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The Greater Educator
By The Greater Educator
FAQs about The Greater Educator:
How many episodes does The Greater Educator have?
The podcast currently has 14 episodes available.
The Greater Educator episodes:
June 05, 2019How to Collaborate with Your Library Media Specialist Rachael and Erick discuss the role of the library media specialist and how the relationships forged with teachers can be a gamechanger in your school.
---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more March 28, 2019Peas & Onions Snow, Digital Learning Portfolios, and Other Surprises You've probably heard of a digital portfolio, but we were surprised by the kind of learning that takes place when you're intentional about how you execute them with your students. Also surprising - that late-winter, early-spring "peas and onions" snow.
---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more January 19, 2019Donglemania, Seasonal Cough Remedies, E-Sports in School, and Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) Rachael and Erick discover Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) and discuss their thoughts on some next-level implications for our teaching careers after taking on the often misunderstood and highly stigmatized dongle subculture, some effective remedies for that annoying winter cough, and the impact of implementing e-sports in our public schools.
---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more January 11, 2019Stealing Interviews, Terrible Cliches, and 10 Ways to Make Classrooms Innovative In today's episode, Erick and Rachael discuss the ethics of tricking people into giving an interview, "Live, Laugh, Love" and other terrible cliches, and a recent Forbes article about ten ways to make your classroom more innovative.
---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more December 07, 2018Whose Job Is It to Motivate My Students? To all the teachers who might have had a less than motivated student grace their classrooms - whose job is it to motivate these kids to learn? We tackle this question and attempt to consider the ramifications of our answers.---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more November 20, 2018Instructional Strategies for the Greater Educator Here are some of our favorite go-to instructional strategies that you can plug into your classroom right away.---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more November 08, 2018Becoming Greater with the ISTE Standards Check out the ISTE Standards for Students while we offer our thoughts on each of them.https://www.iste.org/---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more November 08, 2018Transforming into a Greater Educator We have both been so lucky in our careers to be able to attend education conferences across the country. The opportunity to learn alongside and network with like-minded professionals is probably the most energizing experience a teacher can have. That’s a call to action for school leaders - find space in your PD budget to send teachers out to learn and see first hand the kinds of innovation you want your schools to adopt! I’m headed to the iNACOL Symposium next week and will be presenting a session on reimagining schools with personalized learning, and as I was thinking through what I want to say posing questions to myself about how I’ve changed as a teacher, I thought this might be a great opportunity to put you in the hot seat, Erick, and see how you would articulate some of what we’ve gone through professionally.We haven’t really discussed who we are yet on this podcast, so let’s give our listeners a little context. Why don’t you share a quick glimpse of who you are and who you’ve been as a teacher?Sure, so I grew up in a home where mom and dad were both teachers, by sister’s a teacher, education is such a huge part of how I was raised. For 12 years, I taught high school social studies and I always had an interest in using technology to push what was possible in the classroom. I welcomed Google into my classroom with open arms, and that challenged me to transform my teaching methods. At the start of my career, I considered my role to be the content expert and the final word on assessment. Toward the end of my years in the classroom, I was leaning more into the ideas that we need to ask “Google-proof” questions that drive to the deeper concepts of history, rather than merely the superficial facts.For the last three years, I’ve been a media specialist and a technology integration coach, a role in which I strive to draw teachers together, across the curriculum, to engage in real world projects with their students, using the library space as a sort of learning hub - a place where all the disciplines converge and interact. As I do this, I also provide professional learning for teachers in a wide range of settings and circumstances - doing what I can to address their needs, while inspiring them to try things they may have never thought possible.In the end, I’m still simply a teacher. I get to inspire and empower both students and teachers on a daily basis, and I love it.I can say having known you since the start of my own career that you had a good reputation as a teacher since the beginning, but if your own reflection, what was it that changed your mindset from being the content authority taking an inquiry-based, immersive approach to teaching?I can remember the actual moment that the transformation happened. I was delivering content to my very first class of honors European history students - a course I did NOT feel I had the content mastery to teach well. So, I did what any of us would do - I got online and searched for the best of the best unit maps, assignments, primary source documents, lesson plans, and of course, notes, that I could find. It was while I was lecturing from these notes I found online that I became paranoid that my students might actually get online and find the some notes I was using.That was when it hit me. How absurd was it that I was withholding something valuable to my students’ learning so that I could retain my role as the “expert” in the classroom. After that moment, I everything changed - there was no going back.Were the seminal moments in your career that called your teaching philosophy into question?The example I just mentioned was certainly one of them, but I hit another one a few years later when it seemed that every student had a smartphone in their hands all day...---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more November 08, 2018The Greater Collaborator Ah, group work!For some of us, that phrase induces PTSD from projects in which we knew that we would have to drag our group members along, hoping they would carry their share of the load, only to take it all on the day before the due date and making sure we all don’t fail Mr. Smith’s American History class and ruin our lives forever.Yeah, this one is personal for me.Collaboration, the fourth of the 4 C’s we’ve discussed here on The Greater Educator Podcast, can easily be checked off the list by even the most reflective educator. Anytime we put students into groups of any kind, it’s easy to check collaboration off our list and start focusing on the thousands of other learning objectives we’ve prepped for our students.Collaboration can take on so many different forms. We can obviously see it in our classrooms, but it’s also possible online. We can pick the groups our students work in randomly, or based on data, or we can just let students form their own groups. We can establish formal rules for collaboration, or we can allow it to develop organically.Digging even deeper, collaboration can be an integral part of the learning experience...or not. I think that of the 4 C’s, communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration, it is this last one that can seem so easy to implement incorrectly. It’s important for us to take a second to admit that, sometimes, asking students to work together on something doesn’t necessarily add to the learning process - it can actually detract from it.Take, for example, the aforementioned group project - the kind in which 4 or 5 students are asked to prepare a presentation for the class. Without a strict rubric, and sometimes, even with one, we know what happens. Our motivated students take control of the project while our less motivated ones passively go along for the ride. Not only do we have some students doing more than their fair share of work, but we also have some students minimally engaging with the content. Worse yet, we just taught our students to dread working with others.So, before we talk about becoming a greater educator in this regard, we need to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we’re putting our students in the same painful situations we were forced into when we were in school.So, what’s collaboration look like done right?The answer lies in the pedagogy - what do we want our students to learn and how can that be facilitated by having students work with each other?We want our students to be prepared to take on the challenges of life after graduation - challenges that are too big for them to solve on their own and require working with others. Without effective collaboration, this podcast wouldn’t exist right now.In order for The Greater Educator to exist, Rachael and I have had to apply our personal, different sets of skills to the project. Our personal opinions about the direction the podcast should go, the design of the logo, even the name itself, needed to be checked off of each other. Strong feelings about a particular topic were met with critical review, negotiation, and compromise. We have worked together, in person and sometimes not. We have engaged in writing, recording, designing, organizing our materials and our schedules, deciding which pieces of business were able to be done in person, and which could be done on our own time. We've also learned together and from each other through this process. In the end, what we have here is something that could not have existed without each others input.This collaborative effort has been necessary because of the work that needed to be done, the limited resources we have, and the value that is gained by each of us bringing our talents and skills to a project we are both passionate about.Does this sound like the kind of group work that is being done in our classrooms?---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more November 08, 2018A Greater Understanding of Critical Thinking Our recent conversations have been exploring the 4Cs of 21st century learning. I don’t know if it’s been as apparent to you as it has been to me, but the closer we look at the skills and talk beyond the buzzwords to figure out what they actually mean, the more I realize how interconnected and interdependent they really are. Today’s topic, skill number 3 on our list, is critical thinking, and in my opinion, it is no less dependent on its predecessors than the other two were.LIke many of the other learning traits and skills that teachers are groomed to value, critical thinking is complex and dynamic in its definition and abstract in our attempts to teach it. I fear that in my own practice, it was something I expected of kids without teaching to kids - another difficult admission that came to me after some self-evaluation. Thinking back to the turning point in my career, one of the reasons I knew that I needed to reimagine teaching and learning in my classroom was because critical thinking and the higher-order thinking skills that I was hoping my students would obtain seemed to be happening in spite of my teaching habits.I recognized the need to push learners to the more demanding rigors of the common core standards, but I think I did most of my “pushing” by revising the verbs in the questions that I asked. I don’t think I changed much about the way that I guided students to explore the curriculum, and that truly is one way that I characterize critical thinking - as a process of exploration.Whether we refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, critical thinking skills are the strategies that students use when they cross over from comprehension of information that they’ve received into formation of their own individual meaning of and use for the information. I think of the process like a ladder, where learners begin with a basic understanding and perhaps can even apply what they’ve learned across multiple, similar scenarios. Critical thinking happens at the rung where they begin to evaluate their learning through the questioning nature of analysis, and come out on top with the ability to synthesize, or we might say CREATE, new information or understanding because of our exploration.So to answer your question about what the difference might be between creativity and critical thinking, my answer might be that the critical thinking is the hard labor that has to take place before the big idea comes to us. Neither attribute is whole without the other, but when we unpack the meaning behind these attributes and their implications for our classrooms, that is my perspective.In my own practice, defining examples of critical thinking was key to intentionally unlocking the ability in my students. Some of the pedagogical practices that emerged naturally were things like embracing and highlighting the productive struggle in my learners, helping them to identify their own personal biases and those in all of the people around them, developing criteria for evaluating information in a variety of forms, teaching them to be truly active listeners, and to articulate similarities, contrasts, and contradictions. These might seem like really advanced skills for middle school students, but when I implemented best practices in actually teaching these things, they became tangible, achievable goals, and I saw critical thinking strategies emerge from all of my learners in one form or another.One of the byproducts of living in a society where so much information is so easily accessible is that human beings can only internalize so much in a day. New research and theory gains traction so quickly that by the time the message is transferred from expert to scholar to superintendent to school-level leader to teacher, it tends to be delivered in a manner that is honestly just scratching the surface...---Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support...more
FAQs about The Greater Educator:
How many episodes does The Greater Educator have?
The podcast currently has 14 episodes available.