The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

At this week's Round Table, guest podcaster Vanessa, Inica, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with renaissance woman Charli Kemp , founder of Change The Tune and doctoral candidate in education leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Charlie has tapped into EVERY kind of schooling over the course of her own education and professional career, which enables her to state with confidence tha...

At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Seth Radwell, author of the recently released American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation. Seth is an internationally known business executive and leader in consumer marketing--who left it all to start a bottom up movement to, in his own words, “fight unreason with reason”. Seth helped u...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Jeanette Castellanos , Vice President of the Social Impact Collective at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). Jeanette’s career has been at the intersection of social justice, education, and innovation. We talked about what social justice means today; what it looks like in a professional context, formally and informally; and...

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Eric Torres , a doctoral student at Harvard School of Education, about political identity and the history and future of polarization, which he studies and, come this fall, will teach a course at Harvard on.  Eric developed his fascination with these issues through his undergraduate studies in philosophy, metaphysics, and ethic...

At this week's Round Table, guest podcasters Kenisha, Mateo, and Sharona spoke with Allie Swatek, Director of Policy and Research for the New York City Campaign Finance Board about the recent municipal election in New York and the advent of Ranked Choice Voting. We’ve had 110 mayors in New York. None of them have been women and only one was non-white. This year, that won’t be the case. While we do...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Sherene Crawford and James Brodick from the Center for Court Innovation about their visionary criminal justice reform work. They are both very mission driven: Sherene sees criminal justice as the civil rights issue of the 21st century and James is compelled by conviction that we are all one and thus must drive community ch...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline spoke with two of our O.G. podcasters, Julianna Davis and Riya Mehta. If you haven’t listened to our first season podcasts from last year, we highly recommend you go back to hear their great work.  We reflected on the very unusual 2020-21 school year through the lens of first year college students, discussing the heated political environ...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, Jack, and Madeline spoke with Micky Ayoub about his experiences as a campaign and community organizer and about his recent article Four Ways To Actually Understand Someone You Disagree With . Micky was honest about just how hard this can be to do in practice--and why it’s important to keep trying. We talked about the value of not defining someone by thei...

At this week's Round Table, Madeline and guest podcaster Kenisha spoke with NPR Correspondent Martin Kaste , who has been covering law enforcement and privacy over the past seven years. The big story, as he sees it, is the gap between perception and reality when it comes to understanding the complexities of law enforcement and public safety--and the galvanizing impact of video and social media. Se...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline, and guest podcaster Jack Flanigan spoke with Eric Torres , a doctoral student at Harvard School of Education, about promoting dialogue across political differences but with a switch--this time our guest asked questions of us instead of the other way around. We talked about the state of civil discourse in and outside of classrooms, what it takes...

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Inica, and Madeline spoke with Willoughby Winograd , on leave from his junior year at Stanford serving as Program Director of Deliberations. US at Equal Citizens . Willoughby's work focuses on getting Americans to discuss the issues we SHOULD be discussing in order to restore the core promise of political equality. This includes conducting Deliberative Polls arou...

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline spoke with Andy Danilchick, CoFounder and Director of the Project for Mental Health and Optimal Development (PMHOD) at Penn Graduate School of Education. We spoke about the impact of the last 14 months on students’ mental health and well being--and the conditions that will nurture them on the other side. Andy shared the guiding questio...

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline spoke with three of NYC’s We Power Ambassadors : Caroline Ji, Felicia Trestin, and Nathaniel Valdivieso. They are among 32 Youth Ambassadors chosen from all across New York City to inspire and promote voting and civic engagement on behalf of the New York Campaign Finance Board’s NYC Votes initiative. And inspire they did--we loved hear...

Olivia noted that she’s never experienced teachers paying as much attention to feelings as they have this year because at this most impressionable time, students have also had the least amount of social interaction. So the emphasis on mental health--understanding that learning from the confines of one’s bedroom takes a toll beyond grades and performance--has been important. That said, she undersco...

We spoke with our podcast guest Jal Mehta about whether there is a distinction between progressive education and deeper learning. Jal explained that deeper learning happens at the intersection of mastery, identity, and creativity. Progressive education at its best brings these three things together, but we’ve all been a part of truly terrible projects characterized by shallow learning--think diora...

In our conversation with Jal Mehta, we explored how to present a more accurate and holistic picture of the pandemic student in the college application process. Much like an athlete submits recruiting videos or an artist submits a portfolio, we think there’s real power in students submitting an organized and purposeful collection of their best work to complement traditional assessments and grades.

Our guest Jal Mehta talked about the difference in the depth of understanding that comes when you are DOING something rather than just passively listening or receiving it. In studying a high school theater program, some of the students told him, “When you read a play, you’re the audience; when you put on a play you’re the teacher.” The practice of trying to do something over time helps you underst...

Our podcast guest Jal Mehta of Harvard Graduate School of Education helped us understand what deeper learning is and entails—and what a contrast it is from the shallow, sanitized learning that happens too often in school.

At this week's Round Table, Eliza, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline, Olivia, and new outreach director Tarika spoke with Jal Mehta from Harvard Graduate School of Education, where his work focuses on the modest topic of what it would take to improve American education. We talked about what deeper learning is--and isn’t, why we shouldn’t blame teachers for failing to foster it, why we need to think much mor...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline, and Olivia spoke with Lily Howard Scott , an outstanding educator, curriculum developer, and social and emotional learning coach who has been doing research on learning gains during the pandemic. Recognizing that this year has been full of challenges for students, parents, and teachers, Lily focuses on the creative opportunities that have arisen...

Our guest Josh Zeitz reminded us that if you look at some of the most successful political movements over the last 50-60 years, a lot of them have been on the conservative front. This was an outgrowth of a powerful and emboldened political right in response to liberal consensus that arose from the 1930s-60s, that knew very clearly what it didn’t like and what it wanted, and that has spent decades...

Our guest, historian Joshua Zeitz, reminded us that many government programs that provide social benefits are very controversial at first--Social Security was initially decried as being very socialistic--yet become untouchable and beloved by the American people. He also drew our attention to recent changes in civic participation. Our guest Joshua Zeitz noted that former President Trump, and despit...

Our podcast guest, historian Joshua Zeitz, referenced the world of Arthur Schlesinger, a renowned historian and leading light of liberalism, who popularized the concept of the imperial presidency. He wrote biographies of FDR and Andrew Jackson, both of whom he viewed favorably in terms of how they used executive power to drive popular democratic reform. However, by the early 1970s in the aftermath...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Madeline, and Olivia spoke with Joshua Zeitz , a historian, contributing editor at Politico Magazine, and New York Times best-selling authority of books including Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White House and Lincoln Boys . Josh helped us make sense of the current presidential administration, which is going big and going quick in its first 1...

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline spoke with Jordan Thomas, a 20 year old activist who has done quite a few remarkable things in his first two decades. Jordan served as his high school’s class president, was featured on the news in 2019 for taking an NYC subway to his prom, served as a supervisor at JFK airport at age 19 during the early part of the pandemic, and furth...