250: How do you find a balance with structure and student agency?
Shifting Schools: Conversations for K12 Educators
Release Date: 01/30/2023
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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)...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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_outlineThis episode debunks a few misconceptions about Maker education and design projects. We have help with the debunking from Lindsey Simmons, an educator who has partnered with Mackin Maker, who have been a phenomenal sponsor of this show.
Our conversation goes on to explore ways we can use the design cycle in many different ways and how understanding that cycle can set us up for all types of projects in our personal lives.
Lindsey also helps us think about sustainability and the intersection of literacy and MakerED.
Learn all about Lindsey Simmons here. And follow her on social media here.
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Have you heard about our pre-sale offer on now? Click here to learn more about our pathways for educators looking to leverage the power of Chat GPT and other Generative AI tools.
Reach out to us at info (at) shiftingschools.com to learn more
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For the rest of the links mentioned in this episode:
Key Strategies for Maker Education (click here) via Mackin Maker
Three myths of making (click here) via Mackin Maker
Creating connections to the environment through making (click here) via Mackin Maker
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