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! 

For those who have been with us from the beginning, you might remember how this podcast started with just Matt and Dave, and how we didn’t tell each other the question we were going to bring in, and just stumbled our way through thinking on our feet about how we might answer that question. We are recapturing a bit of that feeling in this episode! We sat down at our microphones at our normally-scheduled recording hour…and looked at each other expectantly, waiting for someone to remind us what our topic was for this week’s episode. We quickly realized that we never agreed on a topic! But we decided to go forward, and record anyway. We hope that this conversation gives you a further sense of who we really are behind our podcast personas! Matt gave us a little direction by sharing an Advent piece by Frederick Buechner to begin, and we launched into a ranging conversation about what gives us hope right now. We also talk about recommendation letters, the amazing students we get to teach, some recent adventures in pedagogy, things we are grateful for, and other playful shenanigans. Maybe this episode will be a good reminder to take some time to check in and connect with your colleagues!

In this episode we start off with some random check-in questions from Matt, inviting us to share some things about ourselves. (Be ready for some silliness, dear listeners!) This leads us into Dave sharing a story about teaching while not feeling well…and how he nearly passed out in class. The question Dave raises: how much should we let students see us as “real human beings?” We talk through various aspects of appropriate self-disclosure for teachers, the role of liking students and being liked by students in return, and strategies for giving students glimpses of who we really are beyond being “just the teacher.” We hope you’ll laugh along with our banter, but also that this might spark some introspection and conversation with your colleagues about right relationships with students.

Hallway Conversations is sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Christian Education. You can learn more about the good work CACE is doing at https://cace.org/

We start off this episode sharing about the different things we’ve been doing lately, with different conferences where we’ve been presenting lately. (It was marvelous for Abby and Matt to meet up with many listeners at CEA!) Dave’s conference actually sparked the topic for this week’s conversation: so many of the sessions at his EdTech conference dealt with AI in Education. We have questions, and maybe the beginnings of some answers. We discuss a whole range of ideas, from what AI is and what it currently can and cannot do, the potential impacts on teachers’ pedagogy, and how to focus on having humans do the things that humans should do…while also imagining ways that we can have machines do things that machines are good at. These are murky waters, for sure, but we hope this somewhat-longer-than-normal hallway conversation will be encouraging, and might spark some more hallway conversations of your own about the role of AI in education.

• In this episode, we mentioned the fact that Dave recently had a chapter published in a monograph by the Association of Christian Schools International that is all about AI in Education. You can learn more about the book here: https://your.acsi.org/pdp-store/Product-Catalog/Product-Details?productid=%7B03BC9D7A-5D6C-EF11-A670-002248218222%7D&srsltid=AfmBOor-gBOI96z2BNH5J5x9hfa0p_as5MktUIpinVzf75ZYhOfXm4QP

This week we start off with a rant about Christmas decorations already being out in the stores (it’s only the middle of October!) which turned into a just-for-fun check-in question about our favorite Halloween treats from our youth. The heart of our conversation today stemmed from an impromptu conversation Matt had with a campus visitor about the Education profession, and the prospective student was definitely not planning to become a teacher. Their conversation prompted our discussion: why aren’t people coming into the profession today? We think around some of the narratives about the profession, and what parts are true, and what parts are…less true. Dave shares his take on why–and how–educators can work to elevate the profession and we brainstorm ideas about how those of us who teach can help encourage other people to join us in the joyful challenges and rewarding work we get to do as teachers. We have some specific words of encouragement for you all, listeners, to help encourage your own students to consider becoming teachers–we hope you’ll have those conversations too!

• Hallway Conversations is sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Christian Education. You can learn more about the good work CACE is doing at https://cace.org/