Hallway Conversations

Abby kicks things off for this week’s conversation as it’s “hiring season,” and she is serving on a hiring committee for teachers at her own kids’ school. We also see our students, future teachers that they are, heading into interviews, and know that they are highly sought after! (You might not have heard, but there is a bit of a teacher shortage going on!) All joking aside, in this episode we dis...

This week we are so grateful to have our friend and colleague from the Dordt University Social Work department, Dr. Tara Boer, in on our conversation about students’ mental health. This is a passion area for Tara, and she has expertise from her background and experience as a therapist. She has lots of helpful advice and encouragement about how parents and teachers can help kids with their mental h...

“For the shortest month…February is the LONGEST MONTH.” In this light, Dave brings the question for  this episode: “How can we beat the February doldrums?” We think out loud together, as usual, and share some of our strategies. Some are small things, like just noticing how the days are getting longer. Others are bigger strategies, like dress-up days, or including intriguing projects, or saving a h...

Today’s conversation was sparked by an assignment Abby gives in one of her courses–she has her students write a “reading biography” to reflect on their process of becoming a reader, how they feel about reading, and how their stories impact their reading habits even today. This has us thinking about our own reading biographies, and we shared some of our own stories, including Matt’s love of hockey...

Welcome to Season 6! We are excited to dive into more conversations with you. We begin this episode with a little reflecting on the journey that has brought us to this point; we’re so grateful to you, dear listener, for joining us on the journey. This episode is inspired by the fact that Dave has been working on writing a book(!!!) and we spend a little time celebrating that he has completed the m...

It's a shorty solo episode from Dave this week, as the three of us haven’t been able to get together long enough in the same room to record an episode in the past two weeks! In this episode, Dave shares an old post from his now-defunct blog about the importance of taking breaks. We hope it’s an encouragement to you to embrace the change of pace that comes with Christmas break. We’ll be back with n...

Matt and Dave had a great time away in British Columbia recording our last episode with our friend Darren Spyksma, but it sure is good to be back with our normal trio–we definitely missed having Abby with us! After a little good-natured joking around, we turn much more serious, thinking about the Advent season we are now in. All three of us love Advent! Matt brought along an Advent prayer that we...

Matt and Dave recently had the opportunity to travel to British Columbia for the InspirED Christian Educators’ Conference, and while we definitely missed Abby, we loved having the opportunity to record a live episode while we were there. Regular listeners will notice a dip in audio quality–hazards of recording a live episode in a large room! (Thanks for listening anyway; we think there will be a g...

Matt kicks off our conversation this week by sharing about a book he is currently reading entitled Why Kids Love (and Hate) School. Reading this has prompted him to wonder about whether more kids love school or hate school–and it got us thinking about our own experiences as students and how that has shaped the way we all feel about school, even as teachers. We share our own stories from school, an...

This week: a short bonus episode with more wisdom about teaching the Bible from our friend and colleague, Dr. Gayle Doornbos. After we “finished” recording our last episode, Dave left the mics on and kept recording. Gayle had more wise things to share about faith formation as part of a Bible class. We hope you’ll be encouraged, challenged, and blessed by what she has to say here! A peek behind the...

This week, Abby was not able to join us for recording, and while we definitely missed her, we were grateful to have a good friend from the Theology Department join us, Dr. Gayle Doornbos, Associate Professor of Theology at Dordt University. Gayle teaches a course entitled “Teaching the Bible,” and knowing this, we invited her to join us for a conversation about teaching the Bible as an academic su...

Our question today came from our friend and colleague down the hall, Sheila. She shared with us that she had been listening to another podcast and it prompted a wondering from her: “The parents on the podcast said that it [the parent-teacher conference] was very academic and reporting of scores but they just wanted to know who their child was at school beyond the surface level–they talked about wa...

Thank you, loyal listeners, for joining us each week! You may have noticed that there was no episode in the queue last week. Never fear; we have no intention of giving up on the podcast! But with some changes to responsibilities for two of us this year, we are having a harder and harder time getting all three of us into the studio together to record a weekly episode. So we are planning to shift to...

This week’s episode is inspired by a tweet from our friend, Darren Spyksma that has us thinking about things that are “uncomfortable truths” about education today…and things that we think really need to change about the way we do school. Through the conversation, we come to the idea that teachers and school leaders need to develop an imagination for what could be rather than just focusing on what...

This week, a continuation of our conversation with Dr. Justin Bailey about his new book, Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture. If you haven’t listened to our last episode yet, we would recommend starting there, because we’re going to be jumping into the middle of a conversation here. While this isn’t a “teaching” book…it has plenty of wisdom for Christian educator...

It’s the beginning of the new academic year across North America, and we know that many of you listeners have already launched in, and some are very soon going to. We started classes this week too—lots of newness around! And…we are hoping to try a few new things this semester on the podcast as well. One new thing: we are hoping to regularly start sprinkling in interviews with people we would love...

It’s the beginning of the new academic year, and we are excited to begin again! In today’s wide-ranging conversation, we talk about the joys and stresses of first days, and we share some of the things we do at the beginning of the new academic year to foster a hospitable space and begin building community. We aren’t prescriptive here, but descriptive of some of the practices we have found to be su...

BONUS EPISODE: Schooled! In this episode we connect with some of our favorite Christian school podcast friends and have some fun drafting our ideal schools using peculiar pools to choose from. In round 1 we draft our school's name and motto using 80’s bands and their songs. In round 2 we draft our school's sports teams, colors and mascot using a current pro sports team. In round 3 we draft our sch...

Greetings, loyal listeners! We have had a terrible time finding shared times for recording lately, but don't worry--more new episodes coming your way soon. For today, one from the archives. In this episode, Matt asks the question, “What’s up with all this talk of failure and what do we mean when we talk about ‘failure?’ Is failure truly essential to learning? And how do we reconcile failure when w...

Greetings, loyal listeners! We have had a terrible time finding shared times for recording lately, but don't worry--more new episodes coming your way soon. For today, one from the archives. In this episode, Dave is wondering about positivity, which is typically one of his strengths, but questions whether positivity can sometimes become toxic. We begin by talking about potentially-problematic posit...

Today’s episode was inspired by Dave’s recent re-reading of David Smith’s book, On Christian Teaching. Dave is wondering about the work of imagination and how it connects to teaching “Christianly.” Smith encourages teachers to “see anew”--to reflect on our practices, and perhaps develop more of an imagination for the work of teaching, and the possibilities and potential of how we can help students...

Today’s topic is substitute teachers–people we all celebrate! In our conversation we share about some of our happy memories of working with substitute teachers from our K-12 experiences, and some of the joyful experiences we have had serving as substitute teachers. We also have a few ideas about how to equip substitute teachers, so if you know someone who think could be an awesome “teacher on call...

We haven’t done book talks for a while, and since we have more time to read in the summer…it’s time to share a bit about the things we’ve been reading! We each brought in one book that we have read recently, and share a bit about our take-aways from the book. At the end of our recording session, we realized that though we didn’t discuss our choices ahead of time, they all seemed to “touch” and flo...

Welcome to “Season 5” of Hallway Conversations! We hope you’ll notice a couple of changes; most notably, we have new microphones, so we hope you’ll find the audio quality a better listening experience. But the basic idea of this show is the same: we hope these are meaningful conversations for you to listen in on that will encourage, challenge, and inspire you. Today we have a question from a liste...

Due to some unforeseen circumstances related to our summer travel schedules and other responsibilities, we were not able to get into the studio to record a new episode this week. (Sorry, loyal listeners!) But we have one from the archive: a question from some of our students prompted this discussion about the challenges of teaching today, and how to cope when it all seems like too much. We hope th...