We need student voice and student storytellers now more than ever.
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
Release Date: 12/21/2022
Lisa Gardner on Creativity and Curiosity
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
What can ELA teachers learn from a bestselling suspense novelist who begins writing without knowing who the villain is? In this episode of Shifting Schools, Tricia Friedman speaks with Lisa Gardner about the habits, questions, and research behind her novels. Their conversation offers ELA teachers a fresh way to think about character development, suspense, inquiry, and the creative conditions young writers need. Lisa explains that she does not begin with characters divided neatly into heroes and villains. She gives each person layers, contradictions, motivations, and a moral code. As the story...
info_outline
How to Raise a Reader from Birth with Sandra Magsamen
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
What can a board book offer a baby who cannot yet speak or even hold it independently? Award-winning author, illustrator, and art therapist Sandra Magsamen joins Tricia to discuss Hello, Baby, her new board book created for children from birth to age three. With bright illustrations, melodic language, playful terms of endearment, and a mirror that places the baby inside the story, the book is designed to support far more than early literacy. Sandra explains how reading with a baby can build connection, vocabulary, attention, curiosity, and a growing sense of belonging. She also shares...
info_outline
Who Gets to Lead? Expanding Student Voice with Rachel Thrash
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
When schools picture a student leader, they often imagine the confident speaker, the high achiever, or the student who already understands how to succeed within existing systems. But what about the students who are rarely invited to lead? In this episode, Tricia speaks with educator and author Rachel Thrash about expanding student leadership beyond the familiar few. Her book, , presents leadership as something every young person can practice, not a privilege reserved for students who already fit a traditional leadership profile. Rachel explains how educators can move from simply asking for...
info_outline
How do we teach students to sit with evidence longer?
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
What happens when historical research uncovers a truth you are not sure you want to know? In this episode of Shifting Schools, Tricia speaks with author Christine Kuehn and her husband and research partner, Mark Schiponi, about Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor. Christine’s investigation began with a startling discovery: members of her family had been deeply involved with the Nazi Party, and her grandfather had been convicted for his role connected to the attack on Pearl Harbor. What followed was a 30-year search...
info_outline
How Nolan's Odyssey and Cover Songs Help Us Talk About AI
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey just earned nearly $300 million retelling a 3,000-year-old story — so what actually separates imitation from transformative interpretation? In this episode, Tricia makes the case that cover songs are the perfect entry point into the AI and creativity conversation for educators. You'll trace how Aretha Franklin re-authored Otis Redding's "Respect," why translator Emily Wilson's critique of Nolan's film proves that interpretive choices matter, and how three human skills — reflect, re-envision, rework — map directly onto UNESCO's vision of students as AI...
info_outline
Ted Lasso's Cristo Fernández: Fútbol Is Life, and It's Never Too Late to Dream
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
You know him as Dani Rojas on Ted Lasso. He's also a professional footballer with El Paso Locomotive FC, a filmmaker, and now the author of a bilingual picture book, Fútbol Is Life! / ¡Fútbol es vida!, illustrated by James Rey Sanchez. But before all of that? He was a life insurance salesman who sold nothing for a year. This conversation is about what happens between the dream and the arriving. About injuries that turn out to be redirections. About why "be curious, not judgmental" might be the most useful thing we can teach — and keep learning ourselves. In this episode: (00:01)...
info_outline
When Students Go After Real Problems
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
When Alex Campbell set out to teach sociology through true crime, he wasn't trying to catch a murderer. He was trying to make the stakes...
info_outline
Do you want to better understand your team?
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
Every team has communication habits, but how many of those habits have ever been discussed out loud? In this episode, Tricia introduces a free reflection and facilitation tool designed to help teams understand how each person prefers to communicate, receive feedback, make decisions, ask questions, and work through a project. Using stories about getting fired from a bartending job and accidentally adding unwanted sriracha to breakfast, she shows how easily we can mistake our own habits for shared expectations. The tool begins with individual reflection before helping a team create its own...
info_outline
The perfect middle grade book for readers during The World Cup
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
Award-winning author Christina Diaz Gonzalez joins Tricia to discuss Offside, her new bilingual middle-grade graphic novel about soccer, friendship, ambition, identity, and finding the courage to use your voice. Although soccer brings the characters together, Offside is also a story about young people learning to form their own opinions rather than simply inheriting the assumptions of the adults around them. Christina explains why she wanted her characters to have real agency, including the ability to challenge gender stereotypes, rethink competition, navigate conflict, and sometimes help...
info_outline
AI Literacy Is Problem-Solving Literacy
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
Tricia Friedman shares a real-life story about a flooded basement, an insurance claim, and what it revealed about AI literacy. After a major storm in Ottawa caused basement flooding, Tricia found herself facing the kind of problem many people recognize: too many damaged items, too many documents, too many decisions, and a process that can quickly become overwhelming. But this time, compared with a similar flood two years earlier, the experience felt different. Using AI tools, Tricia organized photos of damaged belongings, created an insurance-ready inventory, reviewed policy details, searched...
info_outlineThe Port Townsend School District Website for the 2022 Salish Coast Elementary Children’s Film Festival
This year the Library/STEM program at Salish Coast Elementary hosted the 2022 SC Children’s Film Festival! It was created by our K-5 citizen-scientists as a “Call to Action for the Future of the Salish Coast Ecosystem” and our students are excited to share their voices to tell their stories to ask our community: “What Will You Do to Help?”
https://sites.google.com/ptschools.org/sc-childrens-film-festival-22/home
Novel Effect is a Seattle-based company that created a fantastic free app that follows along as you read aloud books and uses voice recognition software to respond at just the right moment with music, sounds, and character voices to help make storytime magic. They also have premium plans with educator discounts.
https://noveleffect.com/educators/
WeVideo is an easy to use, chromebook compatible, cloud-based editing platform that allows teachers and students to work collaboratively on creating gifs, videos, podcasts, and more.
https://www.wevideo.com/education
The Stop Motion Pro Studio app allows students to use the iPads to take photos of their original artwork and then, through software applications, put them together in a sequence to create movement in their animated films.
Contact Denise: deniseaedan {at] gmail [dot] com