The What School Could Be Podcast

Today my guest is Rob Strain, coming to us from Oakland, California. This is his first time as a guest on a podcast! Working chronologically, Rob has done internships in Botswana, at NASA and at a refugee camp in Philadelphia. He taught in the 1st grade at a Bay Area public school, served in multiple roles at Teach For America, GripTape, the Catalyst Fellowship and at Transcend. Rob co-founded the Inspiration Project and is about to launch a rebranded consultancy called Lemon Battery. And that is just the half of it. Alison Kerr, a partner at Transcend writes: "Rob was able to bring out ideas I didn't even know I had. One of his biggest superpowers is this insane ability to generate ideas across different topics. Then he's able to take all that and synthesize so beautifully. He's got an ability to take complex or unrelated information and make it user-friendly." Editing for this episode is provided by the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music comes from the vast catalogue of music by master pianist, Michael Sloan. Please support this show by giving us a rating and writing a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Today my guest is Brendan McCarthy. Brendan’s resume is complicated, so bear with me. He is currently working on a masters in education at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa. Prior to that, he has degrees from Parsons School of Art and Design and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also taught at Parsons, which is what we are going to focus on today. His undergraduate degree in mathematics is from Columbia University and he graduated as the valedictorian at Gonzaga College High School. Recently, he was a scholar in residence at Hanahauoli School where he developed a remarkable gathering for 217 elementary school kids titled I Want to Know What Love Is: A Progressive Film Festival. And, he is working on an informal degree in surfing, love and fun. Among the zillions of interesting things about Brendan’s life and work as an educator, we note that he was born in, Nairobi, Kenya. Editing for this episode is provided by the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music comes from the vast catalogue of music by master pianist, Michael Sloan. Please support this show by giving us a rating and writing a review in your wherever you get your podcasts.

Today my guest is Erik Swenson, the Student Service Coordinator and Project Teacher at West Hawaii Explorations Academy PCS, fondly known in Hawaiʻi as WHEA. WHEA began when a Hawaiʻi island high school teacher built a famous solar car team that raced across Australia, the continental US and Europe. From that experience came first a school within a school, and then, in the year 2000, the chartering of WHEA as a public startup, Hawaiʻi Island high school. Erik describes himself as an analytical, data driven critical thinker with a diverse skill set applicable in varied educational settings. He sees himself as a big picture thinker with a bias towards practical action. He endorses a procedural based theology, loves project-based learning and authentic assessments, and is devoted to student needs and providing equitable access to learning for all. He also describes himself as environmentally conscious with a deep understanding of Hawaii’s aquatic environment gained from years of experience. As always, our theme music comes from the vast catalogue of pianist, Michael Sloan. Our post production engineer and editor is the talented, Evan Kurohara. Please give us a five star rating and review in your favorite podcast app!

So what will you hear in my conversation with Hawaii's Governor, David Ige? Over the next 75 minutes you will hear him talk about his passion for education and his involvement in a start up high school in his home community of Pearl City; how his degrees in engineering and business shaped his approach to appointing members of Hawaii’s Board of Education; his thoughts on No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the Every Student Succeeds Act; the creation of his Blueprint for Public Education; his strong feeling that education is at its most innovative when local communities are empowered to shape teaching and learning and school governance; how Hawaiʻi, as a result of the pandemic, could become a model for learning over distances and remote work, and how he turned federal COVID education relief funds into an innovation grant program (GEER) 37 teams are using to reimagine what school and what education could be. Editing for this episode is provided by the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music comes from the vast catalogue of music by master pianist, Michael Sloan. Please support this show by giving us a rating and writing a review in your wherever you get your podcasts.

Jackie Freitas teaches the natural sciences and agriculture at Leileihua High School on the Island of Oahu in the state of Hawaiʻi. But really, she is doing much, much more than that. She is cultivating, nourishing, and shaping the minds and hearts of the next generation of young farmers, engineers, coders and makers who will move Hawaiʻi from unsustainable mono ag to a more diverse and organic AgTech approach to feeding the local population. Jackie is changing lives, developing a love of place and culture, engaging her young students in real world challenges and student-driven learning and literally helping Hawaiʻi solve its food sustainability issues. She is the evidence that supports any argument that innovation in education comes from the grassroots, from the rank and file, from the teachers on the ground. Metaphors abound, but don't take my word for it. Listen to the episode. Post production editing is provided by the talented, Evan Kurohara. Our theme music is provided by the master pianist and my friend of 40 years, Michael Sloan. Please give us a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts!

Dr. Kristin Alford has a Bachelor's Degree in Minerals Processing Engineering and a PhD in Ferrosilicon Corrosion in Dense Medium Plants from the University of Queensland. Dr. Alford, a futurist, also has a Master's in Strategic Foresight from Swinburne University. Yes, there is an interesting difference between being a futurist and having a degree in strategic foresight, whose connotation has a bias towards action. Most importantly, Dr. Alford is the Director of the Museum of Discovery at the University of South Australia. Stay tuned because Dr. Alford and I are going to take you on a magical mystery tour that dives deep into what learning could be. This episode was edited by the talented, Evan Kurohara. Our theme music is by the master pianist, Michael Sloan. To support this show, please give us a rating and review in your favorite podcast app.

My guest today is Parul Punjabi Jagdish, who came onto my radar screen because of a talk he gave in Las Vegas attended by one of my previous guests, Robert Landau. Currently, Parul is the CEO of AIME Mentoring, Inc. (USA), a global movement founded in Australia. Parul’s resume is long, and deep. So what is AIME Mentoring? In 2004, AIME founder Jack Bancroft sketched an idea of a social network for good, one that connected university students as mentors with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students in Australia, building bridges between two different groups, to lead to educational equity, exchanges of worth and value, and for the mentors a deeper connection to a different lived experience. To learn more, dive into the episode! My editor is the talented Evan Kurohara. Theme and interlude music is provided by master pianist, Michael Sloan. If you love these episodes, please give our series a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts.

In his 21 years at Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School, Kevin Matsunaga has taught over a thousand students how to use cameras and editing software, and how to conduct interviews and tell stories. He emphasizes that the digital media program also teaches students important life skills, like how to work in teams, meet deadlines, communicate effectively and solve problems. “Our goal has never been to produce that next Spielberg,” he says. “It’s always been to just give them opportunities that they would never have had in a regular classroom.” Says Aaron Schorn, “Being a teacher in this world is being a jazz musician. You know your standards, you know how to perform, and then you just free form it based on your student population." Schorn co-founded Nalukai Academy Startup Camp, a free 10-day technology, entrepreneurship and design boarding camp offered to high school students each summer on Hawai‘i Island and O‘ahu. Experienced entrepreneurs serve as consultants, and students develop products, business plans and investor pitches. In 2017, David Sun-Miyashiro started HawaiiKidsCAN, a local advocacy chapter of the 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now, which advocates for equitable learning environments for all students. Phoenix Maimiti Valentine, a former participant in a HawaiiKidsCAN program and now a board member, says Sun-Miyashiro mentored her to speak to her Wai‘anae Coast community about better education. “David was supporting me the whole time,” she says. “He’s one of the most amazing teachers I’ve met. He encourages students and he pushes them to do things that maybe they hadn’t imagined they could do. He urges them to share their voice and their opinion with the world.”

Ashley Mika Ito-Macion is an educator at Kanoelani Elementary School in Honolulu and a proud Hawai‘i State Teacher Fellow. She has a passion for helping her colleagues and working to create opportunities for educator growth. Ashley also was recently awarded Teacher of the Year for the Pearl City-Waipahu Complex, which is in Honolulu, Hawai'i! She is also the founder of the Hawaiʻi Distance Learning Forum For the University of Hawai'i at Manoa College of Education Ashley writes: This is one of my favorite funny stories. In my senior year of high school, I had to take an extra class. I chose Early Childhood Education, thinking it was the class where you got to take care of a fake baby. It turned out to be a class about creating lesson plans and working with students. I went home to tell my mom that I think I found my passion in teaching. She also mentioned that she wanted to become an educator when she was younger. I got this overwhelming feeling and just knew I was meant to be an educator. Editing provided by Evan Kurohara, music by Michael Sloan.

“Over her years at High Tech High, Laura McBain (now at the Stanford d.School, K12 Lab) did almost every job it was possible to do - teacher, principal, graduate school instructor. She can hold her own in any conversation about policy, standards, school design, school change. But the most important thing about Laura is she is all about FUN! Having it, creating it, sharing it. She never loses sight of the fact that learning has to be fun to be engaging. She wants learners of all ages to have those "WOW, that's amazing" moments. And she makes them happen, all the time.” ~ Larry Rosenstock, Founder, High Tech HighLinks:Educator as Futurist: Moving beyond “Preparing for the future” to “Shaping the future”New View EDU Episode 19: The Role of Failure and Risk in Designing Deeper LearningStanford d.School K12 LabDesign ThinkingLaura McBain: Build Relationships With Students EarlyHuman Bias Is Everywhere in Tech. To Fix It We Need to Reshape Computer Science Education.Laura McBain - Twitter