Human Restoration Project

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 of Teach Boldly.

In this interactive discussion, we will discuss connecting the UN Sustainable Development Goals to authentic projects in the classroom.

Participants will be posed with these questions, but the conversation will take us on a journey of its own:

• How does one become inspired to start a SDG-related project? How can we incorporate student inspiration and voice to the planning process?
• What components work well in SDG-related projects? What tools, websites, or objectives are there?
• How can we take projects into the community to make meaningful, authentic change for the world?

Please see the attached Google Document for all the notes from this conversation, as well as a variety of external links.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 teachers seem to understand this, and a recent analysis by Harvard University seems to confirm it.

Dr. Zhao has written and spoken extensively on how testing and test scores harm students. And he’s done the research and work to back up everything he states. It’s up to teachers - those in the field - to actually make change in this endeavor. There’s a lot we’re up against! It makes all the difference.

GUESTS

Dr. Yong Zhao, the Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas. Zhao was the Presidential Chair and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education at University of Oregon, and a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. Further, he's served as the founding director of the Confucius Institute and US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence.

RESOURCES

• What Works May Hurt by Zhao
• Reach for Greatness by Zhao
• Counting What Counts by Zhao
• The Courage to Be Creative: An Interview with Dr. Yong Zhao
• HRP’s Primer for Human-Centric (Progressive) Education

FURTHER LISTENING

• FreshEd #79: What Works (May) Hurt w/ Dr. Yong Zhao
• ReImagine Schools: Global Competence with Dr. Yong Zhao

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Curiosity in Childhood and The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness, Not Money, Would Transform Our Schools. Further, Dr. Engel is co-founder and educational advisor to the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, NY.

In this interactive discussion, we’ll talk the importance of research and dissect how to analyze research results as well as revamping teacher professional development models.

*Apologies for the relatively low audio quality. First time we’ve recorded on Jitsi!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 students to improve well-being, both from a resource and systemic perspective.

Participants will be posed with these questions, but the conversation will take us on a journey of its own:

What are some practices or systems that get in the way of connecting, or are disconnecting, students and educators?

How can we foster a class/school culture where students listen, learn, and support one another?

How can we systemically change our class/school to support learners and their social/emotional well-being?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The story my guest will tell today is of her experience growing up and teaching in Memphis, Tennessee before finding a purpose-driven career change in - I am not joking - the heart of Transylvania. Emma Sisson is the School Director of The Mission School in Sighisoara, Romania.

The work of The Mission, Romania is deeply rooted in the local community in Sighisoara and, as you’ll hear Emma describe it, homebase is an 80,000 sq ft abandoned Soviet textile mill where staff live, work, house a K-3 school, and provide family wrap-around services to Romani children and families.

Romani, or Roma, are a historically enslaved and oppressed underclass in Europe, in Romania in particular, where they are often slandered as a lazy, thieving, “gypsy” underclass. In 2022 the European Union reported that 80% of Roma live in poverty, compared to the 17% EU average. 1 in 5 live in households with no running water. 1 in 3 have no indoor toilet. And fewer than half of Roma children attend early childhood education. The scathing report prompted the EU director of Fundamental Human Rights to ask, “Why do Roma across Europe still face shocking levels of deprivation, marginalization, and discrimination?”

Overcoming structural discrimination and prejudice against Roma people is a key part of The Mission’s mission. The Mission School also works to preserve Roma values and language in the context of education, expressed as a preference for family apprenticeships, experiential hands-on learning, and a rich oral tradition, that have historically put them at odds with the priorities of institutional school-based literacies.

On the other side of the Atlantic, The Mission international is currently recovering from a devastating fire that destroyed their entire campus headquarters in Tijuana, Mexico that served over 500 at-risk youth, so if you’d like to learn more and donate to help support Emma’s work in Romania and rebuild the Tijuana campus, you can do that at themissioninc - that’s the mission eye-enn-see - dot org

https://www.themissioninc.org/

You can reach Emma @ [email protected]

Amazon Book Wishlist

Amazon Supplies Wishlist

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.