Human Restoration Project

Today I'm joined by Nick Covington and Zoe Weil, where we're exploring the work of the Institute of Humane Education, which is led by Zoe. Zoe has been teaching "humane education" for over thirty years, and is an established author, speaker, and workshop leader on the topic. The Institute of Humane Education is an accredited program offering robust graduate and doctoral coursework in "humane educa...

Interested in using this opportunity for professional development credit? See our template for administrators . Consider running this event past your administrative team prior to completing. In this interactive discussion, we will discuss what teaching is like during the COVID-19 crisis. Participants will be posed with these questions, but the conversation will take us on a journey of its own: Com...

Today we're covering COVID-19 and how it impacts the education system. Depending on when you're listening to this podcast, you're likely facing your school's physical environment shut down, or soon to be doing so. In Ohio, all schools are now expected to have at least three weeks out starting on Tuesday - and schools are frantically trying to prepare how they'll tackle this shift. Most districts a...

Today we are joined by two fantastic educators. First, I will be speaking with Peter Verdin, who is a "movement engineer" at Future Public School in Garden City, Idaho, which is a tuition free, progressively minded lottery-based school. Essentially, Peter is redoing the way we look at physical education with elementary students, and designing curriculum as these students grow older and the school...

Interested in using this opportunity for professional development credit? See our template for administrators . Consider running this event past your administrative team prior to completing. Dr. Jennifer Williams, is the co-founder and executive director of Take Action Global, co-founder of TeachSDGs, professor at Saint Leo University in the College of Education and Graduate Education, and author...

In this podcast, we are joined by Dr. Yong Zhao, the Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education. Dr. Zhao and I talk about building a movement that ends standardized testing in the United States and how to build classrooms that invoke a student's innate desire to learn. Perhaps the grueling, “rigorous” standardized testing system is actually harming students, not helping? Most t...

In this podcast, we are joined by Seth Coster, the CEO and game programmer at Butterscotch Shenanigans, who have seen incredibly success on their video and mobile games. Best known for titles Crashlands and Levelhead , Butterscotch Shenanigans was founded by three brothers with no explicit academic background in video game creation. Seth studied to become a Certified Financial Analyst, started a l...

In this podcast, we are joined by Brooke Tobia and her two students, Olivia and Avery. Together, they've co-developed and written the book How to Teach Us: A Guide for Teachers Written by Students . Working in a PBL environment, roughly 60 6th grade students between Brooke and her co-teacher researched, wrote, and published this work which is available via Amazon. Within, you'll find slews of info...

Interested in using this opportunity for professional development credit? See our template for administrators . Consider running this event past your administrative team prior to completing. Dr. Susan Engel is a professor of developmental psychology at Williams College, with a focus on curiosity, school reform, and educational research. Her many works include The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curios...

This episode is all about the Sustainable Development Goals , with some specific questions surrounding their implementation. If you're not familiar, the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015 and consist of 17 major problems the world aims to solve by 2030. Countries are working in partnership to solve issues such as ending world hunger, establishing gender equality, taking climate act...

I’ve always been perplexed by school lunch. It’s sort of taken as a part of school: a fairly bland looking, processed, mess that students deal with during the school day. Michael Moore in Where to Invade Next how ridiculous it was that the United States spends, on average, much more than other countries lunch programs, while not even serving fresh food. It’s not uncommon to view any school’s lunch...

Join Monte Syrie - a proponent of student relationships who operates a daily educational reflective blog at LetsChangeEducation.com . Monte serves as an adjunct professor of education at Eastern Washington University, and as a high school English teacher and department chair at Cheney High School in Cheney, Washington. In this interactive discussion, we will discuss connecting and relating with st...

We often think of democratic education as student government - where students are sadly often pigeon-held into a glorified party planning committee with very little power. But what if things could be different? First, we could establish democratic norms in our classroom, where students are on equal footing with us to discussion curriculum and classroom changes - where the topics we discuss in clas...

This is an audio version of our Summit on October 27th,, 2019. Starr Sackstein, NBCT is author of many titles including Hacking Assessment, Peer Feedback in the Classroom: Empowering Students to Be the Experts, and From Teacher to Leader: Finding Your Way as a First-Time Leader without Losing Your Mind, as well as an English nationally board certified teacher. In this interactive discussion, we wi...

In this podcast, we're focused on student voice: how to engage students, what it means to share power with students, and the possibilities that can occur when we truly let students speak. It's obvious that this true, just a quick glance at the news and Greta Thunberg demonstrates how powerful young people can be if given the opportunities to be successful. Our job as educators to not hamper that m...

This is an audio version of our Summit on September 22nd, 2019. Sunil Singh is author of Pi of Life and co-author of Math Recess: Playful Learning in an Age of Disruption , whose expert focus is on revolutionizing the math curriculum through philosophical conversation, decolonizing the content, and redefining the narrative. In this interactive discussion, we discussed revolutionary thinking of mat...

Today, we're deep diving into ungrading. In episode 5, we looked at the gradeless movement and the pedagogy that surrounds it, and now we're looking at how it's incorporated, and the non-academic benefits of implementing it. To be clear, when I say "ungrading" - I'm referring to the movement away from grades. This doesn't necessarily mean that the class does not issue at grade at all. Typically, t...

Dr. Jessamyn Neuhaus is author of Geeky Pedagogy : A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers, which releases on September 1st, 2019. Jessamyn is a full-time professor at SUNY Plattsburgh, teaching US history, pop culture history, history methodology, as well as “Superheroes in US Culture” and “The Apocalypse in USU Pop Culture.” It’s only fitting that I rec...

In this episode, we discuss Start It Up: The Complete Teen Business Guide to Turning Your Passions into Pay and How We Fight White Supremacy with author Kenrya Rankin. A graduate of Howard University and New York University, Kenrya is an award winning author and speaker whose work has been featured in Fast Company, Ebony , and Glamour . She’s the editorial director for Colorlines. Further, she’s h...

In this episode, we discuss We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be with author Cornelius Minor . Cornelius, a former middle school Language Arts educator from Brooklyn, is a leader in equitable literacy reform across the world. We Got This is an incredible work that blends critical pedagogy, equitable community practice, and connections between relationship...

Today's podcast is all about designing spaces for learning. Often, we think of a teacher's role as creator - someone who is making the learning happen within their room. But we can look at this in a more nuanced way. To completely steal Ryan Hopkins-Wilcox's explanation from in this podcast, when we plan an experience, we're already aware of what outcomes will be achieved. We're planning for what'...

In this episode, we're focused on advocacy - getting students motivated to speak up for themselves and change the world. We have so many brilliant voices who feel limited to the classroom, not realizing the power they hold. Particularly, we're going to look at how writing instruction lends itself to promoting student voices, featuring a variety of English educators, as well as authors, who recogni...

On today's podcast, we're looking at the gradeless movement. There's a lot to be debated in the education system, but I'm hard-pressed to find a topic so steeped in research as this one. Whether it be motivation, willingness to learn, and even traditional test scores, not giving a grade shows improvement across the board. There's countless research articles, books, podcasts, psychologists, educati...

By far the most inspiring thing about living in the communication age is seeing school innovation at work throughout the world. Sometimes we can get trapped in our microcosm obsessing over what doesn’t work in schools - after all, there is a lot that needs changing. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t awesome things happening. To expand on the word "innovation" - I know that these...

We speak with someone exposed to progressive education throughout the world, a human-centered school in Vietnam, an elementary school teacher reaching out, and two tech-experts leading the way in global communications. One of the fundamental shifts of the information age is being able to connect globally with barely any limitations. I'm still shocked that I can connect to a classroom in Vietnam -...