing Industry Manufactured the "Learning Loss" Narrative (HRP)
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Today we are joined by Carla Marschall and Elizabeth Crawford to cover their upcoming book, Worldwise Learning: A Teacher's Guide to Shaping a Just, Sustainable Future. I was fortunate to receive an advance copy, and Worldwise Learning is all about inquiry and experiential education: shaping global citizens by tackling real world issues in projects. The book walks teachers through the "inquiry cycle", which helps students "connect, understand, and act." It's filled with activities, diagrams, and charts, to co-create with students in planning a serious, in-depth project.
We talk about:
- What makes "Worldwise Learning" different than something more generalized, like experiential education?
- How do we balance, or do we balance, between student interest and introducing what could be deemed as "controversial" topics?
- How do we allow space for co-created projects when there's limited perceived time and structure in most/many schools?
GUESTSCarla Marschall, an experienced educator who has worked in various international schools from Germany to Hong Kong to Switzerland to Singapore. She is now the Director of Teaching & Learning at UWC South East Asia, and previously co-wrote Concept-Based Inquiry in Action
Elizabeth Crawford, an Associate Professor of Elementary Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She specializes in global education and works with teacher educators and organizations to advance the Sustainable Development Goals, tackling interconnected global challenges in the classroom
RESOURCES* Worldwide Learning: A Teacher's Guide to Shaping a Just, Sustainable World (available Sept 2021)
FURTHER LISTENING* 66: Humane Education w/ Zoe Weil * 60: Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals to the Classroom with Dr. Jennifer Williams, Julia Fliss, and Nick Covington * 45: Building a Global Equitable Community feat. Ara Aman, Tania Mansfield, Lisa Liss, Colleen Mascenik, and Evin Schwartz
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On today's podcast we are joined by Zoe Bee. Zoe is an English professor, poet, and content creator who produces content for YouTube and streams on Twitch. Some of her work includes "A Professor Explains", where Zoe dives into why Grammarly is a poor product or what makes a poem a "good" poem; or full overview of the themes of H.P. Lovecraft.
Zoe is a successful content creator despite being active for less than a year. We specifically learned about her after seeing her wildly successful video, "Grading is a Scam (and Motivation is a Myth)", which is nearing 500,000 views within 3 weeks. Her takedowns of PragerU, support of progressive education, and overall extensive, fact-checked videos show a growing interest, especially by younger viewers, in educational pedagogy and politics.
In this podcast, we sat down with Zoe to talk about her growth, practices as an educator, and content creation. To start off, here's a short segment from Grading is a Scam:
GUESTSZoe Bee, YouTuber, streamer, professor, and investigator of educational pedagogy, poetry, and English
RESOURCES* Zoe Bee's YouTube * Zoe Bee's Twitch * Zoe Bee's Patreon * Grading is a Scam (and Motivation is a Myth) | A Professor Explains
FURTHER LISTENING* 83: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning w/ Dr. Susan Blum * 74: The Research on Assessment w/ Dr. Astrid Poorthuis * 69: Social Justice, Gender Identity, and Liberatory Pedagogy w/ sj Miller
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Today we're speaking with Emi Takemura. Emi is the co-founder and representative director of FutureEdu Tokyo, which seeks to reimagine education in Japan based on project based learning and experiential education inspired by High Tech High. She is also the representative director of Learn by Creation, which provides professional development, conferencing, and networking for inspiring hands-on learning in Japan.
Emi is a veteran entrepreneur who co-founded Peatix, a mobile event platform, and engages in many events on social entrepreneurship and start-up funding. She's worked at a senior level in various financial firms, and has been an advocate for female leadership, ethical investing, and reimagining education in Japan. Our conversation dives into what it means to develop a hands-on learning curriculum, how Japan and the US relate and differ, and how all of this should or shouldn't relate to the job market.
GUESTSEmi Takemura, co-founder and representative director of FutureEdu Tokyo, representative director of Learn by Creation, co-founder of Peatix, and veteran entrepreneur
RESOURCES* FutureEdu Tokyo (Japan)
FURTHER LISTENING* 15: What School Could Be w/ Ted Dintersmith
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
In today's conversation, we are joined by Alex Venet. Alex teaches undergraduate students at the Community College of Vermont, graduate classes at Castleton Center for Schools and Antioch University New England, creates PD, is a community facilitator for Edutopia, co-organizes Edcamp Vermont and Trauma Informed Educators Network Conference, and is soon releasing her new book Equity-Centered, Trauma-Informed Education, releasing May 25th, 2021. A link is in the show notes.
We received an advanced copy, and I cannot emphasize enough how much this book is needed, and how much it resonated with my own practice. Alex not only perfectly outlines trauma-informed education, but places reflections, challenges, and paramount questions for us to rethink systems in education toward including and advocating for all students. In this conversation, Alex and I talk about shifting the system toward fostering critical wellness and systemic change for equity. Enjoy this listen!
GUESTSAlex Venet, educator at Community College of Vermont, teaches graduate classes at Castleton Center for Schools and Antioch University New England, creates PD, is a community facilitator for Edutopia, co-organizes Edcamp Vermont and Trauma Informed Educators Network Conference, and author of Equity-Centered, Trauma-Informed Education
RESOURCES* Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education (Releasing May 2021); Phoenix Books * Unconditional Learning (Alex Venet's Website)
FURTHER LISTENING* Trauma Informed Educators Network Podcast: Episode 34: Alex Shevrin Venet
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
In today's conversation, we are joined by Dr. Ilana Horn. Dr. Horn is a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, who focuses on serving disenfranchised youth through authentic mathematics. She leads the Teacher Learning Laboratory, which focuses on sense-making of schools, how teachers and students interact. Further, she is the author of Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics and Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In.
In our conversation, Dr. Horn and I discuss how teachers can wrap up the 2020-2021 school year through reflection. How can we build a better system after seeing the inequities, problems, and challenges that this school year has highlighted? And, how do we build a classroom in spite of a system that often demotivates and disenfranchises educators?
GUESTSDr. Ilana Horn, professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, director of Teacher Learning Laboratory, and author of Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics and Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In.
RESOURCES* Teacher Learning Laboratory * Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics * Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In
FURTHER LISTENING* TeachLab - Dr. Ilana Horn * 82: Build a New Future: Teaching Action and Coalition Building w/ Dr. Kevin Gannon
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
In today's conversation, we're joined by Trevor Aleo, an English teacher in Wilton, Connecticut, Kayla Duncan, a professional instruction coach from Cumming, Georgia, and Julie Stern, author of Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding and many more, and workshop leader of Making Sense of Learning Transfer.
Together, along with Krista Ferraro, a history teacher from Braintree, Massachusetts, have written Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World, releasing in April, 2021. This work connects interdisciplinary learning, centers students in instructional design, and offers educators with tools to plan effectively.
In our conversation together, we talk about what it means to transfer learning, how this differs from traditional "brain science" curriculum planning, and how we can push for social justice through interdisciplinary, aligned learning.
GUESTSTrevor Aleo, middle school English teacher from Wilton, Connecticut who focuses on making students become sense-makers.
Kayla Duncan, personalized instruction coach from Cumming, Georgia, who focuses on authentic experiences and increased ownership.
Julie Stern, best-selling author of Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding and many more, and thought leader of the Making Sense of Learning Transfer workshop series.
RESOURCES* Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World (release April 2021) * Education to Save the World
FURTHER LISTENING* Conceptually Speaking (Julie Stern & Trevor Aleo's podcast)
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
Today's conversation is all about 100 Days of Conversations About School! 100 Days is a project by Human Restoration Project, REENVISIONED, Choice Filled Lives Network, and Cortico's Local Voices Network. Simply stated, 100 Days is catalyzing conversations about school in communities across the country. Featuring young people and adults, these conversations about the good life, the school experience, and equity in education are being compiled, shared, analyzed, and presented. We're taking the findings and presenting them to the new Secretary of Education and policymakers across the country.
The process is designed to center the voices of young people and educators - both in the conversations themselves and in the policy and practice recommendations that emerge from the process. We're seeking educators, young people, and education non-profits who are interested in hosting a conversation in their community.
The entire process takes about 2 hours, including the conversation itself. We supply all the materials, the recording space, and walk you through the conversation. Simply go to 100DaysofConversations.org, sign up, gather 2-8 folks, 2 of whom are below the age of 24, choose a time, and host the conversation. We'll take everything from there!
Afterwards, you'll not only get to participate in an important process but also receive a transcript and categorical analysis of what happened - which is so important in figuring out how to reimagine our educational system. It's one thing for us to belabor on the importance of changing ed - yet we must include young people as the most important voices in the conversation.
GUESTSDr. Erin Raab, chief strategy and impact officer for Choice Filled Lives Network and co-founder of REENVISIONED who focused her PhD on transforming schooling from competitions and tests to human flourishing and collective liberation
The 100 Days Social Media Team (Olivia Chiang, Summer Freed, Léa Henaux, which also includes Nontobeko Mdlalose)
RESOURCES* 100 Days of Conversations Website and Sign Up * 100 Days Facilitation Guide * 100 Days Analysis Overview
FURTHER LISTENING* 79: Reimagine the System w/ REENVISIONED (Dr. Erin Raab)
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
In today's conversation we're joined by Tesha Fritzgerald,. Tesha is an urban education expert who currently serves as a district level leader in an urban school district in Ohio. She is a Martha Holding Jennings Foundation Scholar who has a passion for UDL and culturally responsive teaching, which has led her to publishing her recent book, Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success.
I invited Tesha on to talk about pairing UDL and antiracist teaching, with a specific focus on:
- Demanding excellence in progressive, human-centered classrooms.
- Clarifying what UDL actually is.
- Clarifying how UDL and antiracism can coexist, when UDL has been critiqued for upholding a traditionalist lens.
- And actions we can take to build anti-racist, UDL-driven classrooms.
GUESTSTesha Fritzgerald, an urban education expert who focuses on UDL, culturally responsive teaching, anti-racist teaching, and author of Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success
RESOURCES* Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success by Tesha Fritzgerald * Building Blocks of Brilliance (Tesha Fritzgerald's website) * Follow Tesha on Twitter! * Article: Making Room for Asset Pedagogies by Benjamin Doxtdator
FURTHER LISTENING* Planning Period Podcast - Episode 147: Tesha Fritzgerald * 73: School and the Carceral Network w/ Dr. Connie Wun
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.Today we're joined by Dr. Tanu Biswas and Dr. John Wall. Dr. Biswas is a doctorate of pedagogy who focuses her research on children's civil disobedience for climate justice, and showcasing the richness that children and childhood have to offer adults. Dr. Wall is a theoretical ethicist who focuses on the idea of a moral life centered on language, power, culture, and childhood. His upcoming book, Give Children the Vote: How to Democratize Democracy argues for voting rights regardless of age.
Our conversation centers on combatting adultism, or the power adults have over children and the discrimination of young people, which is more than present in society but in my opinion, amplified in the classroom. We talk about what adultism and childism mean, how to promote democracy, and the importance of civil disobedience.
GUESTSDr. Tanu Biswas, doctorate of pedagogy and researcher focused on civil disobedience, children, and the intersection of climate justice
Dr. John Wall, theoretical ethicist centered on language, power, culture, and childhood
RESOURCES* The Childism Institute (Rutgers) * Children's Voting Colloquium * Upcoming Event!: Exploring Children Across Disciplines by (Jan 22, 2021 @ 8AM ET) * Children’s Civil Disobedience in the Minority World & its Potential for Re-imagining the Educational by Tanu Biswas * Why Children Should Have the Right to Vote: An Argument for Proxy-Claim Suffrage by John Wall
FURTHER LISTENING* 34: Restoring Humanity to Education (Critical Pedagogy)
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.Today we are joined by Dr. Jennifer Berkshire and Dr. Jack Schneider. Dr. Berkshire is a journalist and educator who focuses on podcasting and labor organizing at Boston College and Umass Amherst respectively, and Dr. Schneider is an education historian focused on reform and school accountability. Jennifer and Jack co-host the wonderful Have You Heard Podcast, which is focused on hot button issues in educational policy and current events, and both Chris and I highly recommend checking it out if you aren’t listening already.
Our discussion today is going to cover a lot of ground but center on education reform, innovation, labor rights, unions, and change. There’s an odd dichotomy between progressive education and the assault on public education: a cognitive dissonance between the necessity for systemic reform while ensuring a free and accessible public education for the future and recognizing the need for organized labor as a path to a strong working class, that teacher unions are among the largest and most powerful in the country. Yet, there is a narrative - real or not - that unions are resistant to the change that many progressive educators want, and more recently, the notion that they have become the major roadblock to school reopenings in 2020.
GUESTSDr. Jennifer Berkshire, journalist and educator focused on podcasting and labor organizing at Boston College & UMass Amherst
Dr. Jack Schneider, education historian centered on reform and school accountability
RESOURCES* A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Dr. Berkshire & Dr. Schneider * Review: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Nick Covington * Have You Heard Blog/Podcast
FURTHER LISTENING* 80: Pandemic Pods, School Choice, and Combating Inequity w/ Dr. Jon Hale * This Podcast Will Kill You: COVID-19 Chapter 10: Schools * This is Hell!: 1263: The end of public school / Jack Schneider + Jennifer Berkshire
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.Today we are joined by Dr. Susan Blum, Dr. Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, and the author of many works and articles, including her recently released: Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), which features fifteen different educators, such as Arthur Chiaravalli, Jesse Stommel, Aflie Kohn, and Laura Gibbs, speaking on their ideas and implementation of the practice. And as an interesting side note, more than half of the educators in the book have appeared on our podcast!
In this conversation we'll be talking about ungrading, framed on the ideas found in the book - the “how” of the practice, and particularly how ungrading fits within COVID-19 and promoting equity as a whole.
GUESTSDr. Susan Blum, professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and active author, with a recent focus on ungrading.
RESOURCES* Ungrading Book Club (assembled by David Buck) * West Virginia University Press: Ungrading, edited by Dr. Susan Blum * Human Restoration Project Ungrading Handbook * Human Restoration Project Ungrading Course
FURTHER LISTENING* 78: A Way to Ungrade, Floop w/ Christine Witcher * 74: The Research on Assessment w/ Dr. Astrid Poorthuis * 54: Making the Switch to Ungrading feat. Abigail French, Dr. Susan Blum, and Dr. Laura Gibbs * 47: Redefining Assessment by Implementing Gradeless Learning feat. Jeffery Frieden, Aaron Blackwelder, & Nick Covington
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Transcripts can be found via our website, humanrestorationproject.org.Our conversation today will center on teaching organization and collective activism. Essentially, we find ourselves at an important crossroads, as the administration shifts to new policies - teachers will be at the whim of new federal (and likely, state) policies that will have massive ramifications on classrooms, especially during COVID-19. And I hope out of this conversation, we’ll be able to address - what should I be concerned about? What problems may exist? And then, okay...what can I do to actually mitigate these problems and demand an equitable education system?
GUESTSDr. Kevin Gannon, the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a Professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, and author of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. Further, Gannon actively writes and teaches on the science of learning, racism and race in education, and building inclusivity online and offline. You can learn more on his website, TheTattooedProf.com and on Twitter @TheTattooedProf.
RESOURCES* The Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire * Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire * Radical Hope by Kevin Gannon * HRP Book Review: Radical Hope
FURTHER LISTENING* ThinkUDL with Kevin Gannon: Radical Hope for Online Teaching
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This is a recording of our Teacher Powered Schools Virtual Conference 2020 presentation: Sharing Power with Students: Reframing Systems Toward a Liberatory Pedagogy. This session dives into why reform doesn't work, how teachers can use collective action to change systems, and what really, is the point of us working against inhumane structures if not much is actually changing?
RESOURCES* One Teacher Can't Save the World by Nick Covington and Chris McNutt
FURTHER LISTENING* Introduction: Human Restoration Project
Today, Chris and I (Nick) are joined by John Hale, whose biography you will hear at the beginning of the interview. John was recently the guest of a Soho Forum debate on the topic of pandemic pods, which you heard excerpts of at the beginning of this episode and confined in its entirety on YouTube.
Since the Human Restoration Project has primarily been focused on pedagogy and changing the structures of school, I wanted to have John on to talk more about the history and ramifications of education policy and help us unpack what's really going on in our current conversations about pandemic pods, voucher programs and the recently announced Bezos Academy. How can we simultaneously acknowledge that schools need to change while being critical advocates for the need for public institutions and employee unions? How have market oriented takes on so-called school choice actually subverted the original intent of independent and charter schools? It's a really interesting conversation and it was great to talk to John. I'm sure we'll have him on again to talk education policy, history and organization in the future.
GUESTSDr. Joe Hale, professor of educational policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois, Urban-Champaign, and author of the forthcoming book, "The Choice We Face" (working title)
RESOURCES* Jeff Bezos is opening a tuition-free preschool for underserved children (CNN) * Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol * Small Schools and Choice Revisited by Deborah Meier
FURTHER LISTENING* Are ‘Pandemic Pods’ a Symptom of the Public School Monopoly? A Soho Forum Debate (YouTube)
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Today we're joined by Dr. Erin Lynn Raab. Erin is the Co-founder of REENVISIONED, a movement to redefine the purpose of school. REENVISIONED aims to change the conversation of school away from standards, norms, and improving the status quo, toward human flourishing, community, democracy, and collective liberation. Erin and her co-founder, Nicole Hensel, both graduates of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, aim to collect 10,000 stories of students, teachers, and community members to develop a shared vision of what school could, and should be.
The organization works with schools and individuals to catalyze new conversations and create new visions. They provide a tried and true process for opening space for truly eye-opening conversations between young people, educators, and other adults in their community about what we all really want out of our education system and for our live. You can read some of these interviews at REENVISIONED.org.
In our conversation together, Erin talks about systems-based thinking and transforming the system, rather than upholding the status quo. It's a deep, complex discussion centering on history, psychology, and more. I hope you enjoy!
GUESTSDr. Erin Lynn Raab, who earned her Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University, where her scholarship pertained to the question of how we can transform education systems so they foster individual flourishing and thriving democracy, and is the co-founder of REENVISIONED.
RESOURCES* REENVISIONED: Hundreds of interviews on the purpose of school, with free resources and activities to help facilitate these conversations by yourself or with classes. * “Why School?": A Systems Perspective on Creating Schooling for Individual Flourishing and a Thriving Democratic Society” - Dr. Raab’s Ph.D. Dissertation * The End of Policing by Alex Vitale (referenced)
Shorter, broad audience pieces by Erin:
- If We Want a More Just, Equitable Society We Have to Re-envision School. Here’s how to start.
- Designing School for Human Flourishing & Thriving Democracy
- The Four Purposes of Schooling
FURTHER LISTENING* 43: The Good Life feat. Steven Gumbay, REENVISIONED, The Future Project, Anne Connolly, Richard Loeper-Viti, & Gamal Sherif
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Today we're talking about ungrading with the EdTech tool, Floop, short for feedback loop, found over at FloopEdu.com. Now, we don't normally talk about specific tools and strategies at HRP - we get into the theory and pedagogy of progressive systems...but the most common question we're asked is: okay well, is it even possible to do any of these things? It seems like a ton of work and it'll be overwhelming, and everyone is against me!
Well, one potential solution is Floop! In summary, Floop allows you to easily provide feedback to your students. You create dropboxes on the platform, students upload their assignments, and then you are given audio and text-based tools to comment on what they've done. You can assign feedback visually, through comment banks, see growth over past revisions, and you can see if students have read what you've said. I personally love that Floop is committed to ungrading - and you don't need to enter in any grade whatsoever. The company actively promote practices to distance ourselves from grades altogether.
I, myself, started using Floop this year and I'm excited to share it. I think it's a great example of an ed tech company using their tools for actual education as opposed to maintaining the status quo, and it's affordable and ethical as you'll soon find out.
Finally, this episode is not sponsored in any way, I'm just excited about it. Christine offered our listeners 20% off their first year - putting the platform at roughly $67. Just use code "RESTORE20" before October 31st, 2020.
GUESTSChristine Witcher, a current middle school STEM educator and co-founder of Floop, founded in 2017.
RESOURCES* Study: LMS, Grading, and Comments * PD on Feedback-Driven Learning * The Floop Curriculum
FURTHER LISTENING* Teach Better Podcast: 94: A Two-Way Conversation – Christine Witcher chats with us about the importance of feedback, and how to make sure our students are emotionally ready for it, and prepared to learn from it.
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Today we are joined by Evan Whitehead, a veteran educator who is the director of special services at a K-8 school in Illinois. Evan has served in a variety of roles, from crisis and behavior interventionist to Latino parent outreach coordinator to Title 1 director. Further, Evan actively presents on reaching at-risk youth, leadership, and self-care for everyone in education, and is a national consultant for the Aha! Process.
We discuss how educators can best prepare for self-care, especially now within remote and hybrid contexts. Further, we focus on conversation on two themes: 1) how can we build systems (e.g. breaks, SEL check-ins) to ensure teachers are supported by administration, and 2) how can we ensure that toxic positivity doesn’t ignore equity and social justice in the “name of” self-care?
Transcript available here.
GUESTSEvan Whitehead, a leader in social-emotional learning, leadership, and self-care, and director of special services at a K-8 school.
RESOURCES* How Self-Compassion Can Help Prevent Teacher Burnout * Dena Simmons: Without Context, Social-Emotional Learning Can Backfire
FURTHER LISTENING* The Innovator’s Mindset: Balance, Boundaries, and Breaks (YouTube)
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In this podcast, Nick Covington (of HRP) and I, Chris, discuss the "return to learn” plans of school and what we must think about as we reopen. We call upon other educators to hear their thoughts, including Dr. Jessica Zeller, Rachel Lawrence, Shane MacLeod, and an anonymous caller.
Three key themes emerge in our conversation:
- We need to recognize that asynchronous learning is just as valid, if not more valid, than synchronous learning in both content knowledge and equitable practice.
- Our conversation of “reimagining education” has been replaced with maintaining control. Teachers must push back to change the status quo.
- Teachers are facing massive cognitive dissonance of wanting to return to the classroom and help students, while simultaneously recognizing the safety and logistical concerns of the situation.
Also, we experimented with a new recording set up so I apologize for the decrease in quality…always attempting to do better!
Show Notes* Death and Teaching, COVID-19 by Chris McNutt * Referenced Rubric (@k_shelton)
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This is an audio version of our Summit on August 1st, 2020. Here's the video!
Inspire Citizens is an innovative organization focusing on active, informed civics through social justice, sustainable development, collective well-being, SEL, and ethical media literacy. Out of the Blocks is an NPR program focused on capturing the sounds on the street of Baltimore, formed on the idea of interviewing every single person on a given block. And Evan Whitehead is a school leader and educator of over 20 years with a focus on social-emotional well-being.
Check out this podcast between Inspire Citizens and Out of the Blocks on how this work can involve students.
Further, this Padlet has a huge collection of ideas shared today. Further, check out our write-up on writing.humanrestorationproject.org.
Our Summit focused on endorsing student voice through activism in a hybrid/virtual setting. How can we help students become involved in their community when it's difficult or impossible to actually walk around the community? How can we use technology (e.g. podcasts, photography, interviews) to help connect others? How can we promote social justice when it's difficult to build interpersonal connections?
Look out for future Summits via Human Restoration Project’s website and social media.
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Let’s put this into perspective: the United States is planning on the mass reopening of schools when COVID-19 has still not ended its first wave. Millions of people have been diagnosed, and the CDC has issued little concrete guidance on how schools will actually reopen next month. The US Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has essentially ignored questioning of even the notion of remote learning and does not believe that this is a serious issue that will effect children (flat out refusing to acknowledge the adults in the room too.)
This podcast addresses the anxiety and real chance of death due to COVID-19 in the classroom. It calls upon teachers to organize and demand remote learning. Let’s face it, there’s two options:
1) We go back to school, cases increase, and more students, teachers, and faculty members die. This isn’t a hypothesis. There are ample facts presented in this podcast on why this is the case.
2) Teachers stand up to districts, using their extreme leverage during the pandemic, to stay remote and minimize destruction.
I encourage you to listen in. - Chris
Show Notes* Parent Letter Template - We Demand Safe Schools! * “There Will Be No Teachers Left” * School Virtual/Hybrid Reopening Demand Template Letter (Florida)
Citations* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b8Kg_a4Omo * https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases * https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html * https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-restrictions-us.html * https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/05/26/children-transmission * https://www.businessinsider.com/how-coronavirus-travel-through-air-droplets-aerosols-2020-3 * https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/12/us/arizona-teachers-coronavirus/index.html * https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/11/politics/cdc-documents-warn-high-risk-schools-reopening/index.html * https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/10/889848834/nations-pediatricians-walk-back-support-for-in-person-school * https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/concerns-mount-in-chapel-hill-over-prospect-of-students-returning-to-unc-amid-pandemic/19183462/ * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-13/covid-19-reinvades-u-s-states-that-already-beat-it-back-once?srnd=premium * https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-battles-new-wave-coronavirus-infections-after-reopening-n1233139 * https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/asia/south-korea-coronavirus-shuts-down-again-intl/index.html * https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3092174/coronavirus-third-wave-fears-escalate-hong-kong * https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-hongkong/hong-kong-tightens-social-distancing-again-as-coronavirus-cases-rise-idUSKCN24E1L5 * https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/07/10/889376184/photos-how-hong-kong-reopened-schools-and-why-it-closed-them-again * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JSGOO6GiI8 * https://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/map-coronavirus-and-school-closures.html * https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/13/us/teachers-covid-19-return-school/index.html * https://fortune.com/2020/05/28/us-unemployment-rate-numbers-claims-this-week-total-job-losses-may-28-2020-benefits-claims-job-losses/
This podcast is adapted from an article recently published by HRP.
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Our podcast today features Dr. Astrid Poorthuis, an assistant professor at the developmental psychology program at Utrecht University, Netherlands, whose work focuses on performance, school, and its relationship to social/emotional learning. Dr. Poorthuis has researched and published a variety of works concerning grades, student/teacher emotional well-being, student/teacher relationships, and peer relationships.
Dr. Poorthuis and I talk about her research and its applications for the classroom, notably how ungrading and its benefits of engagement, well-being, and participation are backed by substantial amounts of research - referencing a variety of studies. It's incredibly interesting how universal these results are and the commonalities that US and Netherlands schools share. Attached in the show notes are the studies that Dr. Poorthuis has been involved with, as well as recommendations she makes during this episode.
GUESTSDr. Astrid Poorthuis, a leader in researching practices that demonstrate the importance and implementation of practices that bolster student social and emotional well-being, who serves as an assistant professor in the developmental psychology program at Utrecht University, Netherlands
RESOURCES* Do grades shape students' school engagement? The psychological consequences of report card grades at the beginning of secondary school * See me through my eyes: Adolescent–parent agreement in personality predicts later self-esteem development * Dashed Hopes, Dashed Selves? A Sociometer Perspective on Self-esteem Change Across the Transition to Secondary School * The Role of School in Adolescents’ Identity Development. A Literature Review * Klapp: Does grading affect educational attainment? A longitudinal study * Koenka et. al.: A meta-analysis on the impact of grades and comments on academic motivation and achievement: a case for written feedback
FURTHER LISTENING* 28: Restoring Humanity: Gradeless Learning * 54: Making the Switch to Ungrading (feat. Abigail French, Dr. Susan Blum, and Dr. Laura Gibbs)
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Our podcast today features Dr. Connie Wun, the founder and director of Transformative Research: An Institute for Social Transformation and AAPI Women Lead. Connie is an educator, activist, and researcher whose work centers on race and gender equity, community-centered research, women's empowerment, school discipline and punishment, and anti-Blackness in education.
Connie and I talk about school and its relation to the carceral network, or how school is intertwined in producing delinquency, inequity, and power structures in the United States. Our discussion talks not only about the issues facing US schools, but how we can utilize the "winds of change" of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the COVID crisis, to revolutionize the education system to best serve Students of Color and marginalized students.
Briefly, to provide some context to the carceral network and schools - we're referring to not only the "school to prison pipeline", but the commonplace day-to-day discrimination that Students of Color face, including but not limited to a white-centric curriculum, dress codes, the tardy system, and racial stereotyping/discrimination (for example, sending a student out of class for "laughing too loud" or "chewing gum", which effectively hurts a students' education as well as simply their humanity.)
Dr. Connie Wun provides an incredibly clear overview to the carceral state and continuum between schooling and carceral pedagogies.
GUESTSDr. Connie Wun, researcher, speaker, and educator, and founder/director of Transformative Research: An Institute for Social Transformation and co-founder/director of AAPI Women Lead.
RESOURCES* #ImReady Solidarity Work (AAPI Women Lead) * The Abusable Past: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness * Asian American Justice Toolkit * TransformHarm Resource Hub * Truthout.org: We Are Witnessing an Uprising Against a World Built on Anti-Blackness by Dr. Connie Wun * Teachers for Social Justice * Education for Liberation Network * Teaching Tolerance Black Lives Matter Resources * Movement for Black Lives * Black Visions Collective
FURTHER LISTENING* Beyond the School to Prison Pipeline by Dr. Connie Wun * The Tao of Self-Confidence: 712: You Are Gifted With Dr. Connie Wun
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What is Human Restoration Project?
This introductory podcast provides an overview to our organization, what we do, and the goals of progressive education. Listen in to learn about the pedagogy and join the cause!
Resources* I use evidence to inform my teaching. by Chris McNutt * At a Crossroads of Anti-Authoritarianism: Dismissing Far-Right School Advocates by Chris McNutt * Human Restoration Project's research page
Today I'm joined by Marie Bigham, founder and co-leader of ACCEPT Group, or Admissions Community Cultivating Equity & Peace Today. Marie has spent over 20 years in college admissions, most recently at an independent school in New Orleans, and serves full-time as ACCEPT Group's leader. ACCEPT coordinates support for equitable college admissions, such as staging walkouts and organizing like-minded voices for change.
In this podcast, Marie and I discuss the actions we can take to radicalize the college admissions process in an era of uncertainty. The horrific actions of the past few months, from the growth of a global pandemic to yet another murder of a person of color by the police, George Floyd, has led way to some glimmers of hope in organizing, protest, and growth as a society. What actions can K-college educators take to build an equitable higher education experience, when revolution seems more and more tangible?
GUESTSMarie Bigham, former college admissions counselor and co-leader and founder of the ACCEPT Group (Admissions Community Cultivating Equity & Peace Today.)
RESOURCES* ACCEPT Group (Website) * ACCEPT Group (Facebook) * ACCEPT Group (Twitter) * DEFINING ACCESS: How Test-Optional Works * "We are witnessing America as a failed social experiment" - Dr Cornell West Full CNN Segment * The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack
FURTHER LISTENING (UPCOMING)* ACCEPT Group Chat Sessions
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In December, for our last Summit of 2019, we framed our discussion around 2019 Victories, 2020 Goals, and resources to help us grow as a community of educators. Not having any idea that 2020 was going to laugh at those plans, light them on fire, and launch them from a slingshot off the tallest mountain, we're ending May, and the 2019-2020 school year on a different note.
Questions
Delete: What about this new reality would you leave behind? Why?
Recycle: What would you like to see carried forward into 2021 and beyond?
Crowd Source: Is it possible to make these systems & strategies work better? How do we get there together?
Hello, podcast listener!
You may have noticed that your podcast feed for Things Fall Apart looks a little different. We're relabelled our podcast to the name of organization, Human Restoration Project, and are including all of HRP's podcasts under one banner. Listen to this brief update to find out more!
Today I am joined by Dr. William Ayers, a retired education professor at the University of Chicago whose work is rooted in progressive ideology. Ayers was heavily involved in the free school movement in the 1960s, and his work reflects a focus on democratic schooling and building a more free society. Ayers is a prolific author, including writing On the Side of the Child: Summerhill Revisited, Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, and the recently released "You Can't Fire the Bad Ones!": And 18 Other Myths about Teachers, Teachers Unions, and Public Education.
In this podcast, Ayers and I talk about the opportunity that COVID-19 provides teachers to throw out standardized testing and build a better system. We discuss the College Board, the connection between testing and the financial industry, how testing impacts the culture of a school, and what a classroom without these tests could mean.
GUESTSDr. William Ayers, professor of education at the University of Chicago, elementary education expert, education reform activist, author, and researcher.
RESOURCES* “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!”: And 18 Other Myths about Teachers, Teachers Unions, and Public Education by William Ayers, Crystal Laura, and Rick Ayers * Bill Ayers’ Website
FURTHER LISTENING* Bill Ayers | Teaching And Organizing for Social Justice | University of Oregon Lecture * Headline: Author Bill Ayers on the Eighteen Myths of Public Education
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Today I am joined by Dr. Etta Kralovec, a professor of education at The University of Arizona, who focuses on context, research gathering, and teacher preparation, specifically with a focus on US/Mexico border communities. Dr. Kralovec is a widely accomplished author and researcher, with works such as The End of Homework and Schools That Do Too Much, a Fulbright Scholar, school leader and founder, and international expert.
In this podcast, we talk about the practice of teacher action research, where educators perform qualitative studies of what they're doing - essentially to figure out if it works. As you'll soon hear, the power of teacher action research lies in the process of reflecting and analyzing the information. Further, teacher action research is the cornerstone of Human Restoration Project's upcoming microcredentialing program.
GUESTSDr. Etta Kralovec, professor of education at The University of Arizona, author, researcher, Fulbright Scholar, and expert on teacher action research with a specific focus on US/Mexico border communities.
RESOURCES* YouTube: Overview of Dr. Kralovec’s recent work * Schools That Do Too Much by Etta Kralovec * HRP Book Review: The End of Homework by Etta Kralovec and John Buell
*Dr. Kralovec has graciously provided her author email, endhomework@gmail.com - to answer any questions about teacher action research and how it can work for you!
FURTHER LISTENING* Teacher’s Aid: Homework? Really? That’s So 1950s * High Tech High Unboxed: Continuous Improvement: Teacher Induction
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Today I am joined by Dr. sj Miller, an associate professor of teacher education at Sante Fe Community College. sj is an expert on social justice and challenges the gender and gender identity binary (e.g. trans*+, gender dynamic/fluid youth.) sj is an award-winning and well-published author, including writing for The International Journal of Transgenderism, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, and the Teachers College Record. You can view sj's speech on gender identities and young people via TEDMED.
In this podcast, we talk about how schools can best serve nonconforming gender identities, how classrooms can be liberated for social justice, and the mistakes we make in professional development and addressing the complex topic of gender in schools.
GUESTSDr. sj Miller, associate professor of teacher education, expert on gender identity justice and social justice, and published author/researcher.
RESOURCES* sj Miller’s recently published book, about Gender Identity Justice in Schools and Communities * sj Miller’s website * sj Miller’s TEDMED talk: “Why gender identity justice matters for everyone”
FURTHER LISTENING* Engendering Communication - Episode 42 - The Oxford Comment * Documentary: Gender | The Space Between
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Interested in using this opportunity for professional development credit? See our template for administrators. Consider running this event past your administrative team prior to completing.
In this interactive professional development session, we will talk about how teachers can create their own public, private, and charter schools through the Teacher Powered Schools organizational structure. We are joined by three amazing guests:
Amy Junge, Director of the Teacher Powered Schools initiative, co-author and researcher of Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots with Kim Farris-Berg and Ed Dirkswager.
Liz Seubert, a co-founding teacher at Wildlands School, a public tuition-free, PBL-based charter high/middle school in Wisconsin, 2016 Teacher Ambassador for Teacher Powered Schools, and co-author of An Improbable School: Transforming How Teachers Teacher & Students Learn.
Taryn Snyder, a 3rd grade teacher at Boston Teacher Union Pilot School, a public tuition-free K-8 school in Massachusetts, founded as a partnership between the Boston teacher’s union and local schools.
This discussion will span across K-12, directing educators on the Teacher Powered Schools movement, how to get involved, and clarifying questions to start teachers on their journey to potentially envision their own schools!
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Today I am joined by Liz Seubert, a teacher at the teacher run and operated school, Wildlands in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. Wildlands is a small, tuition free 7-12 public charter school, which is affiliated with the Teacher Powered Schools movement. Liz, along with her coworkers, operate the entire school without an administrative body.
In this podcast, we will delve into the operation of Wildlands, how it was founded, and what teachers can do to become involved in Teacher Powered Schools. If you're listening to this podcast before April 29th, make sure you sign up for our Summit with Liz and two other experts from Teacher Powered. There, they'll be able to answer your questions and start your own journey to a grassroots revolution in education. In our opinion, teachers being treated as professionals, and being able to connect with students in small school environments, is a realistic and pragmatic way to organize progressive education for all students.
I highly recommend you visit Teacher Powered Schools at teacherpowered.org. Their network supplies a ridiculous amount of resources, materials, and help channels to help teachers navigate starting their own school.
GUESTSLiz Seubert, co-founding teacher at Wildlands School, a 2016 Teacher Ambassador for the Teacher Powered Schools Initiative, and co-author of An Improbable School: Transforming how Teachers Teach & Students Learn.
RESOURCES* Wildlands 8-12 School * Teacher Powered Schools * Summit Sign Up (April 29th, 7:30PM EST)
FURTHER LISTENING* THE "TEACHER POWERED SCHOOLS" INITIATIVE from Blog Talk Radio
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Our podcast today features Tiersa McQueen, an avid homeschooler who raises her four children in an unschooling philosophy. Tiersa and her husband both work opposing shifts to allow this to occur. Tiersa frequently posts on her Twitter and Instagram handles as MotherBae, critiquing traditional education, offering support as an unschooler, and demonstrating how we can adopt unschooling among our children. I invited Tiersa to talk about this pedagogy and offer advice for educators who are now supporting their students in their home environments, as well as many who are raising their own children alongside this.
GUESTSTiersa McQueen, avid homeschooler and unschooler who posts under the handle @MotherBae to critique traditional education and represent Black married moms who unschool
RESOURCES* HRP COVID-19 Resources and Charities * Tiersa McQueen on Twitter (@tiersaj) * Tiersa McQueen on Instagram (mother_bae_i) * Tiersa McQueen on YouTube
FURTHER LISTENING* Girlfriends Guide to Homeschooling with Angela Jordan Perry: Episode 91: Dual Employed homeschooling Parents of 4, Tiersa McQueen
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Interested in using this opportunity for professional development credit? See our template for administrators. Consider running this event past your administrative team prior to completing.
This discussion will talk about how we can bring about play-based learning in and out of classroom. This conversation will center on experiential learning and student voice, with some credence to how this can integrate to the COVID-19 crisis.
Abe Moore is a primary teacher in Adelaide, Australia, and has worked on brilliant projects, including building an entire play space with his students.
How can we build spaces and co-create curriculum with our students to encourage play, especially in the outdoors?
What activities, games, and/or projects can we undertake with individuals or small groups of students?
What does a play-based outdoor curriculum, classroom, and community look like?
Resources mentioned in this episode can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qgePI6nTaD2ihJdYHCJuhPgsg38q3RD4MhIyRbp1qW4/edit?usp=sharing
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Today I'm joined by Nick Covington and Zoe Weil, where we're exploring the work of the Institute of Humane Education, which is led by Zoe. Zoe has been teaching "humane education" for over thirty years, and is an established author, speaker, and workshop leader on the topic.
The Institute of Humane Education is an accredited program offering robust graduate and doctoral coursework in "humane education", which centers on promoting social good and minimizing harm to people, animals, and the environment. The Institute offers incredible resources on its website, including the in-depth "Solutionary Guidebook" - which is part humane education overview, part PBL guidebook, and part student activity booklet. I highly recommend checking it out, it's free!
In our discussion, Zoe, Nick, and I talk about the purpose of humane education, how it can be incorporated into schools, and its relationship to the growing Sustainable Development Goals movement.
GUESTSZoe Weil, the co-founder and president of IHE, who has led the humane education movement over the last thirty years; an accomplished author, speaker, and presenter.
RESOURCES* The Institute for Humane Education * Solutionary Guidebook * Zoe Weil, TEDx - The World Becomes What You Teach
FURTHER LISTENING* My Home Planet: Why We Should All Have A Humane Education
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In this interactive discussion, we will discuss what teaching is like during the COVID-19 crisis.
Participants will be posed with these questions, but the conversation will take us on a journey of its own:
- Commiserate: What’s going on? How has the response to the COVID-19 crisis impacted you and your school?
- Collaborate: What can we learn from your response to the crisis to do right by our kids and our communities?
- Community: How are you going to balance connectivity and social isolation?
Today we're covering COVID-19 and how it impacts the education system. Depending on when you're listening to this podcast, you're likely facing your school's physical environment shut down, or soon to be doing so. In Ohio, all schools are now expected to have at least three weeks out starting on Tuesday - and schools are frantically trying to prepare how they'll tackle this shift.
Most districts across the United States are continuing the expectation of academic coursework across this disruption - and we have no idea how long it will last. Most teachers do not have formal training in adapting their class to a virtual environment, nor does everyone have even close to a 1:1 environment. This episode will assume that educators are dealing with a virtual shift, and looking for a place to start, further resources will be posted in the show notes concerning paper-based methods.
GUESTSJesse Stommel, a leading expert on digital critical pedagogy, hybrid pedagogy, and assessment. He is the Digital Learning Fellow and Senior Lecturer of Digital Studies at University of Mary Washington. Further, Jesse is the co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and a documentary filmmaker.
RESOURCES* Jesse Stommel’s Website * Kajeet - an affordable hotspot that uses mobile data (for students lacking access * “Friggin’ Packets” Blog and Podcast from Cult of Pedagogy - for ideas on alternatives to masses of papers * UNICEF - Learning Through Play - for ways to introduce play-based learning to the home, primarily aimed at younger students
FURTHER LISTENING* Edsurge: Bonus Episode: Coronavirus Has Led to a Rush of Online Teaching. How Can Professors Manage?
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Today we are joined by two fantastic educators. First, I will be speaking with Peter Verdin, who is a "movement engineer" at Future Public School in Garden City, Idaho, which is a tuition free, progressively minded lottery-based school. Essentially, Peter is redoing the way we look at physical education with elementary students, and designing curriculum as these students grow older and the school expands.
Then, we have Bruce Mansfield, is an instructional coach in the Bellingham School District in Bellingham, Washington. Bruce has operated a gradeless system in a traditional environment, and showcases the structure of his course, as well as how he has used portfolios and student letters to obtain evidence of learning. It's a great look at how we can spread the practice of gradeless learning to even more educators.
GUESTSPeter Verdin, the Movement Engineer at Future Public School in Garden City, Idaho, who incorporates place-based and environmentally-focused learning into physical education; host of The Other Literacies; founder of Movement Engineering Project.
Bruce Mansfield, an instructional coach in the Bellingham School District in Bellingham, Washington; former US history teacher of 14 years; a pusher for radical change in assessment via portfolio and student letters.
RESOURCES* The Other Literacies podcast * Bruce Mansfield’s course materials
FURTHER LISTENING* S3: E12: Making the Switch to Ungrading (feat. Abigail French, Dr. Susan Blum, and Dr. Laura Gibbs) * S3: E4 - Innovation in Progressive Education feat. Bennett Jester, Ted Fujimoto, Deanna Hess, & Sophie Fenton
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Interested in using this opportunity for professional development credit? See our template for administrators. Consider running this event past your administrative team prior to completing.
Dr. Jennifer Williams, is the co-founder and executive director of Take Action Global, co-founder of TeachSDGs, professor at Saint Leo University in the College of Education and Graduate Education, and author of Teach Boldly.
In this interactive discussion, we will discuss connecting the UN Sustainable Development Goals to authentic projects in the classroom.
Participants will be posed with these questions, but the conversation will take us on a journey of its own:
- How does one become inspired to start a SDG-related project? How can we incorporate student inspiration and voice to the planning process?
- What components work well in SDG-related projects? What tools, websites, or objectives are there?
- How can we take projects into the community to make meaningful, authentic change for the world?
Please see the attached Google Document for all the notes from this conversation, as well as a variety of external links.
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In this podcast, we are joined by Dr. Yong Zhao, the Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education. Dr. Zhao and I talk about building a movement that ends standardized testing in the United States and how to build classrooms that invoke a student's innate desire to learn. Perhaps the grueling, “rigorous” standardized testing system is actually harming students, not helping? Most teachers seem to understand this, and a recent analysis by Harvard University seems to confirm it.
Dr. Zhao has written and spoken extensively on how testing and test scores harm students. And he’s done the research and work to back up everything he states. It’s up to teachers - those in the field - to actually make change in this endeavor. There’s a lot we’re up against! It makes all the difference.
GUESTSDr. Yong Zhao, the Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas. Zhao was the Presidential Chair and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education at University of Oregon, and a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. Further, he's served as the founding director of the Confucius Institute and US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence.
RESOURCES* What Works May Hurt by Zhao * Reach for Greatness by Zhao * Counting What Counts by Zhao * The Courage to Be Creative: An Interview with Dr. Yong Zhao * HRP’s Primer for Human-Centric (Progressive) Education
FURTHER LISTENING* FreshEd #79: What Works (May) Hurt w/ Dr. Yong Zhao * ReImagine Schools: Global Competence with Dr. Yong Zhao
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In this podcast, we are joined by Seth Coster, the CEO and game programmer at Butterscotch Shenanigans, who have seen incredibly success on their video and mobile games. Best known for titles Crashlands and Levelhead, Butterscotch Shenanigans was founded by three brothers with no explicit academic background in video game creation. Seth studied to become a Certified Financial Analyst, started a law graduate program, but soon realized he enjoyed the games he created in his free time much more. Brothers Sam, Seth, and Adam Coster also host their own podcast, Coffee with Butterscotch.
The reason we invited Seth was because we see an inherent connection between video game design and education, as well as his own story connecting to a lot of our work at the Human Restoration Project. (And it was awesome to have a connection through Nick, who he went to college with.) I actually introduce the concept of learning by doing by showcasing a clip from Indie Game: The Movie, where developers of Super Meat Boy explain that teaching a player to run and jump through a pop up that shows them how to do it, is not nearly as effective as just presenting a large gap and having the player keep trying until they ultimately succeed (see the show notes!)
Enjoy this array of topics from game design to grading to chaotic science experiments.
GUESTSSeth Coster, the CEO and game programmer at Butterscotch Shenanigans, who have seen incredibly success on their video and mobile games Crashlands and Levelhead.
Nick Covington, Creative Director of Human Restoration Project, advocate of equitable gradeless learning and realignment of assessment.
RESOURCES Indie Game: The Movie Super Meat Boy* Clip * Coffee with Butterscotch (Podcast) * GDC: Design by Chaos * Butterscotch Shenanigans * Medium (Chris McNutt): Game Design, Classroom Design, and the Faux Use of Gamification
FURTHER LISTENING* S3: E2: It All Orbits Purpose feat. Kendall Cotton Bronk, John Cagle, Skylar Primm, and Elizabeth Martin * S2 Highlight: Adopting Progressive Ed. w/ Alfie Kohn
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In this podcast, we are joined by Brooke Tobia and her two students, Olivia and Avery. Together, they've co-developed and written the book How to Teach Us: A Guide for Teachers Written by Students. Working in a PBL environment, roughly 60 6th grade students between Brooke and her co-teacher researched, wrote, and published this work which is available via Amazon. Within, you'll find slews of information, gathered from interviews with students, that explains how different students learn and effective teaching methods.
It can’t be stressed enough how authentically this work demonstrates the power of experiential learning. These students are engaged, motivated, curious, and acting purposefully. They see the power in their work and want to share it. They’re working cooperatively to help each other. And ultimately, they’ve built something together that can have a lasting impact. Maybe this podcast will spawn a wave of collaborative book publishing?
GUESTSBrooke Tobia, a 6th grade STEM educator at High Tech Middle North County, who masterfully incorporates experiential learning into her courses. She’s joined by two of her 6th grade students, Olivia and Avery.
RESOURCES* How to Teach Us: A Guide for Teachers Written by Students * Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing * Student Interview Questions
FURTHER LISTENING* S3: E14: Listen to Students (feat. Ayush Chopra, Cody Lees, & Meghan Kestner) * S3: E8: The Inventive Design of Learning Spaces feat. Pam Moran, Tim Fawkes, Ryan Hopkins-Wilcox, & Discovery Lab
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Interested in using this opportunity for professional development credit? See our template for administrators. Consider running this event past your administrative team prior to completing.
Dr. Susan Engel is a professor of developmental psychology at Williams College, with a focus on curiosity, school reform, and educational research. Her many works include The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood and The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness, Not Money, Would Transform Our Schools. Further, Dr. Engel is co-founder and educational advisor to the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, NY.
In this interactive discussion, we’ll talk the importance of research and dissect how to analyze research results as well as revamping teacher professional development models.
*Apologies for the relatively low audio quality. First time we’ve recorded on Jitsi!
This episode is all about the Sustainable Development Goals, with some specific questions surrounding their implementation. If you're not familiar, the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015 and consist of 17 major problems the world aims to solve by 2030. Countries are working in partnership to solve issues such as ending world hunger, establishing gender equality, taking climate action, and reducing inequality. Each of these goals has many organizations working with the indicators - or specific tasks - within each goal.
During our panel discussion, we talk about motivating students to reach the SDGs in spite of their gigantic nature, as well as how to implement these ideas in our ever politicized world.
GUESTSDr. Jennifer Williams, co-founder and executive director of Take Action Global, co-founder of TeachSDGs, professor at Saint Leo University in the College of Education and Graduate Education, and author of Teach Boldly.
Julia Fliss, a language arts educator at Evergreen Middle School in Evergreen, CO and TeachSDGs ambassador.
Nick Covington, a social studies educator at Ankeny High School in Ankeny, IO (and Creative Director at Human Restoration Project.)
RESOURCES* Overview of the SDGs * TeachSDGs * World’s Largest Lesson * Teach Boldly: Using EdTech for Social Good by Dr. Jennifer Williams
FURTHER LISTENING* S3: E14: Listen to Students (feat. Ayush Chopra, Cody Lees, & Meghan Kestner) * S3: E7: Writing for Purpose and Advocacy feat. Bryn Orum, J.J. Burry, John Warner, Stephanie Hurt, & Dr. Richard Wilkinson
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I’ve always been perplexed by school lunch. It’s sort of taken as a part of school: a fairly bland looking, processed, mess that students deal with during the school day. Michael Moore in Where to Invade Next how ridiculous it was that the United States spends, on average, much more than other countries lunch programs, while not even serving fresh food.
It’s not uncommon to view any school’s lunch menu and see the same questionable offerings: chicken nuggets, french toast sticks, chicken sandwiches, hamburgers. And when I saw an ad for a new book, The Labor of Lunch by Jennifer E. Gaddis - I was thrilled to see an in-depth discussion on why school lunch is the way it is. It’s a chronicle of the history, social issues, and modern movement toward lunch reform.
Gaddis offers an incredibly detailed work. You can read our “book of the month” review here.
GUESTJennifer E. Gaddis, an assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gaddis focuses on a feminist perspective of food politics, with a special focus on school lunch programs.
RESOURCES Gaddis’ Book: The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools via the University of California Press (use 19V3712* for 30% off.) * Jennifer E. Gaddis’ Website * The Chef Ann Foundation * Food Corps * National Farm to School Network
FURTHER LISTENING* E143, Heritage Radio Network - Eating Matters: The Labor of (School) Lunch * E93, Bite: There Is Such Thing as a Free (School) Lunch
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Join Monte Syrie - a proponent of student relationships who operates a daily educational reflective blog at LetsChangeEducation.com. Monte serves as an adjunct professor of education at Eastern Washington University, and as a high school English teacher and department chair at Cheney High School in Cheney, Washington.
In this interactive discussion, we will discuss connecting and relating with students to improve well-being, both from a resource and systemic perspective.
Participants will be posed with these questions, but the conversation will take us on a journey of its own:
What are some practices or systems that get in the way of connecting, or are disconnecting, students and educators?
How can we foster a class/school culture where students listen, learn, and support one another?
How can we systemically change our class/school to support learners and their social/emotional well-being?
We often think of democratic education as student government - where students are sadly often pigeon-held into a glorified party planning committee with very little power. But what if things could be different? First, we could establish democratic norms in our classroom, where students are on equal footing with us to discussion curriculum and classroom changes - where the topics we discuss in class and the assignments that are given are a contract between the two of us, and our job is educators is to support, rather than tell what to do.
Then, what if we build student governments that operated in the school as an actual government? As in, they have a place at the school board. If they don't get what they want, they protest. And they demand things that every human being as the right to....often to the dismay of legacy administrators. Phones? It's their property, let them be used. Dress code? It's part of the first amendment. Emotional well-being? Who cares about grades when people are stressed and anxious?
This issues matter deeply to students, and they should matter to us as well. The people in our classrooms are well - people, they're human beings. And they deserve the same respect that any individual has. Sometimes ,yes, they're students and they may push boundaries or get on our nerves, but they still demand the rights they're beholden to - especially when these rights are needed to navigate our ever-changing world.
Further, the state of democracy in the modern world is dismal, to say the least. No matter the political party, people are unhappy with their representatives. Money corrupts the system and people aren't having their most basic needs met in some of the richest countries on Earth. Despite social studies being taught to every student, voting in the United States is still relatively uncommon and people rarely demand change. Yes, we're seeing an influx of young people taking a stand - but imagine if all our young people were given the opportunity to express themselves and recognize their voice was heard? The world would be radically different - and for the better.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCECarla Marschall, who has worked in various IB programs across Switzerland, Germany, and Hong Kong, and is currently the Head of Curriculum Development and Research at United World College South East Asia in Singapore. Co-author of Concept-Based Inquiry in Action, Carla is an expert at preparing students for a flourishing democracy.
Merrit Jones, who is the executive director of the student-led organization, Student Voice, which in my opinion is the most interesting and exciting organization currently in development. Not only is it run by students, it provides a beautiful website full of exciting resources, amazing student-written articles, and materials for supporting student-led chapters that honestly disrupt the flow of traditional schooling.
RESOURCES* Connect the Dots International (Carla Marschall) * StuVoice.org
FURTHER LISTENING* Podcasts from Student Voice
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This is an audio version of our Summit on October 27th,, 2019.
Starr Sackstein, NBCT is author of many titles including Hacking Assessment, Peer Feedback in the Classroom: Empowering Students to Be the Experts, and From Teacher to Leader: Finding Your Way as a First-Time Leader without Losing Your Mind, as well as an English nationally board certified teacher.
In this interactive discussion, we will discuss how these principles not only are paramount for our students' success, but our own longevity and joy as educators.
How does gradeless learning change the teacher’s role in the classroom?
How can we use self-assessment to not only change our classrooms for student well-being, but for teachers?
How do student agency and voice and choice lend themselves to teacher empowerment and work/life balance?
What other ways can we foster teacher well-being while simultaneously promoting the well-being of students?
Look out for future Summits via Human Restoration Project’s website and social media. Our goal is to host free, quality PD at least once a month!
In this episode, Chris sits down with Michael J Crawford, co-founder of EdSpace Live, a new social media platform aimed at helping teachers connect in a more meaningful way than Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. EdSpace Live is currently in development, with an expected release in November.
EdSpace.Live looks to help teachers connect on a deeper level by having a platform exclusively for them, where they can converse via video chat on podcasts, books, conferences, and more. Within this interview, we talk about:
- How EdSpace.Live is different than current social media solutions.
- What EdSpace.Live will do in order to ensure platform adoption.
- How EdSpace.Live will deal with moderating varying communities of educators.
- The plans for EdSpace.Live’s monetization.
In this podcast, we're focused on student voice: how to engage students, what it means to share power with students, and the possibilities that can occur when we truly let students speak.
It's obvious that this true, just a quick glance at the news and Greta Thunberg demonstrates how powerful young people can be if given the opportunities to be successful. Our job as educators to not hamper that motivation to learn and change the world, and help open up new experiences for students to be interested and engage in.
And it's just just Thunberg or Malala or any young person doing amazing things - it's small scale success and purpose as well. The more people we unite with their purpose, the better society we will build. Sometimes those purposes aren't global reaching, but building a happy, motivated world is a giant, yet legitimate goal we can reach. What else really matters in the end?
However, we all know that school is not a place where many students are engaged in this kind of work. Sure, there are pockets of teachers doing amazing things - and they're often doing these things in spite of the systems and structures they find themselves in. We need to engage students in conversation and take their ideas legitimately, leaving out judgment aside, to truly find ways to transform our classrooms and schools.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEAyush Chopra, a 17-year-old student out to change the world with his organization, SDGs for Children. Ayush has written Shaping a Fairer World with SDGs and Human Rights and hosts the podcast, Shaping a Fairer World.
Cody Lees, a recent high school graduate who was actively involved in leadership activities in school, who highlights his 3rd grade experience in “Action Club.”
Meghan Kestner, a special education educator and Upward Bound advisor whose students share their stories, and who reflects on the need for more human-focused approaches to the classroom.
RESOURCES* SDGs for Children * Chad Hyatt’s Twitter (Cody Lee’s teacher!) * Meghan Kestner’s Blog
FURTHER LISTENING* Shaping a Fairer World with Ayush Chopra * S3: E9: We Got This: Equity and Access in Schools with Cornelius Minor
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This is an audio version of our Summit on September 22nd, 2019.
Sunil Singh is author of Pi of Life and co-author of Math Recess: Playful Learning in an Age of Disruption, whose expert focus is on revolutionizing the math curriculum through philosophical conversation, decolonizing the content, and redefining the narrative.
In this interactive discussion, we discussed revolutionary thinking of mathematics education and how to instill a humanized mathematics curriculum into our schools.
- What does it mean to have a “humanized mathematics curriculum”? How does this differ from the predominant way mathematics is taught?
- How can we redefine what “success” looks like in mathematics, as well as lessen math anxiety and promote wellness in the classroom?
- How can we make substantial changes to the process and curriculum to make mathematics more engaging? (e.g. social justice, real life scenarios, PBL, decolonization)
- Why is it imperative that we implement these changes? What specific notes will you take away from this conversation? What questions and concerns do you still have?
In this podcast, we're speaking with Goddard College, a private college in Plainfield, Vermont with additional campuses in Port Townsend and Seattle, Washington. Goddard is a heavily progressive school with a variety of unique programs - from inventing “low residency” (students attend campus for around 2 weeks, then complete self-directed, purposeful projects) to never giving grades. It enrolls 700 students, 30% of whom are undergraduates. Founded in the spirit of experiential and democratic education, Goddard emphasizes self-directed higher education programs where learners submit their work via learning portfolios.
We talk about the struggles, successes, and experiments of progressive universities, including what makes Goddard different, how we can prepare students and educators for progressive schooling, what types of students make Goddard their home, and how we can revolutionize higher education.
Two of their representatives join us:
Dr. Bernard Bull, president of Goddard College, an advocate of alternative education and author of many books, including Missional Moonshots: Insight & Inspiration in Educational Innovation, What Really Matters: Ten Critical Issues in Contemporary Education, and Adventures in Self-Directed Learning.
Dr. Kumari Patricia Younce, education program director of Goddard College, who has worked in every variety of school as an art educator, whose focus on creativity and progressive practice landed her at Goddard.
RESOURCES* Goddard College’s website * Goddard College’s continuing education programs
FURTHER LISTENING* Leading Learning 137: Bernard Bull
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Today, we're deep diving into ungrading. In episode 5, we looked at the gradeless movement and the pedagogy that surrounds it, and now we're looking at how it's incorporated, and the non-academic benefits of implementing it. To be clear, when I say "ungrading" - I'm referring to the movement away from grades. This doesn't necessarily mean that the class does not issue at grade at all. Typically, this means that grades are as limited as possible, as in one final grade at the end of a year, with opportunities to redo assignments or reach that goal in multiple ways.
Almost every classroom one visits today will have a chart on the syllabus which breaks down grades.
- Homework: 30%
- Tests: 40%
- Classwork: 20%
- Participation: 10%
- With opportunities for extra credit.
First, I don't blame educators for setting things up this way - it's the way it's almost always done. It's the dominant way of thinking about grading. But there are a litany of issues with categorical grades. Does a student who never completes homework really not understand the content, or are they just disobeying instructions to do work at home? If a student never passes a test, but does great in their classwork, are we grading their content knowledge or their anxiety levels?
And further, in addition to all the pedagogical issues with assigning grades, what we're actually grading, and how this affects intrinsic motivation, we're also enacting barriers. When we place these systems within our classroom, we're presenting one more step between us, as educators, working with students to help them learn. Because now, the conversation isn't about helping someone get better, it's about ensuring that the categories are adhered to and scored properly.
This system causes a breakdown of the relationship between all of us. I distinctly remember being horrified in an English class, one of my better subjects, because although I did great on tests and assignments, a huge portion of our grade was participation. My teacher met with me with the advice..."talk more" - which for someone like me is easier said than done. The anxiety and fear I felt within that room meant not only that I'd achieve a lower grade than others, but I simply didn't enjoy the class, nor did I trust the teacher, nor did I learn as much as I could have.
When my Spanish teacher assigned extra credit to make back our points from tests, which I was doing very poorly on, I would always do the extra work - which took a considerable amount of time. I remember turning in one of the longer assignments, only to have it lost by him - leading to an argument that resulted in me receiving a detention.
The point is that when we create systems where there are barriers to learning, we're demotivating students as well as making a hierarchical structure that harms our relationships. The teacher becomes an enforcer rather than a coach. And these experiences are commonplace. Most people have some fond memories of school, but certainly negative ones that harmed them mentally and emotionally. Some of my worst memories are those that happened at school as a result of teachers.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEAbigail French, a veteran public school teacher focusing on sixth grade, whose beginning her journey into ungrading after unrest with the traditional system.
Dr. Susan Blum, an anthropology professor at the University of Notre Dame, author of I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College, who utilizes ungrading in the classroom and is soon publishing a work on gradeless learning.
Dr. Laura Gibbs, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, who teaches mythology and folklore and epics of ancient India . Laura has been teaching these classes online since 2002 which have always been ungraded.
RESOURCES* Alfie Kohn, “Punished by Rewards” (Discussion) * Monte Syrie, Project 180 * Teachers Going Gradeless * Dr. Susan Blum’s website * Cathy Davidson * The Meaningful Writing Project (book/study) * Chapter on Ungrading - Laura Gibbs (from Dr. Susan Blum’s upcoming work) * Dr. Laura Gibbs’ website * Dr. Laura Gibbs’ Course Page * Dr. Laura Gibbs’ Feedback/Mindset resources for students * Dr. Laura Gibbs’ students’ work * HRP’s Ungrading Handbook * HRP’s Grading =/ Assessment Guidebook * HRP’s Gradeless “Why Sheet”
FURTHER LISTENING* S3: E5 - Redefining Assessment by Implementing Gradeless Learning feat. Jeffery Frieden, Aaron Blackwelder, & Nick Covington * S2 Highlight: Adopting Progressive Ed. w/ Alfie Kohn
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Dr. Jessamyn Neuhaus is author of Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers, which releases on September 1st, 2019. Jessamyn is a full-time professor at SUNY Plattsburgh, teaching US history, pop culture history, history methodology, as well as “Superheroes in US Culture” and “The Apocalypse in USU Pop Culture.”
It’s only fitting that I recorded this episode with a D.C. Comics shirt, just after watching an episode of The Boys. Jessamyn and I speak about what introverted teachers bring to the classroom, how we can engage introverted students, the problems with the loud and “inspiring superteacher narrative”, and how embracing nerdom/being authentic is paramount to success.
As an introvert, I struggled in professional development, specifically motivational speakers, who made me believe that the best teachers had “Robin Williams” moments (which we discuss on this podcast!) Certainly, this isn’t to berate those who are loud, inspiring, and engaging - but us “nerdy folks” would not do well in a profession that requires that skill-set. I worry that many educators who choose this path and read certain teaching strategy books will come to believe that teaching isn’t for them - solely because of the false narrative of what “good teaching” can look like. Jessamyn and I dive into this and what we can do to change the narrative.
RESOURCES* Geeky Pedagogy Website * Preorder/Order the Book (West Virginia University Press) * Teaching Struggling Students by Laura Harrison
FURTHER LISTENING* Tea for Teaching 82: Geeky Pedagogy
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Nick and I (Chris) are experimenting with new ways to grow our progressive community. Social media is a double-edged sword: it’s amazing for discovering connections in a way that’s never existed before, but not intuitive for deep conversations. So, we’ve started our monthly Summit! This is an online discussion for anyone who wants to attend.
This is our second discussion, centered around the start of the year. Listen in for upcoming announcements and big deals at HRP! Plus, check out restorehumanity.chat for future info!
ATTENDEES (as recorded)* Nick Covington * Deanna Hess * Shealyn * Terry Whitmell * Terri Broce * Trevor Aleo * Chris McNutt * And more!
RESOURCES* Video Recording * RestoreHumanity.chat * Expo Night Example * StuVoice
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In this episode, we discuss Start It Up: The Complete Teen Business Guide to Turning Your Passions into Pay and How We Fight White Supremacy with author Kenrya Rankin. A graduate of Howard University and New York University, Kenrya is an award winning author and speaker whose work has been featured in Fast Company, Ebony, and Glamour. She’s the editorial director for Colorlines. Further, she’s host of the new podcast,The Turn On (NSFW.)
I contacted Kenrya initially while researching entrepreneurship education books for an upcoming class project, and I was impressed by Start It Up and the message it sends. It’s not just a “business plan book” - it features students from all backgrounds starting business in their teenage years. It’s an easy read and perfect for one’s classroom. However, I was more excited when I learned Kenrya has an extensive repertoire of anti-racist advocacy works, and this connections between the two are fascinating. Listen in and enjoy!
RESOURCES Kenrya Rankin’s website * Parent Teacher Home Visits * How We Fight White Supremacy by Kenrya Rankin and Akiba Soloman * Start It Up: The Complete Teen Business Guide to Turning Your Passions into Pay* by Kenrya Rankin
FURTHER LISTENING* The Short Stacks 15: Akiba Soloman & Kenrya Rankin//How We Fight White Supremacy
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Nick and I (Chris) are experimenting with new ways to grow our progressive community. Social media is a double-edged sword: it’s amazing for discovering connections in a way that’s never existed before, but not intuitive for deep conversations. So, we’ve started our monthly Summit! This is an online discussion for anyone who wants to attend.
We were thrilled to hear such inspiring voices share their “whys”, challenges, and solutions. It’s incredible to hear what work is being done throughout the world, and the opportunity to connect and learn more is so beneficial. At many points, we’re referring to ideas that can be found in the video below, however - the discussion is still valuable as audio.
ATTENDEES (as recorded)* Jessica Packer-Quinnell * Jill Gurtner * Mary Wessel * Terri Broce * Julia Fliss * Trina * Burton Hable * Nick Covington * Shannon * Sybil * Garreth Heidt * John Cagle * Chris McNutt
RESOURCES* Video Recording * Resources Shared * HRP Summit #2 Sign-up (July 30th, 2PM EST)
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In this episode, we discuss We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be with author Cornelius Minor. Cornelius, a former middle school Language Arts educator from Brooklyn, is a leader in equitable literacy reform across the world. We Got This is an incredible work that blends critical pedagogy, equitable community practice, and connections between relationships and research in an easy-to-read and implement fashion.RESOURCES HRP’s Review of We Got This * We Got This* Publisher Page * Cornelius Minor’s Website: Kass and Corn
FURTHER LISTENING* Heinemann’s Author Series featuring Cornelius Minor and Kwame Alexander
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Today's podcast is all about designing spaces for learning. Often, we think of a teacher's role as creator - someone who is making the learning happen within their room. But we can look at this in a more nuanced way. To completely steal Ryan Hopkins-Wilcox's explanation from in this podcast, when we plan an experience, we're already aware of what outcomes will be achieved. We're planning for what's going to happen next and already have each step in mind. In contrast, to design an experience - or space - we're opening possibilities for students to learn in multiple fashions. We have a general idea of where we want to be, but we're side-by-side in that learning experience.
This is an incredibly powerful message that is core to progressive education. We speak about student voice and choice but that's not choosing from preset options given by the instructor. When we say choice, we're referring to a plethora of possibilities that each student has to meet a learning goal. And we want to make that learning goal as broad as we possibly can to ensure that all students are engaged.
I think the thing that excites me most about education is the ability to craft learning experiences. My "why" in education is to find cool ideas, make simple foundations and structures for them to flourish, and pass almost all control over to students to make it happen. Of course, a lot of barriers exist to making the why of our purpose as educators happen.
Some of us get caught up in the systematic barriers to learning - whether they be topics that seem meaningless, students who aren't getting enough support, our lack of free time or pay, or just the general way our classrooms look and feel. And I think many - if not most - students are in the same boat. They may be excited from time to time on their why at school - after all, everyone loves to learn about things they care about...there's just a lot getting in the way.
Walk into most school buildings and you'll find a fairly bland and sterile environment. It may be even prison-like. Lack of funding is partially to blame, but there's also a system of control that manifests itself in having a comatose environment. Make everything too crazy and maybe the students will go crazy? I'm not sure. The fact is that as educators, we have the capability to design learning spaces that tear down the barriers as much as they can be torn down.
Sure, there's a lot of things outside of our control - and sometimes we're working against the best interests of our employer, the state, board, etc. that may have lost their way on what learning is (as they're more concerned about state test scores or upholding the way things were when they were in the school.) But we can continue to press on and design the most open and interesting environments we can.
These learning environments are both physical - the ways things look and feel, as well as conceptual - how our learning is designed.
We have four guests on today that exemplify these ideas - from a superintendent who designs schools to be honestly incredible, to a music educator who's making his classroom equitable and democratic, to an administrator at an International school who's designing experiences for students and staff, to two parents and educators who created their own school to do what's best for their children.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEDr. Pam Moran, superintendent of the widely acclaimed Albemarle County Public Schools and co-author of Timeless Learning. Pam is an avid proponent of progressive education and designing schools that ignite learning.
Tim Fawkes, a high school music educator set on redesigning the classroom as an equitable, democratic space through embracing student voice, choice, and experiential learning.
Ryan Hopkins-Wilcox, an international educator and current assistant principal at the International School of Uganda, where she focuses on igniting learning through well-designed opportunities for staff and students.
Tosha Woods and Natalia Parker, founders of the Discovery Lab, a self-described “micro school.” Tosha and Natalia started this school as concerned parents and community members to provide an outlet of progressive learning to students.
RESOURCES Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools* by Pam Moran, Ira Socol, and Chad Ratliff * HRP Review of Timeless Learning * Pam Moran’s recent TEDx Talk * The Application of Critical Pedagogy to Music Teaching and Learning by Dr. Frank Abrahams * Discovery Lab * HRP’s 1 Page PD: Curation
FURTHER LISTENING* S2 Highlight: Restoring Humanity to....Education (Critical Pedagogy) * S2 Highlight: Timeless Learning w/ Ira Socol
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In this episode, we're focused on advocacy - getting students motivated to speak up for themselves and change the world. We have so many brilliant voices who feel limited to the classroom, not realizing the power they hold. Particularly, we're going to look at how writing instruction lends itself to promoting student voices, featuring a variety of English educators, as well as authors, who recognize how important the Humanities are to promoting a flourishing democracy.
Whenever I've attempted to rally my students up - to get them to stand up for what they believe in - I'm honestly not that successful. Certainly, there's some students who take command and advocate, but most shrug it off. That's not to say they don't care - students overwhelming care about the problems they see in our world...they just don't necessarily think they have the power to change it.
There's so much untapped potential in today's youth - an entire generation of young adults who care about tolerance, acceptance, the Earth, and love. Yet schools rarely, if ever, want their students to engage in political discourse....to fight for what they believe in. It makes sense, given how political volatile the United States is, it isn't an advantageous position to have one's students on the news. However, these issues are core to what students find interesting and important, and seeing that relevance in their work...and most importantly, making the connection that their work is valuable, could literally change the world.
Further, our classrooms are places of "rank and filing", which frankly is just a reflection of society itself. Our "merit-based" consumerist lifestyles don't lend themselves to positive, fulfilling lives, and schools are increasingly intertwined with the belief that success is framed by hoarding money and obtaining the perfect job. With so much focus on purely capitalist gains, it is no wonder that students feel they lack purpose. Plus, our unjust society contributes to most of our "on paper" problems in education - a lack of food, safety, or any safety net for our disadvantaged youth means we'll never find a human-centered education without reforming to make equitable communities. If educators aren't demanding political action to help impoverished families, then isn't all our work for nothing?
The question then becomes twofold: 1) How can we encourage advocacy in schools among our student body, and is that advocacy appropriate? and 2) What is the educator's role in advocating for their students and communities?
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEBryn Orum, director of Rise Up and Write, a summer writing program centered around advocacy in Madison, Wisconsin, who used to teach high school English and further, co-founded Clark Street Community School, who our previous guest, Bennett Jester, attends.
J.J. Burry (Jess Houser), an English educator at a small public school in Texas, who is an aspiring writer and advocate of writer’s notebooks.
John Warner, an author, editor, speaker, and professor focused on writing instruction. Recently, John's work has focused on writing instruction through Why They Can't Write and its companion book, The Writer's Practice.
Stephanie Hurt, an English educator at Brodhead High School in Brodhead, Wisconsin. Stephanie is a teacher leader for the National Writing Project's College, Career, and Community Ready Writer's Program and The Greater Madison Writing Project.
Dr. Richard Wilkinson, an accomplished social epidemiologist, author, and advocate who served as Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham. He is co-founder of The Equality Trust and was awarded the 2013 Silver Rose Award from Solidar for championing equality. His co-author and significant other, Kate Pickett, wrote The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, which both focus on the across-the-board improvements of equitable societies.
RESOURCES* Rise Up and Write (website, Facebook) * Greater Madison Writing Project Medium * Jess Houser’s blog * The College, Career, and Community Writer’s Program * HRP Book Review: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner * HRP Book Review: The Inner Level by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett * Dr. Richard Wilkinson’s TED Talk * NCTE: Introduction to Writer’s Notebooks
FURTHER LISTENING* S2 Highlight: Restoring Humanity to...Purpose (Changing the Focus of School) * S2 Highlight: The Importance of Relationships w/ Monte Syrie
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Unlike our season 3 episodes thus far, this is a standard one-on-one interview! Our guest didn't really fit in to some of the podcasts we're brewing up - so rather than holding onto this for a few months...we just went ahead and released it! I think it's an awesome conversation and I hope you enjoy.
The New Nordic School is an innovative school being built in Finland. Our guest, Brad Kremer, serves as director and informs us about the fantastic opportunities Finnish education provides and what New Nordic School aims to build further upon.
In our discussion, Brad and I discuss:
- What is the New Nordic School?
- What is the current state of Finland’s education system? Why is the New Nordic School different?
- What curriculum can be exported from Finnish schools?
- Is it possible for Finnish schools to be replicated everywhere, even in less equitable societies? As in, are Finland’s educational outcomes due to curriculum or more supportive societal structures?
RESOURCES* The New Nordic School
FURTHER LISTENING* S2: E20: Timeless Learning w/ Ira Socol * S2: E3: What School Could Be w/ Ted Dintersmith
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On today's podcast, we're looking at the gradeless movement. There's a lot to be debated in the education system, but I'm hard-pressed to find a topic so steeped in research as this one. Whether it be motivation, willingness to learn, and even traditional test scores, not giving a grade shows improvement across the board.
There's countless research articles, books, podcasts, psychologists, education experts, and more writing and studying the effects of grades. And every single time, whether it be 1850 or 2019, it seems to support the same outcome:
- Grades diminish motivation and do little to actually provide feedback for students to improve.
- If there is research that supports grades, it's stating that they improve standardized test scores, not necessarily motivate or improve student outcomes.
I challenge you to find data that supports otherwise. I say that not out of spite for those who disagree with the practice, but because I'm genuinely curious if there is any. This appears to be one of these things that's "common sense."
People have thought this way for awhile, even back in Dewey and Thorndike's time. Ironically, grades were intentionally brought into schools as a way to show student growth overtime - a way to open up dialogue between teacher and student - but they've done the exact opposite. Essentially, grades are a shortcut that communicates pass or failure, with many students seeing anything under an A as "failure." And those at the bottom, who receive an "F", are pushed out of our schools - rank and filed to be the "losers" of the education system.
But there's a lot of barriers to best practice, and going gradeless isn't easy. Many districts have gradebook requirements, whether that be simply just giving a kid a grade or even requiring a grade per week. And therefore, many don't even attempt "the impossible." I'm here (with our guests) to show that it is possible! There are educators throughout the world "going gradeless" even in traditional systems. Of course there are various degrees of making this happen, but going as far as possible within one's district for the benefit of their students is worthwhile.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEJeffery Frieden, an English educator at Hillcrest High School in Corona, California, and founder of Make Them Master It, an organization aimed at connecting teachers to mastery-based practice and identifying teacher struggle through a podcast, book, and blogs.
Aaron Blackwelder, an English educator in Woodland Public Schools in Woodland, Washington, and founder of Teachers Going Gradeless, an organization aimed at providing resources and connecting educators who diminish or eliminate the use of extrinsic motivators.
Nick Covington, a Social Studies educator at Ankeny High School in Ankeny, Iowa, who promotes progressive education in his own practice including developing portfolio-based gradeless assessments.
RESOURCES* Make Them Master It * Teachers Going Gradeless * Aaron Blackwelder’s Feedback Report * Aaron Blackwelder’s Soft Skills Rubric * Redefining Quality: Working Towards New Measures of School Achievement by Aaron Blackwelder * The End of Average by Todd Rose * Nick Covington’s Medium * Nick Covington’s Economics Evidence Journal * Grading =/ Assessment HumResPro Resource
FURTHER LISTENING* S2: E18: Innovating Education w/ Dr. Tony Wagner: * S2: E16: Restoring Humanity: Assessment (Gradeless Learning)
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By far the most inspiring thing about living in the communication age is seeing school innovation at work throughout the world. Sometimes we can get trapped in our microcosm obsessing over what doesn’t work in schools - after all, there is a lot that needs changing. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t awesome things happening.
To expand on the word "innovation" - I know that these word can be "fad worthy" - if you will. The education community tends to look at every new initiative as innovative, including those that just do everything most normally do - better. But that's not what I'm getting at here...innovation is taking a risk against the status quo, doing something that little to no other people are doing. It's important to highlight and express these ideas are not only legitimate, but extraordinary - we should celebrate work and be careful of solely critiquing the established system.
In this episode, we’re speaking to a variety of people - from students in high school to business leaders - on what innovation looks like in schools. However, instead of focusing on broad, sweeping topics on progressive education (which lends itself to a lot of banal conversations about “inspiring creativity” or “preparing for life”), we want to hone in on specifics. Each person we’ve invited has a different specialty. Whether it be going gradeless, mastering a portfolio, enabling student/teacher relationships, tackling AI and digital literacy, or scaling progressive education to multiple schools, I guarantee you’ll learn from these conversations!
The expectation isn’t that we jump into our classrooms tomorrow and rapidly change everything based on what we’ve heard here. No - our goal is to have these conversations in order to shift the pedagogical dialogue. There’s not a set curriculum or step-by-step you can purchase, or a podcast that you’ll hear, that will make changes in your school. Instead, developing a mindset of progressive education - hearing these thoughts and bringing your perspective, then (of course) taking action is the only way we’ll see true innovation in schools.
In other words, listen, dissect, question, reflect, and engage in this field. Don’t let time and “that’s just not realistic’s” wear you down. Any measure of progressive education is possible anywhere - our guests on this podcast have been from all walks of life, all stages of teaching, across the United States and many countries. Once you understand what you feel when it comes to what “restoring humanity” means in schools, have the ample research and expert voices to back you up, and form that into mitigated risks you can take, we’ll see more and more communities embracing positive educative change for the souls of our students. After all, that’s the Human Restoration Project’s goal! A one-stop for everything you’ll need: research, resources, pedagogical guides, expert opinions, and opinionated, targeted blogs that actually push some boundaries. Let’s push forward together.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEBennett Jester, a high school freshman at the progressive Clark Street Community School in Middleton, Wisconsin, who blogs and speaks on issues of grades and traditional education at-large.
Ted Fujimoto, the president of Landmark Consulting Group, a business that focuses on scaling, leadership, and redesign, and whose hand shaped the growth of New Tech Network and Big Picture Learning, both of which have seen massive whole-school progressive redesigns.
Deanna Hess, an English educator at Dover High School in Dover, Delaware, who teaches a range of classes including dual-credit courses, where she focuses on developing purpose in writing and reading in what is typically regarded as a traditional setting.
Sophie Fenton, the Head of Education Design at the Asia Education Foundation in Melbourne, Australia, who focuses on promoting intercultural and communicative schools in an increasingly connected world.
RESOURCES* Bennett Jester’s Blog * Clark Street Community School * Rise Up & Write Program (WI) * New Tech Network * Big Picture Learning * Go All Creative * Asia Education Foundation * Foundation for Young Australians * An Overview by Insight.com on the “Intelligent Digital Mesh”
FURTHER LISTENING* S2: E11: Administration, Organization, and Vision w/ Amy Fast Ed.D. * E20: Timeless Learning w/ Ira Socol
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We speak with someone exposed to progressive education throughout the world, a human-centered school in Vietnam, an elementary school teacher reaching out, and two tech-experts leading the way in global communications.
One of the fundamental shifts of the information age is being able to connect globally with barely any limitations. I'm still shocked that I can connect to a classroom in Vietnam - see and speak with the person - and it's almost like I'm there. And that's a semi-normal thing to do.
And I often think about: what does that mean for education? Not only from a communicative standpoint in perspective-building, but specifically progressive education. I know starting off: adopting critical pedagogy in the classroom, giving students projects that weren't necessarily completely aligned with standards, letting students choose what to do each day - those were radical concepts to me that I took away...at least mostly...from books. I was incredibly hesitant to really go "full on" with any of my ideas...until I started engaging online. It turns out, I wasn't crazy - there are plenty of other people tackling and contemplating these ideas on social media and elsewhere.
Our pockets of progressive education - of people who care and reflect on education and the humanity of each person in their classroom - are no longer isolated. And now we can hear stories, see people affected - really it brings to light the necessity of progressive practice. Now that we can see this - visualize it - be supported by it - we have a backing to buckle down and keep at it. We can unite together and see drastic change...and those sails are already in motion. Organically, there is a rallied movement of people taking on what were once insane ideas at most traditional public schools. Everyday I'm so happy to read a Teachers Going Gradeless blog, people tweeting - even debating publicly - the goals of an often-too teacher-centric classroom, or discovering whole new pockets of progressive ed. - like Belouga's social justice centered global education initiative, who I'll be talking to this episode.
The point is - it's a lot more common than I ever thought - and assumedly it's more common than most who attempt it believe. We can do this together - just listen to the voices of this episode and tell me if progressive education isn't here to change the world. And now that we're starting to spread progressive ed. further - we need to make sure it's for the whole world - not just a select few.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEAra Aman, a sophomore at Bennington College in Vermont, a progressive higher education experience. Ara grew up in progressive environments in India and the United Kingdom.
Tania Mansfield, the PYP (International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme) Coordinator at Ho Chi Minh City International School in Vietnam, which is piloting a self-directed education program.
Lisa Liss & her elementary students, located in Sacramento, California, organizing around an experiential project, the aptly named Bandage Project, which seeks to build tolerance and understanding of the Holocaust.
Colleen Mascenik, founder of BreakawayLearning.org, a non-profit organization which connects students and educators with individuals around the world, teaching anything from life under the Taliban to piano instruction.
Evin Schwartz, founder of Belouga, an online platform aimed at connecting classrooms across the world, centered on social impact campaigns.
RESOURCES* Bennington College * Brightworks School * Ho Chi Minh City International School * Bandage Project (donate today!) * BreakawayLearning.org * Belouga.org
FURTHER LISTENING* S2: E19: Educating for Change w/ Kevin Wilcox & Benjamin Goes * S2: E15: Engaging in Social Media w/ Annick Rauch
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Frankly, I’m astonished by how little school systems spend on covering purpose in students’ lives. Where do they see themselves in 10, 20 years? We leave them to the “next step” (either lost and apathetic or in incredible amounts of debt) to figure it out for themselves. How do we go about creating a purposeful society? Is it possible for a teacher to actually make a change? And, in addition, what about our sense as educators in the classroom? What about our purpose?
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEDr. Kendall Cotton Bronk, head of the Adolescent Morality Lab at Claremont Graduate School, Dr. Cotton Bronk is one of the founding/leading researchers surrounding youth purpose-finding.
Dr. John Cagle, a 27-year public education educator who currently serves as Assistant Principal at Jefferson County High School in Tennessee. His dissertation focused on relationship building and academic success.
Skylar Primm, an educator at High Marq Environmental Charter School in Montello, Wisconsin*, a fascinating small public charter school centered on interdisciplinary experiential learning, with a focus on the environment.
*This were mentioned incorrectly during the podcast, sorry!
Elizabeth Martin, an English teacher who recently ventured to a county school after years spent at a large urban district. She has started to document this shift on Medium.
RESOURCES* Adolescent Morality Lab * Greater Good Magazine * Project Wayfinder * Linchpin by Seth Godin
FURTHER LISTENING* S2: E26: Engaging Students with Meaningful Work and Partnerships w/ Zack Jones (Dual School) * S2: E22: Finding Purpose w/ Patrick Cook-Deegan (Project Wayfinder)
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In this podcast, we're talking about "the good life." What is it exactly that we want students to have in their future? Is it a great career, a content lifestyle, a family, solidarity, freedom, respect for one another, a mixture of all of the above? And if we can't agree on that question or at least have somewhat unified goals in getting there, how can education exist to serve that question? In addition, do teachers have and deserve "the good life"?
We've spoken to various educators from across the world, and I hope you enjoy listening to their amazing thoughts and ideas.
Guests, in order of appearance:Steven Gumbay, who has taught for over 40 years, starting in Denver, CO, then transitioning to Taiwan, Zambia, Kenya, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and Ethiopia. Steven has served as a science department chair and as a consultant building secondary, primary, and preschool programs.
Dr. Erin Raab and Nicole Hensel of REENVISIONED and The Future Project. Erin holds a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University, where her scholarship pertained to the question of how we can transform education systems to foster individual flourishing and thriving democracies. Nicole obtained a dual Masters in Public Policy and Education Leadership from Stanford University. You can find their work below. Currently, Erin also serves as the Vice President of Research and Evaluation and Nicole, the Deputy Vice President of Research and Evaluation, at The Future Project, a non-profit organization that aims to ensure all young people can build a life and world they love.
Richard Loeper-Viti, whose progressive practices have transformed his English international classroom. Starting in a top-ranked charter school in the United States, he ventured to Chengdu, China after his wife, a US Diplomat, received a new position.
Anne Connolly, a CERT inclusion specialist and special education primary instructor, who has taught for over 20 years. Anne currently uses her progressive practices in an elementary classroom in Ontario.
Gamal Sherif, who has taught over 20 years in middle and high school, served as a fellow for the US Department of Education, and is an ambassador for the UN Sustainable Goals Project. Gamal has a focus on sustainable teaching practices.
Resources Dr. Erin Raab’s summarized research on education systems design. (full dissertation) * REENVISIONED’s* website * The Future Project’s website * The Future Project’s “Future Camp” sign-up, for students to take hold of their dreams (available across multiple states)
Further Listening* S2: E11: Administration, Organization, and Vision w/ Amy Fast Ed.D. * S2: E12: Trauma, Mental Health, and Well-Being w/ Mandy Froehlich
Want to share your story? We think that educators are experts in their fields and want everyone to engage in conversation. Fill out this form!
Next time: purpose, passion, and developing the future w/ Dr. Kendall Cotton-Bronk, and many more!
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We are joined by Dr. Susan Engel, professor of developmental psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Dr. Engel has authored a variety of publications and books, including The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (not money) Would Transform Our Schools and A School of Our Own: The Story of the First Student-Run High School and a New Vision for American Education, among many more - including her latest book, The Children You Teach: Using a Developmental Framework in the Classroom. Furthermore, Dr. Engel co-founded the Hayground School, a non-profit school focused on experiential learning and the teachings of John Dewey.
In our conversation, we talk about so many important topics:
- Why is “next step” and industry-prep (e.g. “Preparing students for tomorrow’s industries.”) potentially a problem?
- Why is well-being imperative to learning? How does this contradict those who focus so much on rigor?
- How can we convince educators and administrators that progressive policies help students learn?
- How can we enact this research without eliminating standardized testing?
- How can testing (if shifted to other realms) actually help us in progressive education?
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Restoring Humanity are short(ish) segments on understanding a key idea of progressive education. In this podcast, we’re looking at the history, research, and practical application of “purpose finding” in schools. Why would we not explicitly focus on students finding their purpose in life?
All citations are found within this transcript.
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Restoring Humanity are short(ish) segments on understanding a key idea of progressive education. This time, we're tackling discipline! What are the roots of our discipline system, what issues exist, and how can we solve them?
Cited within:
- Heinz-Peter Gerhardt: “Paulo Freire”
- EdGlossary: “Hidden Curriculum”
- Paulo Freire: “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”
- P. Allman: “Paulo Freire’s Contributions to Radical Adult Education”
A script of this podcast can be found here.
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Today we’re joined by Ira Socol. Ira is the public education director of Educational Technology and Innovation, a Design Project Manager, Researcher, a specialist in Universal Design technology, Senior Provocateur, among many other titles. Ira’s latest book, written with Dr. Pam Moran and Chad Ratliff, Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools, explores how maker spaces, project-based learning, and student-centered instruction radically changes schools from assembly lines to a community learning space.
In our discussion, we focus on converting traditional schools to ones that put students first. Often, when we talk about ‘student-centered learning”, we’re really just offering a faux choice designed by teachers. Instead, why not change schools to truly do what students want? Why not completely realign traditional practice to the needs of the 21st century? And what if, despite what everyone may think, students did better on traditional standardized assessment as a result? Ira offers research and anecdotes to help one understand the impact of zero-based thinking and what teachers/administrators/parents/whomever may do to transform their schools to be more human.
Despite some minor connectivity issues, make sure you listen in to this one!
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Restoring Humanity are short(ish) segments on understanding a key idea of progressive education. This time, we're tackling discipline! What are the roots of our discipline system, what issues exist, and how can we solve them?
This podcasts pairs with our resource (which is where most of the researched information is cited) on this topic.
We also cite:
- William Bagley's Classroom Management (1908)
- School Discipline in Public Education (2011)
- For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since (2013)
- How Racial Bias Affects the Quality of Black Students' Education (2016)
- The Trevor Project: Facts About Suicide (n.d.)
- Effective Discipline for Misbehavior: In School vs. Out of School Suspension (n.d.)
- ACLU: School to Prison Pipeline (n.d.)
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Today we're joined by Dr. Tony Wagner. Tony is a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute who has served at Harvard University for over twenty years. Tony has worked in K-12 education as a school teacher, K-8 principal, university professor in teacher education, and is the founded the Educators for Social Responsibility. An author of many thoughts including Creating Innovators, The Global Achievement Gap, and Most Likely to Succeed (documentary now available on iTunes) - Tony has been a perpetual driver of innovative educational practice. Tony has been a prime resource for Michael and I for years and we're always thrilled to show new staff and students Most Likely to Succeed to promote project-based learning and transforming the traditional model.
In our discussion, we primarily focus on the need to change education and hope that's on the horizon - specifically the Mastery Transcript Consortium (of which Tony serves on the board.) Our emphasis on grades, unwavering class times, age segregation, and more have led us toward a stale curriculum which does a disservice to students. Instead, why not flip the entire model by reimagining college admissions?
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For this episode we're trying something new. Instead of having a guest, I'm (Chris) deep-diving into one element of progressive education - offering history and advice to gradeless learning. I tried my best to cover an extensive look at this topic, including - most importantly - the point of why this is needed.
There are many quotes and research provided, here is a list of the resources used:
- The "Grading / Gradeless Learning" category of our research page.
- Much of the historical data (and all quotes) are from "Making the grade" by Jack Schneider & Ethan Hunt (2013).
- We recommend the portfolio tool Seesaw.
- **Mistakenly, I said that Seesaw was free for everything except grading - this is mostly true, but to assign "skills" and organize student posts via tags it is $120/year. A simple workaround is to create folders for skills and have students upload work into them.
- I celebrate the upcoming work of the Mastery Transcript Consortium.
*Also, I stated "Deborah Meiers" as a source for "creative noncompliace." I meant "Deborah Meier."
Much of these thoughts are laid out in text form with specific recommendations for educators in our free resource, Grading =/ Assessment.
I hope this podcast was valuable to you! You can leave us feedback by tagging us on Twitter @HumResPro or contacting us on our website.
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Mandy Froehlich is the Director of Innovation and Technology in the Ripon Area School District in Wisconsin and author of The Fire Within: Lessons from Defeat That Have Ignited a Passion for Learning. This collection of stories from educators describes how adversity is met with strength and everyone grows as a result. Furthermore, Mandy is a Google for Education Certified Trainer, ambassador for Canvas LMS, a keynote speaker, presenter, and PD lead.
In our discussion, Mandy and I (Chris) spoke about the dangers of the stigma surrounding mental health and its specific detriment to teachers and students. Often, teachers are put on a pedestal - being seen as heroic (or for some, godlike) - and facing trauma is both unrealistic to account for, as well as dangerous to the psyche of "teacherhood."
Furthermore, we talk about the steps teachers can take to ensure they are well equipped to deal with trauma in the classroom, as well as simple actions that can have drastic impact on students' lives.
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Sunil Singh was a high school math and physics teacher for 19 years. Before he quit teaching in the classroom in 2013, he had taught everything from basic math for junior students to IB math for honors-level students. He has worked in a socioeconomically challenging environment of an inner-city school in Toronto and at the prestigious International School of Lausanne in Switzerland. His vast experience teaching math in every setting imaginable has helped him become a leader in creative math education in North America. Since 2005, he has given over 50 workshops on kindergarten to grade 12 mathematics at various locations—math conferences, faculties of education, and even the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. In addition to having been a regular contributor to the New York Times “Numberplay” section, Singh works full time as a math consultant for Scolab, a digital math resource company in Montreal, Canada. As well, he travels all over North America as a speaker and promoting Family Math Nights in local communities. He is an integral component of the Global Math Project, and his ambassador designation is helping him communicate the beauty and happiness of mathematics throughout the world. He is the author ofPi of Life: The Hidden Happiness of Mathematics, and his next book, Math Recess, a co-writing endeavor with kindred math spirit, Chris Brownell, will be out in Spring 2019.
This podcast is roughly divided into two parts - the first on current issues in mathematics, the second on what change looks like and its implementation.
Sunil and I spoke about a lot that personally resonated with me. One factor I wasn't expecting were Sunil's opinions on a shift to personal finance from Algebra I and other similar shifts in "relevant math." To me, this was a no-brainer - utilize applied math skills instead of our traditional building blocks. However, Sunil noted that not only are these concepts simple - they don't necessarily reform the issues we currently have. His analogy: instead of rearranging the room of a house, implode it. This shifted my thinking on this concept. Math is much more than I give it credit for - and a math curriculum housed (partly) around justice, love, and happiness seems otherworldly. It's hard to comprehend in a culture that's so logistically focused on math - especially in the classroom. However, I believe Sunil's argument is well-stated.
Near the end of the talk, we highlighted one of the most important notions - can real change happen? How can we make a change now? We offered starting points: "find your tribe" on social media or in your building, try new things and be open to innovation, andfight. If you know what's best practice - you know the culture of your school - and you fight for change, but nothing is done even after organizing and preaching best practice? Then perhaps you're at the wrong place. Seek out a school that embraces what's best for children - a place where your voice is heard. They're out there in increasing numbers. Change in education is more than complaining, it's about taking action.
Sunil advised that all math teachers (or educators in general) watch Dan Finkle's "Five Principles of Extraordinary Math Teaching."
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We're excited and honored to speak with renowned educator Alfie Kohn surrounding his views on progressive education and what steps educators can take to implement his ideas. We spoke about the ideology surrounding Kohn's views on grading and standardized testing, among others: its relevance to today's world and why it's needed.
Kohn has authored an extensive amount of articles on the importance of progressive practice, including his collection of works The Myth of the Spoiled Child, Feel-Bad Education, Schooling Beyond Measure, Punished by Rewards, The Homework Myth, and more. Kohn is well known for his views on eliminating competition such as grading in schools, eliminating standardized testing, emphasizing the removal of automatic (expected) rewards for positive behavior, and truly having a relevant, authentic caring system that focuses on education over content cramming.
You can find Kohn's works on his website, featuring articles, videos, blogs, audiobooks, and more (many for free!). We highly encourage any educator not familiar with Kohn's work to read his collections of works and dig deeper into his lectures on YouTube or via his website.
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Ted Dintersmith is an accomplished entrepreneur - from serving as a top venture capitalist and running an incredibly successful business, to working in our government as an analyst and representative to the United Nations - as well as being an advocate for innovative education. Dintersmith offers a profound, visionary look at changing educational practice to be applicable, relevant, and creative and is well known for co-producing and co-writing Most Likely to Succeed as well as his latest book, What School Could Be.
Dintersmith, in our view, has written a fantastic piece of work that covers all elements of - and most importantly exemplifies - progressive education with What School Could Be. You can read an extensive review on our blog. You can read more about Ted Dintersmith on his website.
If you've read the book and want to discuss more (or just to see what all the fuss is about!) check out #EdCoChat 's upcoming book talk on Twitter on May 10th at 9:30PM EDT.
Also, check out the accompanying video from What School Could Be surrounding (and entitled) The Future of Work. For more information on the exponential growth of AI (and its potential impact on education) check out AlphaGo - the story of a robot that could defeat the world's best Go players.
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In this podcast, Monte Syrie joins us to talk about building relationships with our students. Monte operates a daily educational reflective blog at letschangeeducation.com, serves as an adjunct professor of education at Eastern Washington University, and is a high school English teacher and department chair at Cheney High School in Cheney, Washington.
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