What is the future of education? Thousands of people have been pondering that since the start of the pandemic three years ago. The guests and hosts at Silver Lining for Learning (SLL) have been pondering that since March 21, 2021. In this three-year anniversary edition of SLL, four magnificent prior guests of the show, Sophia Mendoza, Paul Kim, and Kiran Bir Sethi, will reemerge for one hour to share their perspectives on education during the next three to five years. Please join us for what is sure to be a most enlightening show.Kiran Bir Sethi is a Designer who became a Teacher, a Principal who grew into an Education Reformer and subsequently morphed into a Social Entrepreneur. A trained Graphic Designer, she uses the language of Design to develop not only curriculum innovation, but also community-based Social Programs. 20 years ago, she founded The Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, aimed at all-round development of children. As their website says, “Over the last 20 years, Riverside has designed, implemented and shared a unique user centered curriculum … which focuses on quality of learning AND student well-being. … The school has regularly been honored for its academic achievement as well as its unique philosophy of ‘Doing Good AND Doing Well.’ In 2009, Kiran launched Design for Change to instill an I CAN mindset in children. It asks kids to feel any problem that bothers them, imagine a way to make it better, do an act of change, and share their story of change with the world. It is today one of the world’s largest movement of change, led by children— impacting over 2.2 million children and 65,000 teachers in more than 60 countries. (Her TED talk and other videos are given below)TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/speakers/kiran_sethihttps://www.designforchange.us/about-usDr. Paul Kim is the Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. An education technology entrepreneur, Dr. Kim leads initiatives involving the design of learning technologies, educational research, and community development. In a trans-disciplinary project aiming to promote innovation and competition by constructing a Programmable and Open Mobile Internet (POMI 2020), Dr. Kim designs and implements mobile technologies and social learning environments.In 2009, Dr. Kim founded Seeds of Empowerment, a 501(C3) non-profit global education incubator for social innovations leveraging mobile technologies. Under his direction and leadership, Stanford undergraduate and graduate students carry out mobile-social educational research and development in real-world classrooms and virtual learning environments. Some of the student-initiated projects he has helped develop and sponsor include the multiple award-winning TeachAids, a global HIV/AIDS education NGO, Adina’s Deck, an award-winning internet safety education program, SMILE (Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment), a mobile platform that has been implemented in over 20 countries, ROSE (Remotely Operated Science Experiment), and 1,001 Stories, a global micro creative economy project. These and other Seeds of Empowerment initiatives have been recognized in global competitions sponsored by organizations including the Sesame Workshop, WISE by the Qatar Foundation, the Marvell 100K Challenge, Vodafone, etc.Dr. Kim has dedicated himself to international development through education and information technology strategies and has advised Saudi Arabia’s national online education initiative, the national evaluation of Uruguay’s One Laptop Per Child project, Rwanda’s national ICT planning, and institutional advancement efforts for numerous universities. Dr. Kim serves on the Board of Directors of WestEd, the Committee on Grand Challenges in International Development for the National Academies of Science, and the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation’s Education and Human Resources Directorate. Dr. Kim was born in South Korea and received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Technology from the University of Southern California in 1999.Paul Kim:Paul Kim’s Stanford Homepage: https://gse-it.stanford.edu/about/team/paul-kimCV: https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/viewCV?facultyId=30964&name=Paul_KimWikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kim_(academic)Sophia Mendoza (bio), who began her career at Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) as a kindergarten student, is now director of the Instructional Technology Initiative where she oversees the implementation of instructional technology across the nation’s second-largest school district. Mendoza says it’s important to her to give back to the district that opened so many doors for her. She is an innovative, systems-level collaborator with over 20 years of experience as an education leader in L.A. Unified (which serves 589,000 students). Mendoza leads the implementation of computer science education and digital citizenship programs across 1,300 schools. She is committed to cultivating leaders and learners ready for a growing digital world. As evidence, Mendoza was named a NextGeneration Leader by EdScoop and CoSN as well as 2018 Most Influential People in EdTech by Tech & Learning. In addition, she received an ISTE Impact Award honoree for 2019, an honor that recognizes her work in establishing strategic partnerships and programs that expand instructional technology opportunities for all students, such as collaborations with Common Sense Media and Code.org. Note that she also received awards in 2022 for Best Overall Implementation of Technology, Best Overall Implementation of Technology, Latino Technology Champion of the Year 2022.https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiamendoza/https://connect.iste.org/network/members/profile?UserKey=114d29ed-3d32-4a56-97b4-690fddbe147fhttps://www.laschoolreport.com/tag/sophia-mendoza/Chuangye Chen, Professor East China Normal University Dr. Chen is an educational researcher with wide social science interests who seeks to decipher and theorize patterns and mechanisms shaping Chinese education in the changing society from macro and meso levels of policy and leadership. With empirical enquiry and theoretical building, I explore to develop alternative scholarly perspectives helping break down stereotypes, challenge misunderstandings, and interrogate oversimplifications in comparing China and Western contexts. http://www.kcs.ecnu.edu.cn/EN/TeaShow.aspx?info_lb=20&info_id=3669&flag=20

In this episode of SLL, we are celebrating 3 years of the series with Toks Bakare, Lea Anne Daughrity, Ragini Lall, and Annie Nam. They call themselves the “Volunteer Crew” as avid listeners and fans of the episodes, who have come together with the goal of moving Silver Lining for Learning over onto more accessible podcast platforms. YouTube was just not cutting it, and they wanted to listen on the move! They are truly a global bunch taking full advantage of the technologies of our times to make this work happen. They have been collaborating fully remote, joining across 2 continents, 3 countries, and 4 different time zones. They have met biweekly for the past several months with the goal of learning about podcast distribution platforms, setting up a system to move over 140+ episodes of Silver Lining from the website and YouTube over to a RSS feed, and manually formatting each episode as they got ready for the transfer. They are four education technology enthusiasts and our meetings turn into sharing the latest trends around learning sciences, chatGPT, workplace learning, and more.Tune in to learn more about the Volunteer Crew – how it came to form, our process, as well as our highs and lows and their takeaways from digging through the archives of SLL.About our guestsToks BakareHarvard Graduate School of Education EdM ‘20LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toksbakare/Toks is an XR enthusiast who seeks to further the use of immersive learning experiences for education and training. She is currently a Director of Business Development at Mursion, and sits on the Equity board at Classcraft. In the last three years, Toks has served as a teaching fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education; led a student organisation (LEAD) which brought conversations around tech in African education to four conferences; hosted a short series of webinars discussing the impact of COVID-19 on education in Africa; and has served as co-dean of the AR/VR Africa Bootcamp and hackathon judge.Before moving to the US, Toks spent more than 15 years working on improving access to quality inclusive education for neurodiverse learners in the UK, Europe and in West Africa. She founded a social enterprise called asktoks.com, which promotes inclusive education for neurodiverse learners.Lea Anne Daughrity,Research FellowPh.D. in Learning TechnologiesLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leaanne/Website: https://www.leaanne.me/Dr. Lea Anne Daughrity  has spent the past 16 years in education, serving students from Early Childhood all the way through to Graduate School. Her true passion is in Learning Experience and Instructional Design. She began working at SMU in 2022 as a STEM Research Fellow in the Technology Enhanced Immersive Learning (TEIL) Cluster in the Simmons College of Education. In her current role, she focuses on the learning experience design of immersive and embodied learning applications in STEM projects under the guidance of Dr. Lin Lipsmeyer. She holds a Ph.D. in Learning Technologies from the University of North Texas, a Masters in Instructional Technology and Library Sciences from Texas A&M Commerce, and a Masters in Public Relations and Bachelors in Communications from The University of Alabama.Ragini LallLearning Design ConsultantEd.M’ 2020 Technology, Innovation & EducationLinkedin: linkedin.com/in/ragini-lall-2202b825Website: www.thestudentact.comRagini is a learning design and innovation expert who leverages her decade-long expertise in design research, pedagogy, and technology to create effective learning strategies for curricula, products, and platforms. She launched her career at Quest Alliance, a leading edtech NGO in India, where she focused on improving learning outcomes for low-income communities in the vocational training, ITI, and government school ecosystems.There, she developed blended learning experiences, games, and workshops for young learners and educators. Amidst the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ragini contributed her skills and knowledge to the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a Teaching Fellow and Online Learning Fellow with the Teaching Learning Lab.Currently, Ragini is building a consultancy called “The Student Act” and wears multiple hatsas she continues to develop the practise around games for learning, workplace learning, and teacher education. She maintains a strong focus on human-centered design methods and digital learning pedagogy keeping up with the rapidly changing landscape of education technology. Ragini holds an undergraduate degree in Art & Design from Srishti Manipal School of Art, Design & Technology in India, and a Masters in Education in Technology, Innovation & Education from Harvard University.Annie NamHarvard Graduate School of Education EdM ‘20LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annienam/Portfolio: https://www.annienam.com/Annie is a learning advocate and research enthusiast with 10 years of experience that cross the frontiers of education, technology, and business. Her lifelong mission is to advance the role of learning in various organizations and aid in the advancement of human development and her passion lies in designing and deploying immersive, innovative learning experiences to users of all backgrounds at scale.She currently sits at the board of Girls in Tech Korea where she works on business development and partnerships with organizations like AWS, Microsoft Korea alongside various government entities. She was the former Global Partnership Lead at the Education Commission, Asia hub. Additionally she has worked at MIT Sloan and Berekley Haas as a learning designer.Her strengths include data analytics, learning design, strategic decision making, as well as writing for both academic and non-academic publications.She holds a Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Technology Innovation and Education.

Our guests (Ariel Anbar and Norman Bier) propose a promising solution for tackling complex concepts in education: creating immersive, adaptive, and open resources that utilize digital personalized tutoring. By incorporating a curriculum that emphasizes real-world relevance and challenges learners, education can be transformed from an abstract and siloed experience to one that is responsive and engaging. Intelligent facilitation of interactions between peers and instructors can also enhance the learning experience, making it more powerful and relevant.Anbar and Bier also highlighted the importance of open-source in edtech. They pointed out that the industry has been stifled by an investment-driven model that has led to excessive protection of intellectual property (IP) and market domination. However, this approach is ultimately futile since education decision-making is decentralized, and costs must be kept low. An open-source approach to scaling out tech infrastructure is essential since it promotes community collaboration and affordability, thereby providing a hedge against IP capture. While there is still room for specialized, for-profit businesses to cater to specific needs, the adoption of open source can significantly improve education accessibility and affordability for all learners. More importantly, the goal is to create a model that addresses the full range of educational needs—i.e. systems that are effective, robust, reliable and a joy to use.Ariel Anbar is Center Director and President’s Professor at ASU. He is a scientist and educator exploring Earth’s past and future as an inhabited world, and the prospects for life beyond. He and his team study topics ranging from the origins of Earth’s atmosphere to detecting life on other worlds. Ariel’s passion for science combined with his desire to transform how students learn catalyzed the formation of the ETX Center which he directs, which is reinventing digital learning around curiosity, exploration, and discovery. A graduate of Harvard and Caltech, Ariel is a President’s Professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and School of Molecular Sciences, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, and was named one of 10 “teaching innovators” by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2017.Norman Bier is Director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University. His work sits at the intersection of CMU’s internal educational practice, ongoing learning science research and external collaboration.Norman has spent his career at the intersection of learning and technology, working to expand access to and improve the quality of education. His experience spans the higher educational sector, including 2-year and 4-year; public and private; domestic and international; and commercial institutions. Prior to joining OLI, he was Director of Training and Development at iCarnegie Inc., a CMU subsidiary chartered to deliver software development education through international partner institutions. Using technology and faculty support, iCarnegie reaches thousands of students who would otherwise not have access to a CMU-level education. He has taught computer science courses as an adjunct faculty member at the Community College of Allegheny County, philosophy courses at Carnegie Mellon University and served as a founding committee member of the Cook Honors College at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He currently serves as board member for the Kaleidoscope Project and the Shady Lane School.

Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, higher education has become increasingly limited for young women and often suspended and banned. According to a January 24, 2023 article in Inside Higher Ed, Reviving the College Dreams of Afghan Women, by Liam Knox, there are several initiatives currently underway to help Afghani women get access to educational opportunities, from online experiences at the University of the People to residential ones at higher education institutions in the United States like Arizona State University (see “61 young Afghan women arrive to begin new life as Sun Devils” ASU News, December 16, 2021 and the ASU Foundation for Afghan refugees). Enter the Asian University for Women in which has opened its doors to Afghani women to come to Chittagong, Bangladesh and enroll in a Master’s of Arts in Education. The Asian University of has Women Teaching Women, Women Learning from Women (WTW-WLW) initiative that is intended to nurture the next generation of woman leaders through a network of secondary schools for young women and girls who are refugees and located in displaced communities (website).The Asian University for Women (AUW) Masters of Arts in Education is a unique program launched with aspirations to empower women in education, particularly the brightest young female reformists/educational entrepreneurs dedicated to creating an impact through educational development and their leadership in society. The majority of the students are Afghan evacuees and/or belong to minority communities seeking reform in education. As Israt Jahan Oeeshi, a Teaching Fellow in the Graduate Program in Education at AUW, explains, “I chose this particular program to begin my academic career because it allows me to improve my pedagogical skills and provides me with a purpose: assisting an exceptional cohort of students.” Attend this episode of Silver Lining for Learning and learn firsthand from the Founder of AUW, Kamal Ahmad, as well as one of the instructors, Dr. Stefanie Panke, and three Afghani graduate students who had been evacuated with the help of Asian University for Women in 2021 and are currently in a Master’s of Education program in Chittagong, Bangladesh. All their bios are below. They will discuss their class project with Dr. Panke which was a Pressbook titled “Strong Schools.”

Many job roles and responsibilities are rapidly changing here in the third decade of the twenty-first century. According to a December 19, 2022 article in the Evolllution, A Time for Learning Experience Designers, Mark Milliron, President of National University and Kim Round, Associate Dean in the Teacher’s College of Western Governors University (WGU) argue that we need to better engage students in the learning process by rethinking the instructional approaches and supports that can be provided for learners. Milliron and Round point to the need to craft richer and more meaningful learning experiences. They argue that these new approaches are more empathy-based and sensitive to student wellness. Among those jobs in the midst of transformation is that of instructional designer and educational technologist. It is time for the learning experience designer (LED) to lead us into this new learning age.In addressing this concern, in this episode of Silver Lining for Learning, Drs. Milliron and Round will discuss a new Master of Science in Learning Experience Design and Education Technology (MSLxDET) from Western Governors University that will launch in the summer of 2023. As they sagely write in the Evolllution, “25 years of advancements in competency-based education, personalized learning, its commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, support for Social Emotional Learning, advanced use of data, and innovation with skills-based learning are working to help our diverse array of students—particularly historically underserved students—successfully navigate personalized pathways to possibility.” In a personal conversation (January 20, 2023), Milliron further observed that we need to talk about “the new possible,” not “the new normal.” Attend Episode #139 of SSL and hear about the new possibilities of learning experience designers and the types of learning that they might design. You can find out whether “Is it Time to Lead or About Time We LED.”

The dominant schooling system in India today is a product of the colonial era. It follows the factory model of education and emphasizes rote learning. But in a future where many routine tasks can be performed by machines, there is a need to transform the education system and focus on foundational critical thinking and problem-solving skills.Inspirit VR and MakerGhat are two organizations grappling with this challenge by engaging youth in experiential learning at the K12 level, virtually and in person. To enable change, they have been working on scaling through school partnerships, public and private. In this episode, the founders will talk about their vision to build a movement towards experiential learning in India, as well as challenges faced when working at scale.

Issues of social and emotional learning have always been a critical cornerstone of schooling. In particular, mental health and well-being had already become a rising concern for young people prior to the pandemic. But in the last few years, these concerns have grown substantially and there’s a great need to understand approaches that work well in schooling and models or examples of how to support the emotional health and well-being of students. Mindfulness has been one key approach to well-being that has recently received popular attention and consideration in schooling. The guests in this session all bring knowledge and experience with studying and successfully implementing mindfulness in school and other education settings as a way to support learners’ mental and emotional health. They are also deeply interested in the connections between mindfulness and creativity and innovation. They have a series of expert interviews and personal reflections in TechTrends on this topic. We will discuss some of the unique insights they have garnered across studies and expert interviews.

A thought-provoking conversation featuring guests from Harvard, MIT, and Stanford discussing their recently published reports on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teaching and learning, and the potential for innovations and advances in learning that this disruption helped to reveal. Guests share their thoughts on how digital education could transform their universities over the next decade, including how higher education might move forward from the pandemic with a renewed focus on meaningful and impactful transformation.

Coming back from the holidays, the hosts talk about the key ideas from the last few episodes. Young wonders about technology in education coupled with the four-day school week and the possibilities with that. Curt Bonk spotlighted how young people are taking the lead with many on the technology in learning initiatives, Chris Dede highlights how the education industry does not take into account time children spend outside of the school day as an opportunity for them to learn. Punya is on vacation in India!

What might the future of education look like? Google for Education collaborated with research partner Canvas8 to conduct a study across 24 countries on the future of education. The result is a three-part global report highlighting insights from around the world from Google for Education released in December 2022. Part III of this report is called Reimagining Learning Ecosystems. It covers three trends: (1) upgrading learning environments, (2) empowering educators with data, and (3) re-evaluating student progress. Join Jennie Magiera the Global Head of Education Impact at Google and Kimberly Lane Clark Senior Program Manager at Google for Education as they share the top trends from the report and what they mean for educators and education leaders around the world.See Future of Education report: See Future of Education report: https://edu.google.com/future-of-education/Part 1: Preparing for a New FuturePart 2: Evolving How We Teach and LearnPart 3: Reimagining Learning Ecosystems

We are joined by Robin & Travis from The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE | crpe.org) which is a research organization at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. CRPE researches classrooms, schools, and systems to identify the systemic barriers to equity and excellence for every student and ways to overcome them. Since March 2020, CRPE has been the go-to source for high-quality research about the threats to student success and equity posed by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the innovations that have emerged from the crisis

We are joined by Dan Krutka and Marie Heath from Civics of Technology who tell us more about the project, its origin, where they are now and their future plans and ideas. The Civics of Technology (CoT) project aims to empower students and educators to critically inquire into the effects of technologies on their individual and collective lives. The team conducts research, develops curriculum, and offers professional development and through that seek to advance democratic, ethical, and just uses of technology in schools and society.While humans have wrestled with their relationships with technology for centuries, the rapidly changing technological landscape of facial recognition, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and other pervasive technologies requires citizens who can address associated social problems. The CoT team of primarily social studies and educational technology educators and researchers seeks to develop approaches, curricula, and research to help students grow as citizens in a highly technologized world.CoT, therefore, seeks to revive an older idea, largely lost to school curriculum dialogues, for technology education that challenges students to critically inquire into the collateral, disproportionate, and unexpected effects of technology on our lives. Across their projects, they work to advance the civics of technology in schools and society that struggles for just democracy. Some important linksCivics of Technology  Main PageCivics of Technology ConferenceCivics of Technology Book clubsCivics of Technology CurriculumMore about our guests below the video

Life is filled with challenges and adventures. Imagine teaching over 10,000 students in a single class. Sounds quite daunting, doesn’t it? Now what if those learners come from 120 different countries with their unique cultural norms, languages, backgrounds, expectations, technology access issues, and educational opportunities? Would you be a tad worried? Well, what if these people have come to your course to learn a very employable skill called computer coding? Most of them would have at least some expectations of being able to immediately apply the skills that you are teaching. The pressure mounts. And those 20,000 eyes would all be on you…or would they? Not exactly. With the “Code in Place” project from Stanford University, you would actually have around 900 volunteer teachers supporting and helping to individualize the instruction. This online army of volunteers would certainly lighten the load. The Code in Place project has likely the most people virtually assembled to ever teach a single class. Attend this session and find out what is working as well as the challenges and solutions to date for those challenges. Can Code in Place be replicated, expanded, and appreciated in other universities or parts of the world? We will see. More about our guests after the video.

This is the third of three episodes that we are devoting to education in India. As we had said in the introduction to the first of this series (#123 and #129), with 1.4 billion people, 27% of whom are under 15, India has significant educational needs. Its multilingual, multi-ethnic culture throws in further challenges. Scale, complexity, and diversity — it is all here. Today we will meet with representatives of two organizations focusing on student-centered learning. Priyanka Krishna at Quest Alliance  and Joseph Phillip at Reap Benefit.

This is the second of three episodes that we are devoting to education in India. As we had said in the introduction to the first of this series (#123), with 1.4 billion people, 27% of whom are under 15, India has significant educational needs. Its multilingual, multi-ethnic culture throw in further challenges. Scale, complexity and diversity — it is all here.Today we will meet with representatives of two organizations focusing on student centered learning. Sandhya Gupta at Aavishkaar Foundation and Eshwar Bandi with Inqui-Lab Foundation.Transforming math and science education for students and teachers is an important advance for all countries to achieve. STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) knowledge and skills are best acquired through various forms of active, experiential learning rather than passive assimilation. Exciting models for accomplishing this goal are in place in India. The Aavishkaar initiative, led by Sandhya Gupta, builds students’ and teachers’ engagement, achievement, and confidence in research and development through math & science camps as well as training workshops. The Inqui-Lab Foundation, co-founded by Eshwar Bandi, provides both Think & Make in-person programs and online School Innovation Challenges that are very effective in helping children and youth to innovate for problems around them and in supporting them in acting on their ideas. The episode will describe ways that parts of these transformational models can generalize to other settings across the world. More info on our guests below the video.

Roy Amara of the Institute for the Future is quoted as saying: “We overestimate technology short-term, and underestimate it long-term.”  How does this apply to AI?  First, we now know that fears of rapid impact on employment were vastly overblown, as they were based on extrapolations of capabilities continuing in an exponential fashion, rather than plateauing.  Furthermore, the progress has been for narrow applications which were, in engineering-speak, “bounded problems” like protein folding most famously.During this session, we will examine the true abilities and gaps of AI, as delineated in Charles’ co-authored book on Artificial Intelligence in Education, and discuss whether and when these might be resolved in ethical ways.  Armed with that view, we will then address how advances in AI impact education at three levels:Curriculum – What we teach for employabilityInstruction – Intelligent Tutoring Systems may be overblown, but narrow slices are possible (e.g., foreign language acquisition)Assessments – analytics are a clear fit, but it is mostly data science techniques; we need to define what AI is in this context, above and beyond algorithmic techniques and basic adaptiveness.Another impact of AI on education is changing what capabilities educators should cultivate and what students need to learn for their future occupation. Over the next two decades, our partnership with computers in accomplishing work roles will typically involve intelligence augmentation—an interweaving of human judgment with machine reckoning— even though a few human jobs will instead be done completely by AI. For instance, AI designed to support the work of teachers might use metrics like how much time students spent on an activity, the number of questions they answered correctly, and the number of attempts in order to evaluate whether particular students need additional instruction in a topic; AI would provide a recommendation to the teacher. The educator then assesses the validity of this suggestion using a host of data points (e.g., students’ levels of engagement overall, personality, performance in adjacent subjects, well-being) and decides how to best craft additional, engaging instruction for the student. Much as how the word processor enhanced human efficiency, productivity, and capabilities, AI can augment human abilities through reckoning—with potentially a great benefit in which the human-AI partnership is capable of more than either person or machine in isolation.

Silver Lining for Learning is an ongoing conversation on the future of learning with educators and education leaders from across the globe. Hosted by Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Punya Mishra & Yong Zhao, these conversations began under the “dark cloud” of the COVID19 crisis and continue today. We see these conversations as space to discuss the creation of equitable, humanistic and sustainable learning ecosystems that meet the needs of all learners. These  conversations are hosted live on YouTube every Saturday (typically 5:30 PM Eastern US time) and are archived on https://silverliningforlearning.org

In this episode of Silver Lining for Learning, we will meet with Vicky Colbert, a sociologist from Colombia. She is co-creator of the world-renowned Escuela Nueva model. Escuela Nueva, Spanish for “new school”, is a progressive education model that emphasizes learner understanding over memorization, and strives to foster the development of interpersonal skills. Importantly, instead of a lecture-based approach, it employs a child-centered pedagogy with extensive collaborative learning. Studies show that it improves literacy and numeracy among disadvantaged youth while encouraging the development of active and reflexive learning as well as self-esteem, creativity, and civic and democratic values. The skills fostered by an Escuela Nueva school are meant to help graduates flourish and quickly adapt to the challenges and possibilities brought by the increasing technological world around them. Attend this session to learn about this method and perhaps rethink aspects of your vision of effective schools and schooling.

What is creativity? How can we cultivate creativity in education? Can it be assessed? If so, then how? These are all significant and unsettled questions in creativity education. Professors Ron Beghetto and Yong Zhao edited an issue of Review of Research in Education (RRE) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to explore these issues around creativity in 2021-2022. The issue has been published and can be accessed here.They are editing another issue of RRE for 2024. The theme is side effects in education. Educational side effects are effects that accompany the intended outcomes of educational policies, initiatives, and practices. While some side effects can be beneficial, they can also be adverse, negative, and damaging. In this episode, we have invited the two editors, Professor Ron Beghetto and Professor Yong Zhao, who is a co-host of Silver Lining for Learning, to discuss creativity education and side effects in education. Learn more about our guests below the video.

Today, learners face an unprecedented challenge: adapting to a world that is changing more quickly than ever before. The skills, tools, and knowledge needed to thrive in a global knowledge economy are evolving at breakneck pace, and the artifacts we’ve traditionally relied on to capture these skills (e.g., the four-year degree) aren’t well-suited for the task. Learners and employers need a more agile, accessible, and specific way of recognizing what people know and can do.We will hear from a lifelong learner (Brittany Storie, Director of Workforce Skills at Pearsons) who has experienced career benefits since earning alternative credentials, and we’ll discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the credentialing ecosystem more broadly.