Alec Patton talks to Maria Curtis, director of the Early Childhood Center at La Jolla Country Day School, in California, and Junior Kindergarten teacher Kristin Owen, about how they turned the discovery of a mud nest being built outside a classroom into a year-long project.
Sofía Tannenhaus talks to Jarrod Bolte, CEO of both Improving Education and Bedtime in a Box, a nonprofit that provides families with boxes containing everything you need for a positive bedtime routine. Each Box contains four age-appropriate books; bath wash, a towel, and bath toys; a toothbrush and toothpaste; pajamas; a stuffed animal; an alarm clock; a Teach My Learning Kit; and a kid-friendly routine log.
Bedtime in a Box has delivered more than 50,000 Boxes so far, with 80% going to families experiencing poverty.
This episode comes from the Climify podcast, which is hosted by Eric Benson, and produced by the Climate Designers Network. Benson interviews Tish Tablan, senior program director at Generation 180, about how going solar can benefit schools’ budgets and provide opportunities for PBL, as well as helping us all thrive as we face an unprecedented climate crisis.
Alec Patton talks to Juliette Price, the senior Improvement Science coach at the National Association of Higher Education Systems, about how their Network Improvement Community has achieved its remarkable results on transfer enrollments from two-year to four-year colleges.
Ben Krueger talks to cellist, composer, and teacher Okorie Johnson, who performs as OkCello, about music, teaching, and community. And, appropriately, they talk about how all three of those are, themselves, a form of conversation.
Alec talks to RISE’s Linzi Golding, Erin Asselin, and Melanie Gonzalez about keeping things simple, celebrating small changes, smart ways to share data with schools, and how to recognize and celebrate effort, even when it doesn’t lead to the outcomes we were hoping for.
Alec talks to Cary Sabados (national director of teacher leadership development at Teach Plus) and Morgan Hython (fourth grade math and science teacher at Piccolo School of Excellence, a public preK-to-8 school in Chicago) about their work in the Teach Plus Network for School Improvement.
In this episode, Dr. Michelle Sadrena Pledger, CORE Districts’ Chief of Improvement David Montes de Oca, and Dr. Stacey Caillier explore how educators are transforming systems using ideas from Liberate: Pocket-Sized Paradigms for Liberatory Learning. Listen in for stories, strategies, and a vision for what’s possible when we dare to liberate learning — one district at a time.
Alec talks to Deeper Learning 2025 keynote speaker Dr. Heather Michel about about her difficult experience with school as a kid, her own career as a teacher, and the strategies that she’s developed to help teachers take care of themselves.
Alec talks to Jason Nious, founder of the stepping and body percussion crew Molodi, about the journey that brought him here, and about what he’s learned from dance and body percussion about connecting to young people in school.
In this special live episode from the 2025 Deeper Learning Conference, educator Ron Berger talks to two Japanese educators and their two brilliant children, who have experienced education across cultures in Japan, the United States, and Europe.
They talk about the ways in which schools in different countries unleash student potential, and the ways in which they do not—yet.
In this episode, Alec talks to Nichelle Woodson, the Chief of Network Success at RISE Eileen Mezzo, an Assistant Principal at Naugatuck High School in Connecticut. They talk about how the RISE Network has achieved remarkable gains in ninth-grade on track rates (for example, on-track for Black students has risen by 27 percentage points since 2015).
Alec talks to fifth grade teacher Jeff Govoni about a project he and his fifth grade colleagues did last year, in which students designed and built dog houses and cat condos for animals seeking adoption.
Alec talks to Sara DeMartino, an English Language Arts Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Learning (IFL), about how schools in the IFL’s network for school improvement increased 8th grade on track for Black and Latine students by more than 25 percentage points, and improved on-track rates for Emerging Bilingual Students from 35% to 80%, since 2018.
Alec talks to Shelley Glenn Lee, director of High Tech Elementary North County, and Durrell Kapan, a Senior Research Fellow at the California Academy of Sciences, about how the Silvery Blue butterfly is filling the ecological niche left by the extinction of the Xerces Blue butterfly in San Francisco… with some help from Durrell and his team
Sofía Tannenhaus talks to Julie Smith, co-founder of Community Design Partners, and Casey Chiofolo, an Assistant Principal at Respect Academy, an Alternative High School in Denver, about how Respect Academy dramatically improved first period attendance by talking to kids about what they wanted from school, and what was keeping them from getting there on time.
Alec and Nuvia talk to artist Scarlett Baily about her life, her art, and in particular the process of collaborating with 200 elementary school students
Alec talks to Amiee Winchester, director of continuous improvement at Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS), and Zack Jaffe, a manager of continuous improvement at BCPS, about their improvement work on middle school and high school literacy, and particularly about the particular challenges and rewards of doing continuous improvement within a large urban school district.
Alec talks to Dr. Simon Breakspear about the book he co-wrote with Michael Rosenbrock, “The Pruning Principle: Mastering the Art of Strategic Subtraction Within Education”
Alec talks to Sean Mortimer, co-author of autobiographies by Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, and Joe Namath, about how to help people figure out how to tell the stories of their achievements—whether they’re pro skaters or educators.
Alec talks to physics teacher Ted Cuevas about why portfolios and badges are a better way to assess student learning, and how he does assessment in his class.
Stacey Caillier and Curtis Taylor talk to Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford about what Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Bayard Rustin can teach us about continuous improvement.
Alec talks to High Tech High Graduate School of Education president Ben Daley about one of the most powerful (and simplest) data-collection tools in the world: the “by-name list.”
