Two Pint PLC

Multilingual learners are sitting in most classrooms today. How do we support ELL students’ learning in math, science and social studies while they navigate the language and cultural barriers of their emergent bilingualism? We look at some research on how taking responsibility for our own cultural and linguistic perspective as teachers can help. Later, we discuss another listener recommendation. S...

Standards-based grades are an exciting option for making grades more meaningful. We look at some recent writings on how to avoid some of the most common mistakes in our gradebooks, and then consider how standards-based grades can support some of the best practices. Later, we read some additional work suggested by one of our past authors. Her new work helps us connect our ideas on building student...

Students should drive their own learning. Drew Ising, another biology teacher from Baldwin High School, joins the PLC to discuss how the NGSS framework calls for letting our students take the lead in our classroom. We must guide students as they build understanding and skill, but how do we deal with misconceptions and incomplete understanding without removing their control over the process? Later,...

Social controversy swirls in the public space. Societal tensions carry into the classroom and affect how students interact with each other and the material. Teachers must have the courage to address contentious topics in their classroom, the wisdom to know where their expertise lies, and the resolution to see their choices through to the end. We examine the writings of Dr. Diana Hess, an expert on...

Online education makes learning opportunities available for millions of people who otherwise would have very limited access to teachers, peers, and classrooms. As educators continue to explore all the ways we can use digital learning environments to better reach kids, we must search for ways to make the digital space as responsive and personal as a real teacher in a physical classroom. This month’...

Dr. Heidi Hallman, associate professor of English education at the University of Kansas and author of Secondary English Teacher Education in the United States: Responding to a Changing Context, joins our PLC this month. Patterns in teacher preparation have changed over the last couple decades. Patterns in how teachers are trained to use standards, leverage technology and support diverse learnings...

Differentiation can be a contentious topic. Most educators want to reach all of their students, but the realities of how they can serve the breadth of needs in a classroom can lead to frustration. We consider the state of the national conversation by looking at a paper from Warwick (Contested Knowledge A Critical review of the Concept of Differentiation in Teaching and Learning). It argues that th...

Shannon Ralph, the 2015 Kansas Teacher of the Year, joins our PLC this month. Data analysis is getting increasing attention in education. Data science can have considerable influence over education, especially in online or blended learning settings. How do teachers find actionability in the data while still meeting the tremendous demand of running a classroom five days a week? We’ll consider comme...

Lesson planning and sequencing seem to be ever present problems for teachers and coordinators. Which topics should go where? Who should have control over making those decisions? Curriculum research in an economics course provides some insight into how we should choose our priorities (Transforming the economics curriculum by integrating threshold concepts). As we search for how to create a system f...

Camden Hanzlick-Burton joins us from Washington to discuss the effects of high school students earning college credit before they graduate. Washington has Running Start, Kansas has dual enrollment, and many other states have similar programs. Some new and more detailed measures of Running Start outcomes (How Much of a “Running Start” Do Dual Enrollment Programs Provide Students?) indicate there ma...

Standardized testing is a major concern for teachers, administrators and parents. The problem is standardized tests don’t always mean what they are supposed to mean: 4 Things We Don’t Know About AP Tests (NPR). Misconceptions about how test scores relate to school quality are driving a growing separation between students of financial means and students from disadvantage. In the end, research indic...

Education discussions often focus on how best to serve our students, but as the summer comes to an end we must turn our attention to the realities of our job. Many policies are implemented that are beyond our control and navigating the expectations of the many stakeholders in a student’s education can be exhausting. We’ll consider a number of examples of how external forces are shaping classrooms...

The first group of episodes will establish a foundation of educational philosophy, from which we can move forward. Technology is having a tremendous impact on classrooms around the world. We’re considering what the effects of rapid proliferation of communication innovations may be on student learning. We’ll compare research into how new devices compare to older, more familiar methods with The Read...

Every teacher can only provide influence and options to students; they are the ones who will make choices for what they do and how they strive (or don’t) to do those things well. We will consider some of the most influential research on how humans make choices for themselves, and then more specifically in the context of education. We’ll consider marshmallows from the 70’s, the more recent elaborat...

The first group of episodes will establish a foundation of educational philosophy, from which we can move forward. We’re moving on to the difficult topic of grades, using an article describing one effort to abolish letter grades and percentages entirely: A Proposal To Radically Revise High School Transcripts May Alter College Admission from Forbes. What should a grade represent and how do we as te...

The first group of episodes will establish a foundation of educational philosophy, from which we can move forward. This time we’re talking schema, using the review What is a memory schema? A historical perspective on current neuroscience literature in Neuropsychologia. We’ll explore what makes a schema different from isolated knowledge and how that could inform our classroom practice. Schemas exis...

The first group of episodes will establish a foundation of educational philosophy, from which we can move forward. We discuss America’s Not-So-Broken Education System in The Atlantic, which provides a defense against typical calls to start over from scratch with the American education system. We’ll also consider a recent publication in biology education’s impact in other subjects and what it means...

This is a brief prologue where we explain why we've decided to make this podcast and what you can expect to hear in each segment. If you'd like a brief orientation before you jump in, this is the place to start!