Edsurge On Air

A mockumentary web series made by undergraduates makes some timely observations about college admissions, and about student life after the pandemic — when students sometimes struggle to make social connections after high school experiences spent on lockdown.

The pandemic has sparked more-nuanced conversations about kids and tech, getting away from simple questions of how much screen time to allow. Now, one researcher argues, it’s time to provide better guidance on how to match tech to what children need, and can reasonably handle, at each stage of their development.

EdSurge recently took a microphone to a university campus and asked several students to share their group project horror stories. Every student we talked to had one. Then we ran them by a teaching expert to get his advice on how to avoid such scenarios.

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.