Silver Lining for Learning

Noah Sobe, Senior Project Officer for the Futures of Education Initiative, and his colleagues at UNESCO in Paris authored the Futures of Education report for UNESCO, “Reimagining our futures together: A social contract for education” to appear on November 10, 2021. Discover what is in the report including ideas related to more equitable educational futures, disruptions and emerging transformations, pedagogies of cooperation and solidarity, curricula and the evolving knowledge commons, the transformative work of teachers, education across different times and spaces, research and innovation, building futures of education together, and much more! The UNESCO Futures of Education website is at https://en.unesco.org/futuresofeducation/ Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Life and Learning in the Metaverse, with Adam Seldow and Monica Arés from MetaThe metaverse is envisioned as the successor to the mobile internet — a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world. A key feature is that it will be characterized by social presence, the feeling that you’re right there with another person, no matter where in the world you happen to be. In keeping with that vision, Facebook has a new brand for the company, Meta, to better reflect its focus moving forward. This is an exciting new chapter for the company, and Adam and Monica are excited to help bring learning in the metaverse to life. While the metaverse is still a ways off, parts of it are already here — and even more are on the horizon. This episode will describe work in development to improve virtual and augmented reality as we know them now and the steps that can help realize the full social potential of the metaverse in the future. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

This episode introduces how synchronous hybrid instruction provides learning opportunities for children in under-sourced Chinese village schools. The synchronous hybrid class, built by Project VolunONLINE (支教中国2.0), a nonprofit based in Shanghai, adopts a dual-teacher model with an online instructor and a local classroom teacher. For this episode, we will have Dr. Chaoran Wang, a former voluntary online English instructor and researcher of Project VolunONLINE, and Jasmine Zhu, a teacher educator and content developer of the nonprofit. Chaoran and Jasmine will be sharing their stories and introducing their experiences, challenges, struggles, and hopes of working with rural Chinese children and voluntary online teachers. Dr. Chaoran Wang will also reflect on how, as an overseas language teacher, she made use of the online spaces to provide innovative learning experiences for rural students. She will have a short presentation of some of her experiences with children in one rural school in the program at the start. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

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. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

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. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

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.  Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

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.   Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

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.   Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

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. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

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.  Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org