EdSurge Podcast

For more than a decade, the nonprofit behind the popular storytelling podcast The Moth has run workshops in schools to help students share impactful stories from their lives. Now the group started a spin-off podcast, Grown, highlighting those student stories. Here’s what they’re learning, and why they say storytelling needs to be taught in schools.

A new documentary follows an educator and activist pushing to require schools to offer reading instruction that has been proven effective, calling it a matter of civil rights. But the main subject in the film started out reluctant to participate. Here’s why, and what he hopes comes of the film. This is an encore broadcast of an EdSurge Podcast that ran earlier this year.

A professor of urban education dug into the history of school reform in Philadelphia, and came away with questions of what motivates large-scale efforts to change schooling.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the consideration of race in college admissions has sparked a strong push to also end the consideration of enrollment legacy in admissions. Here’s what’s behind the push and a look at other ways colleges are trying to encourage diversity in light of the new ruling.

Scholars have taken to podcasting, interviewing each other about ideas and sharing their favorite areas of knowledge. Even when audiences are small, this new way of spreading information to a broader public is challenging traditional notions of what counts as research, and who gets to be an authority.

As colleges think about diversity on their campuses, they need to consider issues of class as well as race. Because especially among Black students at selective colleges, there are many types of experiences, argues University of Pennsylvania professor Camille Charles.

A group of researchers developed a tool that uses AI to test and improve digital course materials. On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, two of those researchers talk about how their project won first place in a $1 million education XPrize competition, and what it says about how to best use AI in education.

A Drexel University professor has been researching how to make children’s media more inclusive. And lately he’s been putting his ideas into practice as a creative producer of a new animated show on PBS for 3- to 6-year-olds.

“Why do some schools get better quickly, and others get stuck?” That question drove MIT professor of digital media Justin Reich to write a new book about what he’s learned as a teacher, edtech consultant and professor about making small regular improvements.

When their school implemented a new policy requiring students to lock their phones in pouches during the school day, the students had some concerns. This week on the EdSurge Podcast, we share an episode of the student-produced Miseducation podcast that looks at the pros and cons of this unusual new approach to managing smartphone use at schools.

Since the pandemic, more professors are reporting they’re having trouble connecting with their students. That’s according to Bonni Stachowiak, dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California and host of the weekly podcast Teaching in Higher Ed. She shares other trends she’s seeing in teaching, and ways instructors are overcoming them.

It’s important to nurture philosophical thinking in kids throughout school and college. So argues a philosophy professor who wrote a book that highlights the natural tendencies of kids to think like philosophers. When big, important questions arise, he says, parents and educators should treat kids like conversational equals.

Professors are finding that they can’t just go back to teaching as they did before the pandemic and expect the same result. It takes more these days to hold student attention, and convince them to show up. Check out part two of our series reported from the back of large lecture classes to see how teaching is changing.

For decades, proponents of open access scholarship have worked to make the research in scholarly journals freely readable to all. Will this moment of AI chatbots accelerate the effort?

In 2015, a video went viral showing a white school resource officer violently flipping over a Black student in her desk and dragging her across the room before arresting her. It sparked a lawsuit against a vague South Carolina law that brings the criminal justice system into schools for minor offenses, and a nationwide discussion about systemic racism in school policing.

A growing number of educators are wondering whether the grading system is hindering students rather than helping them learn. A new book explores alternative methods of marking papers in ways that encourage students to continually revise their work rather than quibble over which letter grade they deserve.

Sometime early in elementary school, kids are put on one of two paths: regular or gifted. Where did this idea come from? The answer goes back more than a 100 years, to a once-famous scholar named Lewis Terman. And it turns out his legacy, and the future of gifted programs, are still very much under debate.

These days teachers need some basic training in a number of fields, including mental health and social work, to be effective in the classroom, argues Stephanie Malia Krauss, author of a new book about the importance of teaching holistically in this time of pandemic and social unrest.

With every new generation of students there’s an effort to understand what’s different about them, and what motivates them as they enter society and the workforce. For Gen Z, a key factor is their skills in organizing on social media and interest in working across traditional partisan divides on issues like gun control, environmental protection and racial justice, argues Timothy Law Snyder, president of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who calls them the “solidarity generation.”

Two longtime professors hoped the pandemic would reset the small liberal arts colleges where they taught. So they wrote a book-length manifesto laying out a vision for making the colleges more accessible — and true engines of social mobility. Three years into the pandemic, they reflect on how that’s going.

A new documentary called 'The Right to Read' follows an educator and activist pushing to require schools to offer reading instruction that has been proven effective, calling it a matter of civil rights. But the main character in the film started out reluctant to participate. Here’s why, and what he hopes comes of the film.

EdSurge visited large lecture classes to get a sense of what college feels like now that COVID is more under control after years of pandemic disruptions. Students and professors say that years of remote instruction—often referred to as ‘Zoom University’—has left many students more likely to get distracted by their devices, or to place less value on class, thinking they can get whatever is happening in classrooms on their own.

Even before ChatGPT was released, AI experts were exploring how to detect language written by this new kind of bot. On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we talk with one of those experts, and others who are seeking to build guardrails to help educators successfully adapt to the latest AI technology.

Experts have described this as a 'golden age' of discovery in the area of learning science, with new insights emerging regularly on how humans learn. So what can educators, policymakers and any lifelong learner gain from these new insights?

A free-tuition online institution called University of the People has grown into a mega-college. Its founder and president says other colleges can learn from the model to drastically cut their costs.

Active-shooter drills are now common at schools and colleges. But the sometimes-intense simulations can be traumatic for some children, and some parents are asking to let their students opt out of the experiences.

Human brains are wired to think in ways that often lead to biased decisions or incorrect assumptions. A Yale University psychology professor has gathered highlights of what research says about the most common human thinking errors into a popular class at the university that she recently turned into a book.

The acclaimed author has a passion for working with students, but it’s one she has trouble putting into words. Maybe, she allows, it’s “like a chess grandmaster might play chess with a really brilliant 12-year-old and come close to losing — the experience is somehow pleasant in itself.”

Romanticized depictions of teaching in popular culture fail to capture the way teaching actually works — and they create an unattainable model that stifles the impact of teachers and professors, argues Jessamyn Neuhaus, who teaches courses about popular culture runs the Center of Teaching Excellence at the SUNY Plattsburgh.

Getting and holding the attention of students is more difficult since the pandemic, according to many college instructors around the country. So they’re looking for inspiration from other sectors — including video game design and elementary school classrooms — to keep lectures interesting.

Many professors are expressing frustration and even “terror” over ChatGPT, the latest AI tool that students may be using to write their papers for them. That has academic honor committees scrambling to revise policies and provide resources to instructors.

Schools are finding better ways to teach recent immigrant and refugee students. A new book by a high school history and civics teacher collects innovative strategies, and argues that getting the issue right is crucial for building a strong democracy.

Professors are finding that they can’t just go back to teaching as they did before the pandemic and expect the same result. It takes more these days to hold student attention, and convince them to show up. Check out part two of our series reported from the back of large lecture classes to see how teaching is changing.

A new AI chatbot can spit out long-form answers to just about any question, in a way that sounds eerily human. Students are already figuring out they can use it to write their essays, and educators are pondering how to adapt.

Is a college degree necessary these days? One father and son exemplify a generational difference when it comes to that question. Both dropped out of college in their 20s. Now dad is back in an online program, trying to finish. The son recently stopped college and isn’t sure if he’ll ever return. Listen to their debate at the end of this reissued episode of our Second Acts series on returning adult college students.

EdSurge visited large lecture classes to get a sense of what college feels like now that COVID is more under control after years of pandemic disruptions. Students and professors say that years of remote instruction—often referred to as ‘Zoom University’—has left many students more likely to get distracted by their devices, or to place less value on class, thinking they can get whatever is happening in classrooms on their own.

These days many teachers are documenting their lives on podcasts, Instagram or other social media. It all adds up to a kind of virtual teacher’s lounge. But as EdSurge Voices of Change writing fellow Patrick Harris II found out, sharing raw details of your teaching life online can bring big challenges, as well as unusual opportunities.

What if you could travel 20 years into the future and visit a model high school of that time? That’s the premise of a book called “Running with Robots,” whose authors paint a hopeful future, though they say it will take effort and vision to avoid pitfalls around problems like privacy and algorithmic bias.

The SAT can feel very different to different students. While it can give any college applicant stress, some low-income and minority students see it as evidence that selective colleges don't want them. Can the rise of test-optional policies lead to a new, more equitable era of college admissions? This episode, part of our Bootstraps series on who gets what opportunities in education, first ran last December.

One of the most selective college scholarship programs in the U.S. could wind down in the next few years if it doesn’t raise a substantial sum to shore up its endowment. While many scholarships were founded and funded by billionaires or governments, this one was started by a first-generation college student living firmly in the middle class. Will she find a donor to help continue the work?

You may remember the announcement one year ago today of a new private university in Texas that hoped to better promote civil discourse and viewpoint diversity—to avoid what its leaders see as a “liberal bias” on most campuses that they say leads to groupthink rather than free and open inquiry. It turns out, this fledgling university, the University of Austin, has been quietly working on raising money and finding land for the campus—and testing out its unusual model.

What if you gathered a group of high school students in New York City, gave them fancy microphones and some training, and challenged them to make an investigative podcast about the issues they cared about the most? That’s the premise of a nonprofit called The Bell, started in 2017 by two former teachers with a journalism background and a belief that one way to improve education is to elevate the voices of students.

People who happen to be good at school and college are often described as ‘smart,’ and our systems tend to reward them with cultural status and good jobs. But what if the key to expanding educational access comes down to rethinking our concept of smarts and who has them? We talk with Freddie deBoer, author of “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice.”

There are many metaphors of edtech out there, and sometimes we might not even realize the metaphor is there. After all, ‘online lecture’ is a metaphor. EdSurge talked with a professor who just put out a book on how metaphors shape our views of education technology.

An evolutionary biologist who studies the physiology of aging has some surprising advice about brain health. And it has implications for schools and colleges—and anyone interested in learning.

What should the college career center look like in this moment of seismic shifts in the job market and the economy, and growing skepticism of whether going to college pays off? We talked with two professors who edited the new book “Mapping the Future of Undergraduate Career Education.”

Longtime professor Cathy Davidson is on a mission these days to promote the practice of active learning. And she says the stakes are higher than people might realize. It’s not just about test scores and whether people learn. She thinks there’s an ethical issue that sometimes gets lost in discussions about teaching.

There's a big difference between being nearly done with college and getting that diploma. In the finale of our Second Acts podcast series, we learn whether the three students we’ve been following finished their degrees, and what the distinction of college grad means to them at this point in their lives.

It’s back-to-school season, but not every teacher opted to return. This week, we listen in on a frank conversation between Jennifer Yoo-Brannon, an instructional coach in California, and Diana Bell, a veteran teacher of more than 18 years who recently decided to leave the profession.

Some big state universities have decided to get into online learning with a big splash, by buying an existing online college that already serves thousands of online students. What does it say about the future of online education, both at colleges and schools?