We are at the end of another semester, and at the end of another season of this podcast adventure. In this episode, we reflect together on our practices, on the things we are taking away from this year, the nature of teaching as “planting seeds,” and the importance of Sabbath for educators. We hope that this conversation encourages you all to wrap up your own academic years well, friends. With this episode, we are going on hiatus for the summer, but we plan to be back with you with new episodes in the fall. We hope you’ll have time to rest, recreate, and re-create this summer!

After recording our last episode, we left the microphones running as we sometimes do, and had another amazing interaction full of wisdom from our pal, Erik Ringsby. We are including it here as a shorty bonus episode, and we hope it spurs more thinking about how to care well for your students!

This week’s episode is a conversation with our good friend and colleague in the Education department, Professor Erik Ringsby. Erik joined our team last year and teaches a variety of courses in special education and learner diversity, and draws on a long career as a special ed teacher and instructional coach. He is a talented, thoughtful educator, and one of our favorite things about Erik is his deep passion for supporting ALL students to make learning come to life. We are confident that this episode will be a blessing and an encouragement to you to think deeply about ways your school can support all the kids you get to serve! 

This episode was prompted by an email Dave sent to the rest of the crew–we’ll let you listen to hear the details–but it has to do with finding lots of joy amidst some frustration. This got us thinking about the nature of joy, and we share some of the joyful memories we have from our growing up years as we begin. Then we shift to talking about finding joy in the work of teaching, even when it is challenging, demanding, and downright frustrating. How can we look for joy, and help our students learn to see joy as well? We hope this will be an encouragement for you too to choose joy, even when things are frustrating!

In this episode we have the opportunity to interview our new friend, Shaun Brooker, who serves as Head of School at Hamilton Christian School in Hamilton, New Zealand. It was a pleasure to meet Shaun in person at the recent Converge conference in Orlando, and we were delighted that Shaun was able to join us for the show, despite the time difference between the Waikato region in New Zealand and Northwest Iowa–he is 18 hours ahead of us! Shaun is a thoughtful, passionate leader, as you will find as you listen. In this wide-ranging conversation about Christian education, Shaun shares his vision for the Kingdom work we get to engage in as Christian educators. We hope you’ll be blessed by this conversation, and we suspect this is not the last time we’ll have Shaun on the show.

Friends, we know it’s been a bit since we’ve had a new episode. Never fear! We have more fun ideas still to come this spring, including some great interviews. In the meantime, we’d like to share Dave’s side project: another podcast! This one is a STEM-oriented podcast supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation called It’s Good to Be Smart! The idea is that science teachers (grades 5-10) could use the episodes in this podcast to support their teaching. Season 1 is all about matter–the building blocks of the universe. This episode is all about the Periodic Table of the Elements. We hope you enjoy it–and maybe consider sharing this podcast with a science teacher you know!

Matt noticed that it was four years ago last week that we started this podcast adventure–and what a wonderful time it’s been for us! We’re so grateful to you all, dear listeners, for joining us on this journey. We hope it will continue to be a blessing for you. In honor of that milestone, we start things off with some reflections on what we have learned and what we love about this project.

This week we are joined in the studio (aka, Abby’s office with the creaky table) by our good friend, Darryl De Boer. Darryl brings a wealth of knowledge and experience from his roles as Director of Education at Surrey Christian Schools, and Director of Teaching for Transformation at CACE. Our discussion this week is coming in response to our recent (successful!) accreditation process in the Education program at Dordt University. We wonder together about accountability and trust in Christian education. We hope that the discussion will be an encouragement for you to think about the right role of accountability in your own school context, and the important role of trust in those accountability processes.

In this episode we think about whether teaching is best pursued as a solo project, or whether it makes more sense in this day and age to look for ways teachers can collaborate in the work of teaching. We share some stories of our own experiences–in higher ed, and in our K-12 teaching–where we tried co-teaching. We explore the benefits and drawbacks, and try to paint a realistic picture of what a strong co-teaching approach might look like in practice. We hope this will encourage you to have more conversations about what collaborative teaching could look like in your own schools.

Welcome to a crossover episode with our good friend, Dr. Justin Bailey, who hosts the In All Things podcast. Justin reached out to us, because he wanted to interview Dave about his book, which is out now! We agreed, and what you have before you today is a special episode all about the book. Justin, Abby, and Matt ask Dave about his motivations for writing the book, the content, the approach, and really the heart of it all: developing an imagination for teaching “Christianly.” 

Christmas time is here! (Cue the “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!” music!) It’s the end of the semester, and we take a little time to reflect on what we’ve done and what we’ve learned this semester. Matt prompts the discussion this week with a two-part question: 1) What gifts did we receive from our students this year? And 2) What gifts would we like to give to educators? We have a lot of great things we have found blessings from our students, from their reflective responses, to their self-knowledge, to their hospitality, welcoming nature, and idealism. We also have gifts we would love to give to our fellow educators, including bravery, collaboration, authentic professional development, and resources for mental health. Thanks, as always, for listening. We appreciate you so much! We hope that this Christmas season is a blessing for you amidst the blur of busyness, friends!