Welcome to the EXPLORING THE CORE PODCAST, where we delve into the elements that make up our education system and learn more about how that system can improve for the benefit of all students in schools today.

I'm Greg Mullen, and I’d first like to take this moment now to thank you for listening to this podcast. This will be the final episode of this season. I hope you’ve enjoyed the episodes, I hope you share this podcast with other educators, and I hope you’ll listen to these episodes again, to the experts interviewed, and begin exploring how your own schools and classrooms can benefit from shifting toward a self-directed learning environment.

In this episode today, you may recognize a different tone to my voice, a different feel to this episode, than in the previous episodes. Today, I want to share a few of my more personal stories

and insights from my classroom experiences early in my career that helped lead me to my current perspective toward education, experiences that helped shaped my perspective toward what I now believe is a path for creating a more meaningful approach, a self-directed, student-centered, classroom learning environment. I’ll be putting myself out on a limb here, sharing a few of my more vulnerable moments, because what I’m hoping you will take away from this episode, from this season really, is how there’s not just one perspective for journeying toward a self-directed learning environment but that whichever philosophical path you have chosen to follow, you and so many other teachers today have already begun choosing to take a path away from what we’ve been taught for so long of what school is and begin considering what school ought to be. The experiences I share today are not causal, are not the single events that sparked my whole perspective. They’ll simply be instances where I began to question some of the more traditional school practices that were particularly challenging for me. So please keep in mind the context in which these experiences happened will be different than your own but that the choice to question the underlying intent of various traditional practices will surely align with many different teachers in a variety of different situations and environments.

Plus, I’ll be sharing a phone conversation I was lucky enough to have with Starr Sackstein from New York about how she’s been moving away from traditional school practices, even going completely gradeless, and coaching other educators with books and TED talks helping others create a more student-focused approach, and celebrating how the institution of school can be so much more than what we’ve always thought school had to be.