Silver Lining for Learning

Hosts Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Punya Mishra & Yong Zhao gather to reflect on the past three episodes (#72-#74) and provide commentary.  Episode 79 | Human-Centered Approaches to Education, Philanthropy, and Systems-ChangeEpisode 78 | Designing the Next Education WorkforceEpisode  Episode 77 | The Education We Need: A Conversation with Tony Wagner and Ted DintersmithEpisode 76 | Planning for a Blended Learning Future and then Planning AgainConversation topics include lifelong learning, cognition and biases, and reflection of the education sector.

Many of us are grappling with what it will take to achieve profoundly different levels of racial, social and economic justice in our communities and systems, including education and philanthropy. In today’s episode guests Charles Dukes and Nora Flood from the Wend Collective and Ulcca Joshi Hansen from Grantmakers for Education join for a deep and lively conversation exploring human-centered approaches to education, philanthropy and systems-change. Their conversation will cover five centuries of history; a framework that helps us understand how conversations we are having in education, philanthropy, policing, healthcare, climate change and economic justice are all connected; and concrete examples/practical tips for how to build emergent theories of change and community-based partnerships that center human well-being and maximize the potential of individuals and communities.

Stevenson Elementary in Mesa Public Schools in the Phoenix metropolitan area has successfully transitioned to team-based staffing models school-wide under the leadership of Principal Krista Adams. Mesa Public Schools – the largest school district in Arizona – has made a bold commitment to begin moving 50% of their schools to Next Education Workforce models in the next five years. Dr. Brent Maddin, Executive Director of the Next Education Workforce, at Arizona State University joins us in this episode. The default one-teacher-one-classroom model of schooling is unsustainable for most educators. By providing team-based staffing in every classroom, The Next Education Workforce models 1) provide all students with deeper and personalized learning by building teams of educators with distributed expertise and 2) empower educators by developing new opportunities to collaborate, grow, and advance in the profession.This innovation of team-based teaching began as a pilot in 2019 in one school, and by Fall 2021 the work has expanded to nearly 30 schools across 5 school districts impacting over 260 educators and 6600 students. It plans to expand its model to California and other states with the goal of launching models with at least 50 district partners in the next five years. 

We all want to make changes to education because we all want to have a better education for our children. We all also believe that a better education is not only necessary but also possible. We have different ideas of what education can be and what we can do to bring about the education we want. In this episode of Silver Ling for learning, we bring two of the most influential thought leaders in the world, Tony Wagner, Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and founder and co-director, for more than a decade, of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Ted Dintersmiths, Chairman of WhatSchoolCouldBe.org, and representative of the United States at the United Nations General Assembly, to discuss their visions of education and what can be done to achieve that education. Tony and Ted are co-authors of the book Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era.  

This episode of Silver Lining for Learning will focus on the recent blended learning report Planning for a Blended Future: A Research-Driven Guide for Educators. This report evolved from the collaborative efforts between Every Learner Everywhere, The National Research Center for Distance Education and Technological Advancements (DETA), and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC). Nicole Weber and Tanya Joosten discuss different models of blended learning, its evolution, as well as considerations and possibilities of blended learning.  

Hosts Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Punya Mishra & Yong Zhao gather to reflect on the past three episodes (#72-#74) and provide commentary.  We celebrate the birthday of Professor Dede of Harvard University as he explains the three stages of birthday celebrations and has entered the 3rd stage of celebrating life, grateful to be around another birthday.  Episode 74 | The Push for Equitable Learning in Inequitable Learning Spaces: Taking a Journey to Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and NepalEpisode 73 | In Search of Brighter Days with Night High Schools in Costa RicaEpisode 72 | STEM Education, in and out of schoolConversation topics include mental health in education, young leadership, and direction for future episodes.

In the Global South, the education of those in rural schools is often characterized by the lack of access to adequate teaching and learning resources, inexperienced teachers challenged with teaching overwhelmingly large class sizes, and aiding learners with the limited support systems at their disposal in their home life. This session will highlight stories of creative and compassionate teachers that Khendum Gyabak has worked with in her research in Bhutan and Papua New Guinea. More recently, she has extended her research to Nepal. The common thread of these stories is appreciating the teacher agency of working within myriad educational constraints. Extending this thread is the deliberate application of cognitive empathy and creative thinking to scaffold understanding and foster meaningful learning for rural students. Khendum discusses the intersection of designerly thinking and teacherly knowing in responding to sustainable ways of doing learning and instruction in highly inequitable environments. 

Night schools are a critical and valuable educational option offered to students around the world and yet information asymmetry exists in the role they play in the social, cultural, educational, and emotional development of the students who attend it. Night schools are aimed at adults who did not have the opportunity to attend high school at an earlier age. These adults are from low-income backgrounds including single mothers who often work during the day picking coffee, cleaning houses, selling their wares in fruit stands, or are employed in various factory jobs. During the evening, they attend Nigh School as a means of gaining literacy skills and bettering their lives.Hania Morales Arroyo and Natalia Ramirez-Casalvolone, two experienced teachers from Colegio Nocturno de Naranjo of Costa Rica talk about the particularities of the student population, academics, and her experience teaching English at the school. 

Mary Jo Madda is the Growth & Engagement Strategy Lead for several diversity + education initiatives at Google, and a doctoral student at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. Her work with Code Next, a Code with Google Program provides informal after-school training for high school freshmen of color (Black, Latino/Hispanic, and Native/Indigenous) in the most quickly-growing industries, including cloud computing and data science. Chelsey Roebuck is a mechanical engineer who leads ELITE, a community-based youth development organization that utilizes STEM education as a vehicle to empower low-opportunity students to realize their academic and career potential. He leverages his Columbia degree to create meaningful impact toward addressing STEM education inequality as a means to close the achievement gap and provide opportunities for economic mobility for thousands of youth across the Americas and Africa. Both Mary and Chelsey, recipients of Forbes's “30 Under 30” talk about the importance of social capital and networks to achieve success. The need to model and actively practice diversity equity and inclusion initiatives, creating safe places of belonging, becomes all the more important.

Hosts Curt Bonk, Punya Mishra & Yong Zhao gather to reflect on the past five episodes (#67-#70) and provide commentary.Episode 70 | Lessons Teacher Educators Should Have Learned from the PandemicEpisode 69 | Untangling Adaptive Learning on the Way to Tangelo Park: Taking a Road Trip to Central FloridaEpisode 68 | There’s a New Horizon for Higher Education: Make that Three HorizonsEpisode 67 | Educational Alchemy: Time to Restore, Adapt, Evolve, or Transform?Conversation topics include the next education workforce, rethinking teacher education, and the importance of putting theory into action.