The Whole Child Podcast: Changing the Conversation About Education

In today’s global economic state, many families and children face reduced circumstances. What are the implications of this new poverty for schools, many of which have seen drastic changes in the populations they serve and their communities?

Many schools have made great strides in addressing students' needs, but some schools have gone further. They have taken an issue that was initially a need and used it to enhance and improve what the school offers.

Safety is and will always be a fundamental concern for schools. What do we, as educators, believe is crucial to making our schools safe -- not just physically safe, but safe places to teach and learn.

We as educators have a unique opportunity to reset the playing field and make the Common Core State Standards work for us. Now is the time for us to take control and become empowered in the process.

Essential to student success is access to personalized learning and support from qualified, caring adults -- whether those be teachers, principals, counselors, cafeteria staff, custodians, family members, coaches, ministers ... the list goes on and on. Students as learners are also students as people with social-emotional, physical, and mental health needs. Supportive education communities are places where school staff, community-based service providers, families, and all the adult stakeholders work together to identify and address kids' needs and provide a coordinated, whole child approach to their education and development.

Whether your school is in Berlin, Sydney, Ramallah, or Omaha, a whole child approach to education and community engagement -- in which each child in each school and each community is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged -- ensures student growth, learning, and development. In this episode, we explore schools and communities across the world that emphasize providing safe and supportive learning environments and experiences for students and talk with whole child partner organizations that are promoting and guiding their work.

In this episode of the Whole Child Podcast, we discuss the future of assessment and how the current accountability model must evolve from one that is punitive, prescriptive, and often overly bureaucratic to one that is truly learning-driven, informative, promotes supportive learning communities and cultures of continual improvement, and rewards achievement. The true measure of students' proficiency and readiness for college, career, and citizenship has to be based on more than just their scores on any state standardized reading and math assessments. It has to be based on valid, reliable, multiple sources of information.

The true measure of students' proficiency and readiness for college, career, and citizenship must be based on more than just their scores on any state standardized reading and math assessments. It has to be based on valid, reliable information from multiple sources. In this episode of the Whole Child Podcast, we look at the meaning and purpose of assessment; the different types, including formative and summative, standardized and subjective, and informal and formal; and how assessments are used to monitor student progress, provide timely feedback, and adjust teaching-learning activities to maximize student progress.

Research shows that kids who are physically active are not only healthier, but are also likely to perform better academically, and short activity breaks during the school day can improve concentration, behavior, and enhance learning. In short, school-based physical activity is valuable exercise -- it aids cognitive development, increases engagement and motivation, and is essential to a whole child approach to education. In this episode of the Whole Child Podcast, we discuss new ways to encourage movement and how schools are bringing physical activity out of the gym and into the classroom to maximize learning and well-being.

Families are a central source of children's learning and development, and their influence cannot be ignored. Engaging with families can inform, complement, reinforce, and accelerate educators' efforts to educate the whole child. Without strategic and continual connections between families and educators, we cannot ensure that students are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. In this episode of the Whole Child Podcast, we examine research that overwhelmingly reinforces the need for family engagement, practices that create and sustain meaningful involvement, policies that can bring about systemic change, and barriers that we must overcome to achieve this vision.