Conceptually Speaking

This week on the show we are trying something new, Trevor and I are rotating co-hosting duties with our core team members from the Learning That Transfers team. This week features co-host Nichelle Pinkney, who is our social studies specialist and currently works as an instructional coach and curriculum specialist for a large school district in Texas.  So this conversation was pretty special. We ha...

Today’s episode of Conceptually Speaking features Michael Weingarth, founder of Pillars of Learning neuropsychological tutoring. In addition to his work creating personalized tutoring and test preparation programs for students, Michael has what I can only describe as an encyclopedic knowledge of all things science of learning related. In the few conversations we had leading up to the podcast, and...

This week’s episode of Conceptually Speaking features educational researcher and school leader Brad Kershner. This was a special episode for me, as a few weeks prior to recording, I’d purchased his book Understanding Educational Complexity, and was absolutely blown away by its depth and clarity. I was thrilled when he agreed to join us. There are few people in the field who can parallel Brad’s abi...

This week on Conceptually Speaking, Julie and I chatted with Dr. Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, an assistant professor of secondary social studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction/Literacy Studies at West Virginia University. Before entering into higher education Dr. Mitchell Patterson spent a decade teaching students in DC and Virginia about history, social justice, and activism. Her...

Our guest this week is Dr. Paul Bloomberg, Co-founder of the Core Collaborative and author of Peer Power: Unite Learn, Prosper: Activate an Assessment Revolution. In this personal and impactful episode, Paul shares some of the struggles of managing an educational organization in the age of upheaval caused by COVID-19. Though the particularities of his journey over the last year are unique, we will...

 This week’s episode of Conceptually Speaking is a special one. It’s the kick-off of our Learning That Transfers Book Tour! To mark the occasion, Julie and I were joined by our two co-authors, Kayla Duncan and Krista Ferraro. The goal of this podcast is to share a little bit about the journey we started on together roughly a year ago to bring this book to life. It all seemed routine at the time, b...

This week’s episode of conceptually speaking features author, consultant, and EdWeek blogger and moderator, Peter DeWitt. Despite these honorifics, it won’t take long to realize they don’t matter much to him. In fact, Julie and I had to press him on how he’d like to be introduced. Funnily enough, I’d venture a guess that same humility and groundedness are what makes him such a phenomenal leader. D...

Our guest this week is Vince Bustamante, a social studies consultant and co-author of Great Teaching By Design and the Distance Learning Assessment Playbook. Vince is a member of our extended team and has been doing some great work with conceptual understanding and transfer in his hometown of Alberta, Canada. He’s also been busy writing two stellar books meant to help teachers implement Dr. John H...

Today’s episode of Conceptually Speaking features author, consultant, and eLearning innovator, Dr. Jennifer Chang Wathall. Dr. Wathall, or Jenny, as she requests we call her, brings a refreshing balance of disciplinary expertise and an eye for innovation. We cover a wide range of topics in our dialogue, from assessment to higher education to online teaching, but the connective tissue between each...

Today’s episode of Conceptually Speaking is a special one—Our first episode with an actual student! Though Hannah Testa is a student in Forsyth County, Georgia, that’s just one of many hats she wears. She is also a Founder of the non-profit Hannah4Change, an author, presenter, TEDx speaker, politico, and more besides.  She is one of a growing number of Generation Z activists whose compelling, earn...

This week on Conceptually Speaking Julie and I spoke with designer of wonder, Caitlin Krause. As you can tell Caitlin doesn’t like labels or nouns to characterize her praxis. They are too static—too inert to capture the intentional fluidity of her work. Though her current specialty is virtual reality, her focus isn’t on hardware, it’s on humanity. There are few people who so consciously and warmly...

Today’s episode of Conceptually Speaking features educator, author, consultant, maker, and all around lover of learning, Dan Ryder. As you can tell by his bio, Dan is a bit of a polymath. He writes and presents about creativity, design thinking, maker spaces, comic books, and—as is the focus tonight—improv. It’s those generalist tendencies are what make him such a compelling guest and intuitive ed...

Today’s guests are none other than our very own Nichelle Pinkney and Kayla Duncan. Since the mad dash to distance learning environments last summer, Julie and the team have been hard at work looking to design a suite of courses that would help us spread the word and build a community of practice around learning that transfers. We had a blast designing the Learning Transfer Endorsed Educator Course...

Today’s guest is Dr. Michael Crawford--co-founder of Edspace, a social learning network for educators. As someone with expertise and insight into the evolving nature of education, professional development, and educational technology, he was the perfect guest for our current moment. Our conversation touches on a wide variety of topics, from wellness, to new models of professional learning, to the p...

In this week’s episode of Conceptually Speaking, Julie and I chatted With Joaquin Tomayo, a senior policy advisor at the Education Council, who looks to leverage the science of learning to create more equitable systems for students through research and policy. What I loved about this conversation was Jaoquin’s ability to take some of education's oldest truisms—like the importance of relations...

This week on Conceptually Speaking we welcomed Rafel Angel, a language educator and founder of the Ampersand Consulting Group. To say that Rafael is passionate about world languages is a bit of an understatement. When we first shared the learning transfer mental model with him, he sent back a PDF exploring anchoring concepts in no less than eight different languages. Impressive as that is, what re...

  Our guest this week is Ayo Magwood, founder of Uprooting Inequity—her platform dedicated to sharing resources, curriculum & instructional strategies for teaching about systemic racism & social justice through historical and civics education frameworks. From the moment this podcast begins, Ayo’s deep knowledge of racism, history, and pedagogy is spellbinding. In our overly specialized and...

This week on Conceptually Speaking we chatted with concept-based certified consultant, PYP teacher, and author of Pop Up Studio, Misty Patterson. What I loved about this episode is Misty’s ability to cross boundaries and integrate different practices. Though loose parts may appear to be fun and frivolous to the uninitiated, this episode makes it clear just how complex, nuanced, and rewarding they...

Our guest this week is the current principal of Washington DC’s Perry Street Prep, Rachel Crouch. As the school year looms large for teachers, it’s a time of uncertainty for students, their families, educators, and administrators alike. There’s a lot of discussion around concepts like culture and connection, but actually fostering them in school is much more challenging than defining them or placi...

Our guest this week is distinguished education professor Dr. Yong Zhao. Technically, Dr. Zhao’s work focuses on the implications of globalization and technology for education, but as you’ll soon hear in our podcast, his real focus is on kids relationship with education: how it should evolve, what it could be, and how they should take a larger role in determining what it looks like. For that reason...

Our guest this week is entrepreneur and chief curiosity curator at What If? Curiosity, Matt Murrie. As you can tell by his title, he loves to get curious—about education, about people, about things, events, processes, and well, basically everything. It’s what makes him and his method for curiosity-based learning so compelling. Matt regards curiosity as a natural resource—fuel that can provide the...

 Our guest this week is Daryn Cambridge, a facilitator and experiential educator of non-violent practice. With everything happening in our world today, its a timely discussion. Of course, the issue of structural racism and discrimination isn’t new, but the recent murder of George Floyd has shown a spotlight on the injustices these systems perpetuate. As someone who's devoted their life and ca...

Our guest this week is Maimuna Ahmad, founder of the Non-Profit Teach for Bangladesh. Maimuna believes that education is a tool that can help students succeed the world over, but whose particularly interested in creating more equitable system in Bangladesh. Our conversation today will explore her work towards cocreating schools to achieve those ends and some of the lessons shes learned along the w...

Our guest this week is DesignThinker, Tech & Innovation Specialist, David Lee. David teaches at the Singapore American School, and is doing some incredible work there. On today’s episode, we’ll explore his idea of edupermaculture, which he defines as an approach to education that centers around simulating experiences and directly utilizing the behaviors, strategies, practices, and systems foun...

Our guest this week is writer and entrepreneur Chloé Valdery. Chloe has written for outlets like the New York Times, USA Today, and Psychology Today. Although those are labels that describe what she does and has achieved, Chloe is the type of guest who doesn’t easily fit in to boxes or categories. In fact, one of her creative strengths is to grapple with the paradox and cognitive dissonance that i...