Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators

What happens when a reader's first friends are characters in a book? Author Claribel A. Ortega joins Tricia to talk about the Witchlings series and the connections readers build through stories. She shares how gaming shaped her worldbuilding, why fantasy gives us room to explore frightening questions, and what young readers have taught her about loneliness, anger, and belonging. The conversation a...

What can picture books teach us about helping children feel heard—and learning to ask for help ourselves? Author and illustrator Christy Mandin returns to explore Millie Fleur's Pumpkin Problem and Millie Fleur's Worst Day Ever . Through her imaginative characters, Christy opens up conversations about creativity, community, and respecting children's emotional experiences. Together, we consider why...

What can a horror novel teach us about friendship—and why might surviving together be its most hopeful message? Author Ryan La Sala joins Tricia Friedman to explore the queer horror of The Dead of Summer , where estranged childhood friends must decide whether they can hold onto one another when disaster strikes. Their conversation moves beyond the scares to examine representation, found family, gr...

What does it take to build a firm around the needs of people facing some of life's most difficult circumstances? Tricia welcomes the founder of USA4ALL to explore the purpose behind its work, including serving survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. The conversation begins with the firm's origin story and the question of what makes its approach distinctive. For educators and communit...

What if your next assessment asked students to pitch a board game—and explain when they chose to use AI? In this episode, Tricia Friedman explores how game design can bring together research, persuasive writing, creativity, collaboration, and AI literacy. The central challenge: help students make thoughtful decisions about where AI supports their learning and where they want to work without it. Yo...

What happens when the cost of healthcare forces someone to delay a doctor's visit, skip a prescription, or take on debt? Tricia Friedman welcomes Dr. Camille Busette, executive vice president of Programs at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to discuss One Nation, Overcharged . The nationwide campaign brings people together to call for more affordable healthcare. The challenge is widespread, but...

School districts are reaching a turning point in how they manage classroom technology. After years of rapid device adoption and policies that often responded to one risk at a time, leaders are asking a harder question: How can schools protect students from cyberbullying, data theft, AI-enabled scams, distraction and online harm without cutting them off from the learning, creativity and connection...

Uncle John's All-Knowing Bathroom Reader, Curiosity, and the Weirdness of Human History Brian Boone joins the show to talk about why the world has always been weird—not just now. The conversation ranges from animal history and television oddities to fact-checking, collaboration, and why curiosity is the engine behind good stories and human wisdom. In this episode, Tricia and Brian Boone discuss ho...

What if readers and writers received the same attention, celebration, and investment as star athletes? In this episode, Tricia speaks with Super Bowl champion, children's author, and literacy advocate Malcolm Mitchell about his new picture book, My Super Duper Me . They discuss the lasting effect of a few encouraging words, the role librarians can play in helping children see their own possibiliti...

What do young people understand that adults mistakenly believe they have hidden from them? Award-winning author Tiffany D. Jackson returns to the podcast to discuss Ghost in the Night , her haunting middle-grade novel set against the ghost tours, buried histories, and complicated beauty of Savannah, Georgia. Tiffany invites educators to take young readers—and their capacity to confront difficult s...

When Salamanca City Central School District announced plans to bring a humanoid robot into its robotics program, the story quickly became something else entirely: "A school is replacing teachers with robots." That was never the plan. In this episode, Jeff Utecht speaks with Superintendent Mark Beehler about what the district was actually trying to build—and what happened when an AI-generated image...

What if students didn't simply complete an assessment—but designed an experience for someone else? In this episode of Shifting Schools, Tricia Friedman pitches Jeff Utecht a new approach to assessment for the AI era: invite students to become game designers. Games are memorable, social, challenging, and full of consequential choices. Designing one asks students to think about systems, understand a...

The beginning of a school year often arrives with a familiar message: do more, organize more, and somehow become a brand-new person before the first bell rings. This episode offers a different invitation. Instead of attempting a total wellness overhaul, we explore four small anchors that can help educators, students, colleagues, and families start the year feeling a little more grounded: sleep, mo...

What can ELA teachers learn from a bestselling suspense novelist who begins writing without knowing who the villain is? In this episode of Shifting Schools , Tricia Friedman speaks with Lisa Gardner about the habits, questions, and research behind her novels. Their conversation offers ELA teachers a fresh way to think about character development, suspense, inquiry, and the creative conditions youn...

What can a board book offer a baby who cannot yet speak or even hold it independently? Award-winning author, illustrator, and art therapist Sandra Magsamen joins Tricia to discuss Hello, Baby , her new board book created for children from birth to age three. With bright illustrations, melodic language, playful terms of endearment, and a mirror that places the baby inside the story, the book is des...

When schools picture a student leader, they often imagine the confident speaker, the high achiever, or the student who already understands how to succeed within existing systems. But what about the students who are rarely invited to lead? In this episode, Tricia speaks with educator and author Rachel Thrash about expanding student leadership beyond the familiar few. Her book, Let the Learners Lead...

What happens when historical research uncovers a truth you are not sure you want to know? In this episode of Shifting Schools , Tricia speaks with author Christine Kuehn and her husband and research partner, Mark Schiponi, about Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor . Christine's investigation began with a startling discovery:...

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey just earned nearly $300 million retelling a 3,000-year-old story — so what actually separates imitation from transformative interpretation? In this episode, Tricia makes the case that cover songs are the perfect entry point into the AI and creativity conversation for educators. You'll trace how Aretha Franklin re-authored Otis Redding's "Respect," why translator Emily W...

You know him as Dani Rojas on Ted Lasso. He's also a professional footballer with El Paso Locomotive FC, a filmmaker, and now the author of a bilingual picture book, Fútbol Is Life! / ¡Fútbol es vida! , illustrated by James Rey Sanchez. But before all of that? He was a life insurance salesman who sold nothing for a year.  This conversation is about what happens between the dream and the arriving....

When Alex Campbell set out to teach sociology through true crime, he wasn't trying to catch a murderer. He was trying to make the stakes real.  Nine  years  later,  his  high  school  students  in  Appalachia  have  restored  names  to  victims  of  the  "redheaded  murders,"  helped  families,  and  become  the  subject  of  a  limited  series  with  a  perfect  critic  score.  But  as  Alex  tel...

Every team has communication habits, but how many of those habits have ever been discussed out loud? In this episode, Tricia introduces The Shared Kitchen , a free reflection and facilitation tool designed to help teams understand how each person prefers to communicate, receive feedback, make decisions, ask questions, and work through a project. Using stories about getting fired from a bartending...

Award-winning author Christina Diaz Gonzalez joins Tricia to discuss Offside , her new bilingual middle-grade graphic novel about soccer, friendship, ambition, identity, and finding the courage to use your voice. Although soccer brings the characters together, Offside is also a story about young people learning to form their own opinions rather than simply inheriting the assumptions of the adults...

Tricia Friedman shares a real-life story about a flooded basement, an insurance claim, and what it revealed about AI literacy. After a major storm in Ottawa caused basement flooding, Tricia found herself facing the kind of problem many people recognize: too many damaged items, too many documents, too many decisions, and a process that can quickly become overwhelming. But this time, compared with a...

Newbery Medal-winning author Jerry Spinelli joins the podcast for a conversation about writing, perseverance, childhood, and the stories that stay with young readers. Known to many elementary and middle school teachers through books such as Maniac Magee , Stargirl , Wringer , and his latest book, Fifth Grade Top Dogs , Spinelli reflects on the long road to becoming a published author. Before his f...

In this Fourth of July weekend episode, Tricia Friedman speaks with Colin Woodard, director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center, about national identity, civic trust, polarization, and the stories that shape how people understand belonging. Woodard's work asks a question that belongs in every civics and history classroom: What story holds a nation together? Drawing from his...