Edsurge On Air

There’s a budding field called the science of teaching and learning, where scholars are figuring out what works when it comes to educating students. But there’s a challenge -- of getting those findings to folks at the front of the classroom, you know, to make sure no one is reading their PowerPoints aloud, or using techniques that don’t connect with students. A new book focuses on how to move these “science of teaching” findings into actual teaching.

Not so long ago, students did most of their learning at school, and maybe while doing homework or during trips to the museum. Now, learning—like the internet—is everywhere thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and chromebooks. Julie Evans, the CEO of education nonprofit Project Tomorrow, spends a lot of time measuring how young people learn and interact with others. As it turns out, what students say they want from their school experience, or about learning in general, can be rather illuminating for those charged with teaching them.

In an usual study on student debt, NYU anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom sat down with more than 160 people—students and parents—and got them to open up their financial books and talk about the toll of paying for college. We talked with Zaloom about what surprised her most from her research, what she thinks should be done, and how she has changed her thinking about saving for college for her own young children.

A new book argues that hope is something that can be taught, and that it is the key to countering today's heightened polarization and cynicism. We sat down with the author, Sarah Stitzlein, a professor of education at the University of Cincinnati, to hear how her own attempts to teach hope have made an impact, and her advice on how to approach the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

A two-minute video made by students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison was meant to promote school spirit and campus unity during homecoming festivities a couple months ago. But some students had a very different reaction as they watched scene after scene of students working and playing around campus, where almost every one of the students shown was white. It's a telling example of issues going on around the country when it comes diversity on campuses—and the struggle to create a climate where diverse populations feel at home on campuses.

Parents are giving up custody of their kids to get need-based college financial aid. That was a headline in August in ProPublica Illinois, and it got people talking once again about the madness around college admissions. In comments on the ProPublica article and in other online forums, though, plenty of people chimed in expressing sympathy for these Chicago-area parents, calling their move a clever solution to an overwhelming challenge facing their children. To these commenters, the real problem is the high cost of college and what they see as unfair rules around how much parents are expected to contribute.

When people think of education, they often picture content knowledge in subjects like reading, writing or arithmetic. But there’s a growing interest in bigger questions—like whether schools, colleges or job-training programs teach the social and emotional skills people need to make it in today’s complex world. For our final podcast of the year, we get philosophical, looking at ideas of what a good life looks like.

If you were fortunate enough to have music education in school, what were those classes like? Musicians and music educators alike say that learning music is so much more than just playing an instrument, or learning about your favorite artists. It’s a window into other disciplines and life skills, and teaches you how to learn and get along.

It's well-known that podcasting is huge these days. But you might not realize how many educational podcasts are out there. By educational, we mean shows that promise to teach listeners some super-focused topic, like a specific period of history or an academic discipline. Today we’re digging into this growing subculture of educational podcasting, and look at how educators are using these podcasts in formal classes, in ways that make a unique contribution to their teaching.

These days working at a fast-food restaurant or other service-industry job often comes with a new benefit—a college education. Well, more employers, including big-names like Starbucks and McDonalds, are offering tuition-assistance to workers, or even letting them take courses for free. This is part two of our two-part series asking how well these education-as-a-benefit programs work? And who do they work for?

A growing number of fast-food restaurants have added free or heavily-subsidized college education options for their workers. But how well do these new benefits work in practice? And what kinds of people do they best serve? In the first of a two-part series, we look at how tech is changing low-wage work—and what one author sees as obstacles to these new education-as-a-benefit programs.

A few years ago, after more two decades in the classroom, Chrissy Romano-Arribito began to experience something that may sound familiar to a lot of teachers: burnout. Or not burnout, exactly, but demoralization. Experts like Bowdoin College education chair Doris Santoro, author of the book “Demoralized,” note that as systemic pressure, such as top-down initiatives or punitive evaluation systems, crowd out teacher autonomy, they feel they can no longer tap into what “makes their work morally good.”

College kids have a reputation for seeking out free food, and that's why any student organizer knows that ordering pizza is a good way to lure folks to a meeting. But for many students, hunger is a more serious problem. Many campus leaders are trying new ways to address the problem of 'food insecurity' on campus—which can impact professors as well as students.

Back in 2005, one of the biggest stories in tech was a push by a group of MIT professors to build a $100 laptop and give them to children in schools around the world. It was presented as a feel-good story that no one could object to. The story of how these laptops grew into a cultural phenomenon, what their educational impact was, and of what happened to them after they faded from public discussion, is the subject of a new book by Morgan Ames, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.

Computing experts love speed races, and there’s an ongoing battle to build the fastest computer on earth. Usually the overall trend follows what’s known as Moore’s Law, with the speed of the fastest computer doubling every 14 months or so. But last week saw the announcement of a new kind of speed record. A team of scientists from Google said they used a quantum computer to solve a problem in less than four minutes that would have taken a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. What could quantum computing mean for education?

In 1995, NASA astronaut Dr. Bernard Harris became the first African American to perform a spacewalk, and he has spent more than 18 days in space. Today, he's the CEO of NMSI, the National Math and Science Initiative, which runs programs designed to boost the number of STEM teachers. We talked with Dr. Harris about his mission to bring in culturally responsive teaching in STEM, and we asked what it's like to go to space (and what space food really tastes like.)

Researchers are making new discoveries these days about how people learn, and some of those findings are making their way onto campus, in the form of new teaching practices. That has Matthew Rascoff, associate vice provost for digital education and innovation at Duke University, excited about the possibility to make wide-scale improvements in how colleges teach.

What does it mean to be a good citizen? That question is complicated by today's digital environment, since today's kids—and adults too—live in both online and offline worlds. EdSurge sat down with one of the foremost experts on helping navigate these issues: Marialice Curran, founder and executive director of the Digital Citizenship Institute. Curran suggests some simple things anyone can do to be a better citizen, both on and offline.

Today we’re talking about teaching using popular culture, and we’re focusing on a quirky TV comedy called The Good Place. The show is led by Michael Schur, who previously wrote for The Office and Parks and Recreation. But there’s an unusual person in the writer’s room of The Good Place—an academic philosopher from Clemson University, professor Todd May—one of our guests today. But can a network sitcom accurately teach concepts like existentialism and the works of Plato and Kant? And how much should colleges use pop culture in their courses?

This week on the podcast we’re talking about news literacy, and the challenge of teaching students to navigate the relentless flow of information they get through social media and websites and YouTube and ... podcasts. Our guest, Peter Adams, has years of experience working with students like Luquin, first as a classroom teacher, then as a college instructor, and currently as senior vice president for education at the News Literacy Project.