"It’s clear that the College Board is not only grossly overfunded and a waste of money, bordering on corruption,  but a completely unethical, inequitable, and useless indicator of  college preparedness. It’s a gatekeeper to higher education with no real purpose, and its use in schools limits the curriculum, causes anxiety among all parties, labels students, and favors the rich."

This is an audio recording of an article published on April 5th, 2020 titled “Drop the College Board”, and read with permission from the author, Chris McNutt. You can find this article on our Medium page.

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The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

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You can find COVID-19 Assistance and Resources from HRP using this link.

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"Does our preparation for students in the 'kind' world of school really prepare them for life outside its walls or does  it prove counterproductive, or even maladaptive, when the rules change  and those hours of training fail to transfer? And to what extent does this 'kind'/'wicked' framing help us understand the divide in our approaches to education?"

This is an audio recording of an article published on March 31st, 2019 to our Medium page by me, Nick Covington, as HRP’s Book of the Month for “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein, you can read the full article and find more by other contributors at our Medium page.

The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

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You can find COVID-19 Assistance and Resources from HRP using this link.

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"What do teachers need to know to help navigate these confusing and chaotic weeks away from students as we settle into closures and social distancing as a new normal? And, sidelined by forces far outside of our control, how can those of us used to taking the lead in helping students in crisis channel those same energies into supporting students, families, and communities from afar? Though it’s clearly absent in our economic and political institutions, how can we keep our basic humanity at the center of this new role for educators and schools?"

What follows is an audio recording of an article published on March 15th, 2020 to our Medium page by Chris McNutt titled, “Simplification: School Policies and Practices to End During COVID-19”, and read by me, Nick Covington, with permission from the author. You can read the full article and find more by other contributors at our Medium page.

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The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

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"As  we shift our understanding from racism and white supremacy as an  “individual aberration” expressed through outright violence and open  discrimination — viral videos of police shootings or Civil Rights-era  images of dogs used against nonviolent protesters — to something  “systemic, institutional, and pervasive” — say, that black students are three times more likely to be suspended from school than white students — , it is so vitally important for us as teachers to understand our  individual and collective complicity, how our supposed “colorblindness”  fails us and the children we teach, as well as our individual and  collective power to resist these structures in our classrooms."

This is an audio recording of an article published on July 25th, 2019 to our Medium page by me, Nick Covington, as HRP’s Book of the Month for “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” by Carol Anderson, you can read the full article and find more by other contributors at our Medium page.

The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

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What do fields like medicine, physics, agriculture, and education have in common? In this episode of Re:Teaching, I’ll unpack the criticisms and limits of “what works” in what we call evidence-based educational research and practice and try to understand why, in the words of Dutch researcher Gert Biesta, “the dynamics of education are fundamentally different from the dynamics, of, say, potato growing or chemistry”. This article can also be found on our Medium page.

The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

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So today is a double header featuring the first two articles I ever wrote for the Human Restoration Project back in 2018. “My Pragmatic Journey to Voice and Choice in the Classroom” provides the introduction and context, while “Cutting Content to Make Room for Learning” gives the practical details. The ideas presented here have been foundational to the trajectory of my subsequent work in the classroom and my relationship to the HRP community, so I’m proud to bring them to you on this platform. 

The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

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This is an audio recording of an article published on December 20th, 2019 titled “Revisiting Disobedience Instruction as Classroom Structural Change”, read with permission from the author, Chris McNutt. You can find this article on our website and as part of Next Gen Learning’s series “Why Schools Need to Change”. You can find links to both of these sources in our show notes.

The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

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In this episode of Re: Teaching I’ll look at the movement of undergrad and graduate programs away from standardized assessments, unpack new research into our assumptions about standardized test scores as predictors of college completion, and challenge listeners to re-rethink “What’s in a grade?”

You can also find the article for this episode on our Medium page.

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The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

“First, there is no evidence to justify, let alone prove, the claim that PISA indeed measures skills that are essential for life in modern economies. Second, the claim is an imposition of a monolithic and West-centric view of societies on the rest of the world. Third, the claim distorts the purpose of education.” writes University of Kansas professor Yong Zhao in his latest article in the Journal of Educational Change titled “Two decades of havoc: A synthesis of criticism against PISA”. In this episode of Re:Teaching I’ll summarize Professor Zhao’s analysis and try to help listeners understand what is the PISA test, what are its limitations, and what should we do about it?

The Human Restoration Project is a non-profit dedicated to informing and spreading progressive education, through free educational programs, resources, and online materials for teachers, families, and students. You can learn more and follow us at humanrestorationproject.org or on twitter @humrespro. Follow founder Chris McNutt @mcnuttGISA and myself @CovingtonAHS. Be sure to add the hashtag #restorehumanity. We hope to hear from you.

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