We're back!  Season 3 of the Jabbedu Education Podcast launches now!  
Tune in to this season to be introduced to education's biggest leaders and hear some thought-provoking conversations, perspectives, strategies, concepts and more so you can be the catalyst of progress your students need.

We'll be back with Season 3 starting on August 2nd!

Figuring out how to motivate students is one of the hardest skills to develop.  Which strategies do I use, how do I balance reward and punishment, how do I develop intrinsic motivation for learning? 

Luckily people like Dr. Brett Jones are doing the hard work for you.  Over the last decade, Dr. Jones has researched and found the five pillars of motivating your students and has broken each one down for you in this episode.

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Remember the iPod shuffle?  Does anyone still use one?  Probably not.  It’s amazing to think about which technology is here today and gone tomorrow.  Well that’s what Virtual Reality headset technology is like today.  In this episode I sit down with Karl Kosko from Kent State about some of the research he’s doing with VR headsets and 3D classroom videos.  He explains that over the next 5-10 years you’re going to see huge improvements in VR interface which will allow teacher candidates to get some practice experiencing the classroom without ever leaving their dorm.  It's by no means a replacement for in-person practice, but the possibilities are quite endless, and it’s exciting to think about where we will be in 10 years.  Tune in.

Hearing about how the intricacies of the brain, and finding out the “hard” evidence for human behavior might not sound incredibly appealing to most teachers, but it’s actually remarkably important for people in education to understand.  Once you can identify underlying evidence for certain behaviors, you can begin to address the root of the cause, and not just the symptoms… i.e. instead of punitively reacting to student behavior, discover why the behavior exists and address that to prevent the behavior in the future.

In this episode we discuss some of the underlying brain functions of student behavior, why cortisol levels are important to be aware of, and why some of the proof of the benefits of social emotional learning in your classroom.

Talking about how your skin color affects your life is not easy.  In fact, it is really hard and uncomfortable, because we know that in a just society, skin color shouldn’t matter at all… so as a white male, it can be hard to accept that I’ve benefitted (and likely will continue to benefit) from my skin color in ways I likely will never notice.

But if we don’t start having these conversations now, nothing will change, and we’ll rob future generations of the chance of a truly equitable society.

So thankfully there are people like Samuel Jaye Tanner who are leading the way in discussions around whiteness, white privilege, and anti-racism.  In this episode we discuss his experience as a white teacher in a predominantly black school, how it affected his second job as a white teacher in a predominantly white school, the lessons he has learned from improv, and how we can begin to think about how our race interacts with our everyday experiences.

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Do you want your students to be able to self-regulate their emotions?  How about learn how to navigate conflict?  These are just two of the many positives that can come from implementing Social Emotional Learning into your classroom.

In this episode I chat with Joseph Hamer about his new book “Brain Awakes - Empowering Children through Breath, Balance, and Reflection.”  We discuss the lessons he learned from his first year of teaching, how his own mindfulness journey led him to implement some of those strategies with his teaching, and how it all ties in with Social Emotional Learning.

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It can be extremely frustrating to work and work and work and have very little to show for it.  Next time you see a student getting frustrated, it might be for this very same reason.  In this episode we discuss Successive Relearning, a strategy that can help solidify our memories (and our students too!) We discuss the metacognition of effort and how simply switching our students perspective and belief about effort can change everything!

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In my experience, mathematics is an extremely objective subject.  You figure out a certain equation and the answer is either correct, or it’s not… so how on earth does that create any sort of ethical dilemma worth exploring?

Well, luckily in this conversation with Courtney, Naomi, and Eva, we learn that the ethics are not in the problems themselves, but how they are framed.  We discuss how multiple choice test might not be as good as you think, how bringing the real world to mathematical problems is a crucial part of getting students to buy into math, and why our choice to include or not include material does in fact mean that teaching can never be neutral.

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The feeling that you are important to someone else, that your being matters to another person, is one of the strongest emotions we can experience.  It’s one of the things that makes us human.  And if you’ve ever experienced the opposite, like you are unimportant or not wanted, you know that can be one of the most isolating of all human experiences.  So it’s extremely important to make sure our students know and understand that their presence in our classroom matters.

In this episode Dr. Gail Boldt speaks about the roots of Affect Theory, how her experience as a psychotherapist informs her teaching and research, and how we as teachers can begin to adjust our response to student questions and behaviors in a way that makes them feel like they matter.

Tune in!