This Week with EdSurge

Taryn Southern is a pioneering YouTuber who these days experiments with how cutting edge tech might transform human expression. She’s recorded a pop album that she co-wrote with some AI code, for instance, and she’s created a digital clone of herself that she can use to make videos for her popular YouTube channel. Here's what she sees coming for education.

As an instructional coach, Jennifer Yoo-Brannon’s conversations with educators have gotten increasingly difficult this year. Rather than coping, she argues that her hope for every educator is to find a community of resistance when they need it. She says what education really needs is for teachers to flock together, affirm each other’s experiences and resist together.

Bad experiences and feelings of disengagement in middle and high school can haunt students even as they enter college. That, plus a number of other factors, explain why millions of students have left college without a degree. In the first episode of a new podcast series we’re calling Second Acts, we hear the in-depth stories of three students who walked away from post-secondary education and are n...

What if schools and colleges ditched letter grades and GPAs? That’s the key question in this episode of our Bootstraps podcast series about who gets what opportunities in American education. It first ran last fall and was out most popular episode of the past year.

Three educators who were part of EdSurge's first Voices of Change Writing Fellowship share how personal, narrative essay writing can help learners and leaders reshape our world.

It’s worth taking a closer look at how the systems we live in -- including our education systems -- make us feel about ourselves and our connections with our fellow citizens. That's one key point in an award-winning philosophy paper by Waheed Hussain, and In today’s highly polarized environment, his framework for thinking about ethics in education seems more relevant and important than ever.

If you ask middle school and high school students these days the most important skills they’re learning, they’re likely to name something they picked up on their own, outside of normal school hours. That’s according to Julie Evans, CEO of the nonprofit Project Tomorrow, who has been studying what she calls "free agent learning" for years—both before and after the pandemic.

Talk of the metaverse is suddenly everywhere, but what does that mean for education? To help us sort through this emerging space, we talked with two guests who have seen more of this VR space than most in both K12 and at colleges. This conversation was recorded live at the ISTE Live conference in New Orleans.

What can today’s activists and educators fighting for equity in computer science and the tech industry learn from past civil-rights struggles in America? That was one question posed during the recent Black Tech Policy Week event hosted by the Black Tech Futures Research Institute. EdSurge was invited to moderate a session, which we're bringing you as this week's podcast episode.

Who gets to learn about computer science in school? Though more schools these days offer CS classes, they’re more common in well-resourced schools than those that serve underprivileged students. Hoping to spark discussions among kids about equity issues in the tech industry, two scholars studying the issue recently made the unusual decision to produce a graphic novel based on their research. For t...

In the last few years, the landscape of media for youngsters has gone through a transformation. Now kids watch videos on tablets and on their parents phones, and there’s been an explosion of content on YouTube and other social media platforms aimed at little ones. One preschool-teacher-turned-kids-show-host worries about the forces shaping the industry these days, and he’s been talking to a range...

Jackie Kim is on a quest to launch a career in acting and stunts, make it big in the movies—oh, and finish her college degree. She’s one of millions of adults who left higher ed before earning the credential they originally planned for. Now she is starring in her university’s spring production of a play packed with sword fights and monsters, learning how to balance risk and safety on stage and in...

This week, we’re digging into this issue of teen sleep, and looking at the latest in the brain science and the policy debate over school start times. Our guest is Lisa Lewis, an education journalist turned advocate who is out with a new book, “The Sleep-Deprived Teen: Why Our Teenagers Are So Tired, and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive.”

A repeat of an episode from 2021, which recently won an Azbee Award: An online course at Concordia University is being taught by a legend of Canadian art -- well, by video lectures he recorded years ago. But a student in the course said he was surprised to find that even though the professor died in 2019, he's still listed as the teacher on the syllabus. What can we learn from this unusual moment...

America is getting more and more diverse. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the makeup of public-school teachers, who are overwhelmingly white. This week, we look at research into new approaches to attracting and retaining teachers of color.

It’s still popular to prize students who have “grit,” who overcome tough odds to succeed. A new book by Alissa Quart called “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream,” looks at why this narrative is so hard to shake—and proposes more community-minded alternatives that could improve equity. We dive into the book in this bonus episode of our Bootstraps podcast series.

A new effort is trying to bring a fresh approach to gifted education, and it doesn't take place in a school building. Instead, it works either as a project-based homeschool curriculum and support system, or as an unusual boarding school option that involves a kind of educational road trip. How does it fit into broader debates about the future of gifted programs?

One big theme in education innovation circles is that the professional world is changing faster than ever, and so schools and colleges have to change what and how they teach to meet those changing needs. For one college in St. Louis, that means experimenting with revamping its liberal-arts curriculum, and even changing its business model.

At a recent education event, two devoted educators debated the question: Is a university degree the worst investment a young person can make? The discussion turned on a bigger question: What exactly is higher education for?

Many classroom environments favor a certain kind of thinker, usually the students who are quick to recall a fact when the instructor asks a question. But that’s not the only type of mind, and it’s not even always the best kind of mind for learning, says Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University who works at translating the latest brain research into practical advice for teac...

The cost of college keeps climbing, and these days colleges are considering all kinds of innovative alternatives to offer affordable options. But one liberal-arts college recently announced a radical new approach that does away with the idea of tuition altogether and instead counts on something else: gratitude.

The false choice between personal growth or a decent paycheck isn’t serving teenagers well. Young people want more than good livelihoods. They want good lives. On this podcast extra, we bring you the results of a year-long research projects into how to better design college-to-career pathways.

The 15-year old who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last summer is no stranger to victory, having previously won three Guinness World Records for very non-academic feats. We sat down with Zaila Avant-garde to hear what's next -- and we challenged her to show off her spelling skills on the spot.

Burned out, tired, demoralized, at a breaking point. Spend time with educators these days in K-12 or higher ed and phrases such as these will come up often. For those in classrooms and for school leaders, the challenge is how to meet the many needs of educators during this time—social, emotional, intellectual and ethical.

What happens when a venture capitalist who funds edtech companies faces off with an edtech critic about what role AI should play in education? We found out, in this discussion between professor Neil Selwyn and venture-fund founder Ryan Craig.