Episodes

This week on TeachLab, our host Justin Reich joins a panel of education leaders with Superintendent Dr. Baron Davis from Richland School District Two in Columbia, SC, Superintendent Dr. Rhoda Mhiripiri-Reed of Hopkins Public Schools in Minneapolis, MN, and Dr. Beth Rabbitt, CEO of The Learning Accelerator, hosted by the US Department of Education's Office of EdTech. In the conversation, panelists share recent experiences in districts, schools and classrooms throughout the pandemic. In the face ...

This week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined by research scientist Joshua Littenberg-Tobias PhD. and Elizabeth Borneman M.Sc. to discuss a recently published Teaching Systems Lab efficacy study around the online course Becoming a More Equitable Educator and how well participants engaged with simulations about equity. They discuss the findings within the paper and the implications for simulation-based research. “There's very little research into what do people actually do in these simulati...

This week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined by Dr. David Joyner, Executive Director of Online Education at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. Together they discuss the challenges and advantages of online learning, the hard shift to remote learning under COVID, and David’s new book The Distributed Classroom. “The distributed classroom is really about asking the question, ‘Can we take one classroom experience and distribute it across students who can commit to different levels of attend...

This week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined by a panel of teachers from across the country to bring their personal experiences of teaching during the pandemic and to discuss a recent report that was led by Natasha Esteves, a former teacher, and now a student at the Harvard graduate school of education called The Teachers Have Something to Say: Lessons Learned from U.S. PK-12 Teachers During the COVID-impacted 2020-21 School Year. “I had one interviewee say, ‘Everybody wants to tell teach...

This week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined by Neema Avashia to discuss the recently released Teaching Systems Lab report Healing, Community, and Humanity: How Students and Teachers Want to Reinvent School Post-COVID. Together they reflect on what educators have seen in their classrooms since the pandemic, and how we can learn and grow from these experiences. “I'm a pretty firm believer that the old normal didn't work already for too many young people. And that a lot of our young people,...

TeachLab returns! Our host Justin Reich is back in the studio and excited to bring you a new season of episodes, starting December, 9th, 2021. Stay tuned!

Justin Reich is joined by Joel Breakstone, director of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), and co-lead on Beyond the Bubble and Civic Online Reasoning projects. Together they discuss assessing online information, the research of SHEG, and the methods used by fact checkers to determine the validity of information. “For one thing, when they did a search, they didn't immediately click on the first search result, which is what many of the Stanford students, and even some of the historians ...

Justin Reich is joined by Mike Caulfield, a digital information literacy expert working at Washington State University who has worked with a wide variety of organizations on digital literacy initiatives to combat misinformation. Together they discuss critical thinking, issues with traditional forms of evaluating sources, and the SIFT method. “SIFT. S-I-F-T. First is just “Stop”. If you find yourself emotional, if you find something that you've just got to share... Whatever is the trigger, the e...

Justin Reich is joined by Barry Fishman, professor of education and information at the University of Michigan where he studies the use of technology to support teacher learning, video games as models for learning environments, and the role of education leaders in fostering classroom-level reform involving technology. Together they discuss the 50th Anniversary edition of Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education with Barry Fishman’s new introduction, as well as grading systems during the...

Justin Reich is joined by John Palfrey, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, former director of the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society, as well as an educator, author, and legal scholar. Together they discuss philanthropy in education, the work of the MacArthur Foundation, and the challenges of making large changes in institutions. “And particularly when we look at a society where I think most of us, anyway, those of us on the left, broadly global left, woul...

Justin Reich joins Jal Mehta and Neema Avashia for the live webinar panel How to Learn from the Pandemic: Name, Nourish, Connect, and Grow! Together they discuss their collective research and experiences from COVID remote learning, what positivity emerged, and what stakeholders want changed as students and teachers look to re-enter the classroom. Hosted by Elizabeth Foster. “We actually used last year's Imagining September report that was put out, as the basis for redesigning our school schedul...

Justin Reich is joined by Matthew Kraft, associate professor of education and economics at Brown University to discuss the efficacy of tutoring, scaling tutoring for equity, and how COVID exposed the inequities of the status quo. “If we are to not think about changing how schooling works, it is in effect a default acceptance of that current world. So what I'm saying is given the empirical evidence, given the just willingness of parents to pay a whole bunch of money for tutoring, I think it's li...

Justin Reich is joined by Matthew Mugo Fields, the general manager of supplemental and intervention solutions at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a learning technologies company. Together they discuss Matthews career, the direction and values at HMH, and the responsibilities of designing and implementing effective educational technology. “...it can never be about the technology alone. It has to be about sort of more comprehensive instructional systems that leveraged technology, and that technology ca...

For TeachLab’s tenth and final Failure to Disrupt Book Club we look back at Justin’s live conversation with regular Audrey Watters and special guest Kevin Gannon, professor and director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. Together they discuss the final chapter of Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. “My institution is where you have students who are living in their cars, students who can't get basic needs, students wh...

For TeachLab’s ninth Failure to Disrupt Book Club we look back at Justin’s live conversation with regular Audrey Watters and special guest Candace Thille, director of Learning Science at Amazon and former researcher and faculty member at Stanford University and at Carnegie Mellon. Together they discuss Chapter 8, The Toxic Power of Data and Experiment. “It wasn't just that they didn't know how to use the educational technology. It was their belief about their role as a learner and their belief ...

For TeachLab’s eighth Failure to Disrupt Book Club we look back at Justin’s live conversation with regular Audrey Watters and special guest Courtney Bell, a former research scientist at the Education Testing Services and now director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), UW–Madison School of Education. Together they discuss the book’s third edtech dilemma, the Trap of Routine Assessment. “The assessment practice of observing Justin teach or Justin teaching in an assessment situ...

For TeachLab’s seventh Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode we look back at Justin’s live conversation with regular Audrey Watters and special guest Antero Garcia. He's a faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a former teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Together they discuss the book’s second edtech dilemma, the Ed Tech Matthew Effect. “Let's start with the community as the designer, and what it means to then imagine what schools and the tools that scho...

For TeachLab’s sixth Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode we look back at Justin’s live conversation with regular Audrey Watters and special guest Dan Meyer, the chief academic officer at Desmos. Together they discuss the work of Desmos and the section of Justin’s book on the “Curse of the Familiar.” “From our perspective, for us, we are not trying to subvert the school day. We're not trying to get learning outside of the four walls of the classroom. We're not trying to upend schooling and turn...

For TeachLab’s fifth Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode, we look back at Justin’s live conversation with regular Audrey Watters and special guests Scot Osterweil, a game designer and creative director for the MIT Education Arcade, and the esteemed games researcher Constance Steinkuehler. They discuss the history of learning games, their current work, and Failure To Disrupt’s Chapter 4: Testing the Learning at Scale Genres: Learning Games. “I've been studying kids in games for a long time. And...

For TeachLab’s fourth Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode, we look back at Justin’s live conversation with Natalie Rusk and Mitch Resnick from MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Lab and who are the developers of the Computer Clubhouse program and the Scratch programming language. They discuss the founding of these programs as well as Failure To Disrupt’s Chapter 3: Peer-Guided Learning at Scale: Networked Learning Environments. “I think sometimes there really is this misperception about this type of ...

Justin Reich is joined by Susanna Pollack, president and director of Games for Change and Kate Selkirk-Litman, founding teacher and curriculum specialist at Quest to Learn, to discuss games in education and the STEM Your Game Challenge, a contest for game developers to reframe game design with the lean of serving STEM education. “The community that we want to tap through this challenge is the commercial entertainment game developer. The game developer who might not have thought about the use of...

Justin Reich is joined by Barbara Means, author and executive director of learning science research at Digital Promise to discuss her research with digital learning before and during COVID. “There were quite a few universities that for equity reasons told their instructors, ‘Don't do any synchronous instruction in the spring, just put everything online and let students do it asynchronously, that is on their own time whenever they wanted.’ We found that when there were no synchronous sessions, w...

For TeachLab’s third Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode, Justin Reich reflects on a live conversation with special guests Cristina and Neil Heffernan. They discuss Failure To Disrupt’s Chapter 2: Algorithm-Guided Learning at Scale: Adaptive Tutors, and discuss the success of their tool ASSISTments. “According to SRI, they thought the reason why it was successful...They were like, "This fit in with what teachers were used to doing." They're used to actually assigning homework, and classwork. T...

This week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined by S. Craig Watkins, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a respected voice on digital media and youth culture. Together they discuss the affordances and limitations of technology in education and the digital divide created as technology becomes a staple in the classroom. “What struck me is even as I came into the project aware of these ideas around the digital divide and the tech rich and the tech poor, the haves and the have-not...