K12 Education

K12 Education

Getting Social Emotional About Strong and Resilient NYC Schools with David Adams and Elizabeth Stranzl

David Adams is the CEO of The Urban Assembly and a Member of the Board of Directors for Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Elizabeth Stranzl is the Director of The School Climate and Wellness Division of the New York City Department of Education. The pair join host, Mike Palmer, in a conversation about SEL in New York City schools and beyond. We reinforce why it’s important and share how the research backs it up as we respond to the surprising backlash we’ve been seeing against some SEL programs across the United States.

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K12 Education

Creating a New Way for Children to Learn to Read with Zach Silverzweig

Zach Silverzweig is the CEO and Founder of TinyIvy, a startup focused on helping children learn to read. He returns to join host, Mike Palmer, in a conversation about what it’s been like launching and growing his company through the challenges of the past year. When we first met Zach a year ago, he had developed a program of flashcards and worksheets based on a system that adds marks to English letters to create a one-to-one mapping of characters to sounds to make English more decipherable for young learners.

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K12 Education

Driving Student and Family Engagement with Chatbots

Joanna Smith is the CEO and founder of AllHere, an edtech company improving attendance and student success with mobile messaging powered by AI. Before founding AllHere, she taught middle school mathematics and served as Director of Family Engagement at a charter school in Boston.

Joanna joins Mike Palmer to talk about the problem of low student attendance in K12 and how she and team are building AllHere to create a scalable way to begin to address it. What’s the best way to design an ecosystem that is available 24/7 and allows its teachers to focus on the highest-yield human activities? How has the pandemic impacted this problem? How did the team at AllHere listen to the community to respond quickly to needs around food insecurity? In what other ways might chatbots help improve educational experiences for students and families?

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K12 Education

How to Embed Racial Equity in K-12 Schools with Dr. Adriana Villavicencio

Dr. Adriana Villavicencio is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine. Her research is focused on K-12 educational policy and school practice that deepens or disrupts inequities for minoritized communities of students and families. For nearly a decade, she conducted research at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools at NYU—a Research-Practice Partnership with the NYC Department of Education (DOE).

Adriana joins Mike Palmer to talk about her book, Am I My Brother’s Keeper: Educational Opportunities and Outcomes for Black and Brown Boys, published by Harvard Education Press, that examines how districts and schools can embed racial equity work into the very fabric of how they serve students.

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K12 Education

Collaborative Action for Equity and Opportunity with Paul Reville

Paul Reville is the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). He is the founding director of HGSE’s Education Redesign Lab. In 2013, he completed nearly five years of service as the Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Paul joins Mike Palmer to talk about his new book, Collaborative Action for Equity and Opportunity which he coauthored with Lynn Sacks. We explore the practical steps for school and community leaders to establish programs centered around Children’s Cabinets focused on the welfare of all children in the community by building the wraparound supports beyond what schools alone can provide. We also build on the conversation we began with Paul after his book, Broader, Bolder Better, which was the subject of his previous appearance on Trending in Education.

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K12 Education

Free Expression and Education with Dr. Jonathan Friedman from PEN America

Dr. Jonathan Friedman is the Director of Free Expression and Education at PEN America. He joins Mike Palmer on this episode to talk about emerging trends in K12 and Higher Ed in the US relating to Free Speech and Free Expression. You can learn more about what Jonathan and PEN are doing at pen.org

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K12 Education

Building a Makerspace for Kids’ Learning with Cara Lesser

Mike is joined by Cara Lesser. CEO and Founder of the KID Museum in Bethesda, Maryland. Cara starts by describing how she transitioned from working on healthcare policy to growing interested in education as her children entered school. Inspired by the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, she sought to create an institution dedicated to what she felt was lacking in her children’s education: creative, hands-on problem-solving.

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