Silver Lining for Learning

In this increasingly diverse and globally connected world, global education and exchange opportunities are increasingly vital. Enter World Savvy, a national nonprofit that works with educators and community leaders for the past two decades that focuses on creating inclusive schools where young people effectively engage in activities that involve extensive problem solving, empathy, and higher order thinking skills. With this World Savvy support, students engage in real-world challenges and in their communities and across the globe. In effect, World Savvy effectively prepares young people to be “future ready” learners. since its founding in 2002, World Savvy has reached more than 808,000 students and nearly 7,000 educators in 45 states and 32 countries. Its programs make teaching and learning real, experiential, and relevant for a changing world. As a result, students acquire the kind of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that not only prepare them for college, career, and life in a global society, but help them identify as global citizens who are motivated to contribute to peace, justice, and sustainability for our world. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

This session focuses on the challenges and opportunities for scaling innovations in the education sector in a context of uncertainty, risk, and ambiguity. Guests Monica Higgins & James Honan provide a brief overview of their work on scaling for impact and will highlight some of the key considerations for building leadership and organizational capacities to ensure sustainability moving forward. The Covid-19 pandemic has presented leaders of education sector organizations with a number of disruptive challenges in the design and delivery of teaching and learning at all levels, from Pre-K-12 through highereducation. The episode discusses scaling strategies for educational leaders and organizations in both high resource and low resource settings, in the US and across the world. More about our guests below the video. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Delete and replace with episode notesProse on the SLL episode page can be used for this purpose - but will need some crafting, since some of the episode descriptions are too long. Hyperlinks can also be found on the episode page but may need curating. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Silver Lining for Learning, Episode 100: Celebrating 100 episodes with guests Dodzi Amemado, Lydia Cao, Gerald Fussell, John Heffernan, Robert Nelson, Priyank Sharma & Danty Yin Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Mechanisms for achieving educational vision with Barbara Means & Jeremy Roschelle Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org

New Zealand North Island: Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogical approach that can hook students into science. In this session, Sutapa Mukund will explain how PBL allows students to explore real-world authentic problems. The problem often drives the learning process as learners are motivated to think about various solutions to the problem. To solve the problem, students are encouraged to work in collaboration with others such as in building and maintaining a communal garden within a school campus. This allows learners to share diverse skills within a team environment. PBL ties in well with project-based forms of learning as learners often work over extended periods of time on a specific project to either solve a problem or design an outcome like a tyre garden, hanging gardens, or hydroponics units. Both problem- and project-based learning approaches are intertwined and encourage learners to master 21st-century skills towards future-focused learning. These approaches allow learners to be bold and curious while challenging them to move outside their comfort zones and adapt to a rapidly changing world. Her chapter in the new book, Transformative Teaching Around the World Stories of Cultural Impact, Technology Integration, and Innovative Pedagogy, edited by Curt Bonk and Meina Zhu, offers a snapshot of both these approaches in a science context.New Zealand South Island: An Urban Concept Farm was established at a Years 7 to 13 college in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand. In this session, the teacher driving the Farm’s establishment and learning programme, Simon McMillan, will detail his development as an educator and the bases for why the Farm has been created. Project-based learning and applied learning in different contexts have seen success in student motivation and engagement. As detailed in this literally ground-breaking chapter in the new book, Transformative Teaching Around the World, this approach also provided the chance for metacognitive experiences to flourish. Moreover, the success of the Urban Concept Farm space underscores the need to challenge how learning traditionally happens in schools. A recent article by Sharon Fowler in Daily Encourager (March 1, 2022), “Urban farm reaps active rewards,” details the program and its successes. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

The hosts discuss the most recent episodes and continue the conversation while trying to reflect on the topics that were covered by various guests from around the world. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Personalization of learning has become a major goal of educational transformation. But very few schools have actually achieved true personalization, which Yong Zhao calls personalizable education in his book Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for All Children. Personalizable education requires flexible curriculum, flexible leadership, flexible facilities, flexible scheduling, and a number of other flexibilities. It also requires schools to give students autonomy for self-determination. In this episode, we invite two school leaders from Australia Peter Hutton and Michael Ha to discuss how they have achieved personalizable education in their schools. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

It is clear that the field of education faces significant challenges today. We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected even while national and global tribalism tears it asunder. A world that is riven by systemic inequities and injustices that deprive many learners of the opportunities they are their due. The accelerating pace of technological change brings with it immense opportunities to expand educational access across space and time and within and outside of standard educational spaces. But we know that these innovations function within historically messy contexts: histories and contexts that have privileged some and marginalized many. Further, we are under-prepared for the disruptions of climate change and the emerging world of work, even as we deal with the personal and societal ravages of the COVID19 pandemic.It is imperative that we as educators build on our expertise, passion and commitment to develop a more human-centered, future-focused view of education and learning.An important and critical role in this will be played by colleges of education. The challenges though are immense and the pandemic has only made the situation more dire with fewer teachers entering the profession and many teachers leaving due to the day-to-day challenges they face.In this episode we will speak with two deans of Colleges of Education (Dr. Carole Basile at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University; and Rick Ginsberg at The School of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Kansas) to share with us, broadly, their vision for preparing future educators, and specifically how they are leading their colleges to respond to these challenges. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Over the past two years, schools have been battling with the pandemic in many different ways in order to provide high quality education to all children. They have responded creatively to the many disruptions COVID-19 has posted to schooling. In this episode, we invited two superintendents, Dr. Christine Ackerman from Chappaqua Central School District in New York and Dr. Chris Kennedy from West Vancouver, British Columbia, to share with us their actions, innovations, and their perspectives on where schools can and will go after the pandemic. More about our guests after the video: Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org