Human Restoration Project

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 , Tea...

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...

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 Pedagog...

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 a...

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, h...

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 chi...

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 i...

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 educa...

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 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: Com...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 l...

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 info...

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 Curios...

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 act...

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...

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 st...

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 clas...

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 wi...

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 m...

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 mat...

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, t...

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 rec...