Future Learning Design Podcast

What are we learning about systemic change? There are lots of people talking about why we need it, climate and nature emergencies, exponential tech youth mental health crises etc. but how much is it actually happening? By definition, it’s not something that just happens in the education system, so I was really happy to gather together this week with three amazing podcasters and beautiful people wh...

We often overlook sports as a site of learning, but it’s a massive part of so many people’s lives, whether playing, supporting, watching or teaching. And simultaneously, all of life happens in and around the sports arena. It is humanity in our most beautiful and, sometimes, ugliest manifestations. With all of the global sporting events happening right now, I wanted to bring this into our podcast c...

There is a lot of discussions happening these days about the future of university and higher education in general. How does it keep pace with rapidly changing and disruptive technologies? How does it meet the needs of young people and become responsive and flexible enough to generate much needed transformations in research and development, knowledge creation, and capability building? And how does...

A big part of where I see shifts happening in education systems is encouraging young people to get out into the world, into their communities and make a difference to issues that they care about. There is so much learning that can happen in this process. I have shared a few episodes in the past with fantastic people like Cathrine Berger-Kaye, Daniela Papi-Thornton and Zoe Weil, supporting young pe...

This week is a huge privilege to have my good friends Emily Poel and Guy Claxton returning to the podcast in celebration of the release this week of their fabulous new book, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education. It's a really significant book! that lays out, unlike any other, the deep implications of 4E cognitive science that support and strengthen the case for a mor...

If you think about which verbs dominate formal education you’ll probably come up with a list like learning, thinking, reasoning, remembering, knowing, and maybe behaving. Now think about what images come to mind when you consider those verbs, or do a google image search and see what you get! I’m willing to bet that the most common images coming up are of individual heads, maybe with a visible brai...

There are lots of reasons why well-intentioned work, trying to do things differently and shift the way that systems currently operate, often struggle and fail. But one of the reasons that I find most interesting is to look at the "dark matter" or deep codes that are built into our current ways of working. These might be things like the way we do contracts, the way insurance functions, an...

Collaboration, whether it's between young people in a classroom or between institutions across an educational ecosystem, is often seen as an unquestioned virtue. An assumed aspect of people simply working together on a shared purpose, but without much thought given to how it happens in meaningful and deep ways to generate genuinely expanded possibilities for everyone. Rose A. Dodd and her team...

How do we as educators respond in times of urgency and conflict? Not just in teaching, but also in exploring potentially transformative ideas and practices; in such moments of great challenge but also lots of opportunity. I had the huge privilege this week to talk with 3 amazing young people who doing just that in the context of the on-going conflict after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine just o...

Educational leadership is a tough challenge at the best of times, with many pressures from all sides. But particularly now, with so much shifting, high levels of uncertainty, and polarising issues at play, it’s arguably an even rougher sea to navigate. In such a context, my guest this week has done an amazing job of gathering vital insights from 67 amazing education leaders around the world, herse...

This is the first part of a 4-part series exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence is impacting the lives of teachers and young people around the world, through the lens of Anthropic’s recently announced partnerships. In this episode, I talked with Þórdís Jóna Sigurðardóttir, the Director of the Directorate of Education and School Services in Iceland who is exploring the implications of...

This is the second part episode in this mini-series looking into the ways in which artificial intelligence is impacting the lives of teachers and young people around the world, through the lens of recently announced partnerships with Anthropic.  In this conversation, I explored with Karishma Galani the way that Pratham Education Foundation, one of the largest NGOs in India, is integrating AI capab...

This is the third episode in this 4-part series exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence is impacting the lives of teachers and young people around the world, through the lens of recently announced partnerships with Anthropic. In this episode, I explored Teach for All’s thoughtful approach to these big questions with Global Head of AI and Edtech, Stephen Jull. How is collective leadersh...

This is the first part of a 4-part series exploring the ways in which AI tools are impacting the lives of teachers and young people around the world. In this episode, I talked with Kavi Ramburn and Stefan Coetzee from ALX Africa about their amazing work bringing professional foundational competencies programmes to young people across Africa through in-person hubs and online course offerings. They...

This week on the podcast we’re time travelling with the fabulous Professor Keri Facer. How we think about the future or futures makes a difference to the decisions we make in schools today, and Keri has been asking critically important questions about educational futures, pasts and presents for the last 20 years, that are still as important today as they were when she published her brilliant 2011...

I've always been fascinated by questions of religion and spirituality and what they have to offer the educational conversation. Clearly on the big questions of life generally, transformation, meaning, values and purpose they have a lot to say, but educationally we can very quickly find ourselves in the territory of indoctrination. And surely indoctrination is the opposite of good education Thi...

One of the best things about this job is that I get to find out about and share some of the most exciting new developments in education all over the world, sometimes in the most unexpected places. My guest this week, the writer, human rights activist, turned educational entrepreneur Ben Rawlence and his amazing team are building just that in a small market town called Talgarth in mid-Wales. Black...

There aren't many things that prompt widespread agreement from people on all sides of the various educational debates. But whatever your educational stripes, young people becoming better critical thinkers usually gets unanimous support. And, arguably, it's being recognised as increasingly important in a world full of AI-generated content and chatbots pretending to be your friend! So I was...

The following conversation is definitely a wild ride*! It's not an argument often made, but I believe that one of the effects of our industrialised education systems is to create the illusion that the world is full of somewhat fixed and ordered things, that don't move or change much. Of course, we teach our children about orbiting planets, the water cycle or change in historical periods. B...

It's pretty clear from the statistics that there is a huge youth demographic bulge on the continent of Africa. 40% of its population is aged 15 or younger (as of 2021). The population of young people aged 15-24 in Africa is projected to reach 500 million in 2080. But as Prof. Kingsley Moghalu from the African School of Governance said at Harvard University’s African Development Conference in April...

In the current context of ubiquitous digital tech and runaway generative AI, you'd think that a book calling out our collective delusions about digital tools in relation to learning wouldn't make much of a splash! But Jared Cooney Horvath's latest book 'The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning -- And How To Help Them Thrive Again' ( https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/t...

In this final episode of 2025, you'll hear about some of the most exciting things happening around the world for pathways through the upper end of high school from the voices of the young people involved in them. The final years of high school is often the 'business-end' of formal schooling, where we often demand that young people just knuckle down and suffer the "rigours" of...

In this first episode in this Innovative Student Pathways mini-series, I had the huge pleasure of chatting with Monty, Eliza and Lydia, three amazing graduates of the International Big Picture Learning Credential. There are few, if any, other new pathways and credentials that have been as successful in obtaining university recognition for such radical alternatives to the standardised exam factory...

In Episode 2 of this Innovative Student Pathways mini-series, I chatted with Olivia, Farrah and Chrissa, current students at Green School Bali about their learning through their Greenstone projects. Greenstone are a capstone project that is a key part of the ‘living’ curriculum at Green School Bali that is educates young people for sustainability through community-integrated, entrepreneurial learn...

In Episode 3 of this Innovative Student Pathways mini-series, you'll find a fantastic overview of all of the amazing work happening at African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa to build the next generation of young African leaders, innovators, laureates and artists. I had the pleasure of meeting with Ayira, Katleho, Mohamed, Fatima and Maimouna Régina to hear all about the core...