TeachLab with Justin Reich
89 episodes - English - Latest episode: 14 days ago -TeachLab is a podcast that investigates the art and craft of teaching. There are 3.5 million K-12 teachers in America, and we want to explore how they can become even better at what they do. Hosted by Justin Reich, MIT Professor and director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab.
Homepage Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Failure to Disrupt Book Club with Dan Meyer
January 22, 2021 10:00 - 48 minutes - 44.7 MBFor 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 ...
Failure to Disrupt Book Club with Scot Osterweil and Constance Steinkuehler
January 08, 2021 17:19 - 48 minutes - 44.1 MBFor 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....
Failure to Disrupt Book Club with Natalie Rusk and Mitch Resnick
December 18, 2020 10:00 - 35 minutes - 32 MBFor 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...
Games For Change
December 11, 2020 10:00 - 15 minutes - 14.1 MBJustin 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 us...
Barbara Means
December 03, 2020 10:00 - 51 minutes - 47 MBJustin 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 session...
Failure to Disrupt Book Club with Cristina and Neil Heffernan
November 27, 2020 10:00 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBFor 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 classwor...
S. Craig Watkins
November 23, 2020 10:00 - 32 minutes - 30 MBThis 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...
Supporting Students in the Aftermath of the 2020 Election with Youth In Front
November 18, 2020 10:00 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MBThis week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined in a live webinar by members of the Youth in Front team. They answer questions and share reflections and resources that we believe can help educators process this moment themselves and with their students. “So I've been doing a 10 minute election update every day...but again, really thinking about dosage and trying to just think about what is the right amount to not sort of overwhelm you or drown you in this, but also to make sure you feel ...
Failure to Disrupt Book Club with George Siemens and Elizabeth Losh
November 13, 2020 17:00 - 41 minutes - 37.8 MBFor TeachLab’s second Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode, Justin Reich is joined again by friend and colleague Audrey Watters to reflect on their conversation with special guests George Siemens and Elizabeth Losh. They discuss Failure To Disrupt’s Chapter 1: Instructor-Guided Learning at Scale and Massive Open Online Courses, looking at “three big bets of MOOCs,” and exploring why MOOCs failed to achieve their most ambitious goals. “I don't know if I've ever seen an ed tech thing where w...
Failure to Disrupt Book Club with Chris Gilliard
October 30, 2020 09:00 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBFor TeachLab’s first Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode, Justin Reich is joined by friend and colleague Audrey Watters for her insight on Justin’s new book as a well respected writer on educational technology. They reflect on and play clips from the first live webinar Book Club from September 21st, where they were joined by special guest Chris Gilliard, Professor of English at Macomb Community College, to get his unique privacy and surveillance perspective on the book’s introductory chap...
Mitchell Stevens
October 16, 2020 09:00 - 43 minutes - 40.2 MBJustin Reich is joined by Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist of education at Stanford University to discuss the history and current relationship between online learning and higher education, and how COVID has altered that relationship. “I do think this provides a moment of true uncertainty about the future, because essentially every college and university overnight had to reconceive what quality instruction would look and feel like at their institutions. It creates an openness to forward chang...
Jeff Young
October 01, 2020 09:00 - 28 minutes - 25.9 MBJustin Reich is joined by editor and EdSurge podcast host Jeff Young to discuss the current state of higher education and the technology issues of opening schools during the pandemic. They also look at Jeff’s new project, the Pandemic Campus Diaries, a series on the EdSurge Podcast that aims to document this unique moment in a lively and lasting way, and shine a light on the nuanced effects the pandemic has on students whose learning has been disrupted. “...we were trying to get a sense of,...
Michael Pershan Revisited
September 08, 2020 13:30 - 51 minutes - 46.9 MBMichael Pershan, a New York City math teacher, returns to TeachLab to share his experiences in the face of COVID-19. Back by audience request, Michael reflects on the challenges faced during the spring, and shares his strategies for the fall. “...It's hard to know what kids are actually learning and doing. So I'm trying to be flexible. My plan for the spring was eventually keep things engaging, keep kids coming back. That's my fundamental goal. Try to teach as much as I can. And that's what...
Kevin Dua
August 21, 2020 15:50 - 49 minutes - 45.1 MBHost Justin Reich is joined by Kevin Dua, 2017 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, a two-time Massachusetts Teachers Association Human & Civil Rights awardee, and a current member of the Ideation UpLift Legacy Cohort for K-12 Black Male Educators. Kevin is a History and Psychology Teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Justin and Kevin discuss anti-racism, unlearning, and strategies to increase equity in education in the age of Covid. Kevin also shar...
Imagining September with Neema Avashia and Jal Mehta
July 22, 2020 09:00 - 1 hour - 55 MBThis week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined in a live webinar by colleagues Jal Mehta from the Harvard Graduate School Of Education, and Neema Avashia, a Civics teacher in the Boston Public Schools to discuss the Imagining September report; a joint research project to identify values and priorities for reopening schools. “We have to get smarter about how we structure ourselves in ways that actually are in service of kids learning.” - Neema Avashia Managing uncertainty What worked ...
Rich Milner Reboot
June 12, 2020 09:00 - 45 minutes - 41.2 MBRich Milner, Professor of Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University joins Justin Reich to talk about his personal teaching history, and share stories of education research in schools. He presents his five mindsets of becoming a more equitable educator, and discusses the common reluctance to bring race into the classroom. “ if you're going to do work that is emancipatory, if you're going to engage work that is transformative, if you're ...
Lillian Hsu and Angela Daniel
June 04, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutes - 35.9 MBThis week on TeachLab, Justin is joined by Lillian Hsu, the founding principal of Latitude High School in Oakland, California, and Angela Daniel, instructional coach and design thinking project strategist at PSI High in Seminole County, Florida. They reflect on their transition to distance learning in the age of COVID, what values they brought with them, and how this experience will inform the upcoming fall semester. “So much of the ninth grade program at our school is around visiting diffe...
Paul Reville
May 28, 2020 09:00 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MBThis week on TeachLab, Justin is joined by Paul Reville, founding director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Redesign Lab, and former Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. They discuss the future of education during and post-pandemic, the shift of involvement for parents in their child's education, and the need for communities to shift in order to support it. “...it goes beyond just having higher expectations for families, and extended families. It goes t...
Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum Reboot
May 22, 2020 09:00 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBThis week on TeachLab, we’re republishing our first episode with the brilliant Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, to bring her lessons of equity and race back into light during these challenging times of the COVID pandemic. Now with a new segment called “Dear Teacher”, a message from Dr. Tatum directly to teachers around the world. Next week, we’ll be back with a new episode in our COVID-19 series, talking with Paul Reville, founding director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Redesign La...
Teaching Remotely with Chalk Radio
May 14, 2020 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16 MBThis week, TeachLab is republishing the latest episode of MIT OpenCourseWare’s Chalk Radio “Teaching Remotely During Covid-19 with Prof. Justin Reich”, hosted by Sarah Hansen. Below is the episode summary from Chalk Radio. “Join us as we talk with Justin Reich, assistant professor in comparative media studies at MIT. Professor Reich runs the Teaching Systems Lab, which was founded with the mission of designing, implementing, and researching the future of teacher learning. With the emergence...
Addressing Student Anxiety in Remote Learning with Jessica Minahan
May 08, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBThis week on TeachLab, Justin is joined by Jessica Minahan, a behavior analyst, special educator, author, and school consultant. They discuss how COVID-19 is affecting students with anxiety, how it manifests through behavior, and some simple strategies that teachers can use during remote learning to help students feel a bit more in control during these challenging times. “...there are a couple of things to keep in mind as you're planning curriculum and planning different things is we're goi...
Emergency Remote Learning in Middle Schools
May 01, 2020 09:00 - 29 minutes - 27.2 MBThis week on TeachLab, Justin Reich joins Blake Middle School of Medfield, MA for their Monday morning check-in to discuss the many challenges of distance learning, and the specific challenges of middle schools, who have uniquely diverse age-groups to address. Principal Nat Vaughn guides the discussion and provides questions for Justin to shed light on with his experience and research. “when I was a brand new teacher, my department head used to say.... every time you assign an essay, you're...
Modeling the Spread of a Virus with Daniel Wendel
April 24, 2020 09:00 - 25 minutes - 23.1 MBThis week on TeachLab, Justin Reich is joined by Daniel Wendel, Research Manager and Software Developer of the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program / Education Arcade. They discuss the importance and caveats of modeling, their use in the classrooms, and Daniel’s most recent collaboration project “Modeling the Spread of a Virus”, an interactive model designed to be used by teachers and parents for a conceptual understanding of how a virus spreads in a community, and how the individual can a...
Remote Learning Guidance from State Education Agencies with Martin West
April 20, 2020 09:00 - 1 hour - 57.7 MBThis week on TeachLab, Justin Reich presents findings from a report on remote learning guidance from state education agencies (see tsl.mit.edu/covid19). He discussed relevant background research, points of consensus among state guidance, and the most important question for schools right now: what is the purpose of schooling during a pandemic? Harvard University professor Marty West, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, joins as discussant to provide a state policy perspective. T...
Online Learning in the Age of COVID-19
April 10, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutes - 43.8 MBJustin Reich hosts a virtual session with MIT’s Jameel World Education Lab’s (JWEL) to offer practical guidance and strategies for online learning during the coronavirus pandemic. The live audience includes educators from all around the world, and Justin answers their questions and offers his advice on listening to students and faculty, designing learning for challenging times, and prioritizing the needs of marginalized students. “...really think about how you can partner with students and...
Higher Education's Pivot to Online Learning
April 02, 2020 09:00 - 49 minutes - 45.4 MBJustin Reich joins NPR’s On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti to discuss the challenges higher education is facing in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and some strategies for navigating them. They discuss the need to engage the student who are most struggling, respond to pre-recorded testimonials, and provide advice for faculty for enduring these difficult times. Meghna and Justin are accompanied by Christina Morales, a senior at the University of Florida, who describes her experience tran...
Facing History with Laura Tavares
March 26, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutes - 43.6 MBAt TeachLab we continue our efforts to support teachers during the coronavirus pandemic. In this episode, Justin Reich joins Laura Tavares from Facing History and Ourselves, a professional development organization empowering teachers & students to think critically about history & to understand the impact of their choices. We discussed building community, supporting students, and caring for each other in the transition to distance learning. During the webinar, Justin and Laura discuss: Sus...
Math Teaching During COVID-19 School Closures with Michael Pershan
March 19, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutes - 38.5 MBTo support teachers in the midst of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, TeachLab is switching our focus to highlight tools and strategies for effective teaching during this time. Today we talk with Michael Pershan. He is a New York City math teacher at one of the first schools in the country to shut down in the face of COVID-19. At his school, the goal was to transition fully to synchronous distance learning. Michael joins Justin Reich to discuss what we know about online and distance learning, an...
Michael Pershan
March 19, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutes - 38.5 MBTo support teachers in the midst of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, TeachLab is switching our focus to highlight tools and strategies for effective teaching during this time. Today we talk with Michael Pershan. He is a New York City math teacher at one of the first schools in the country to shut down in the face of COVID-19. At his school, the goal was to transition fully to synchronous distance learning. Michael joins Justin Reich to discuss what we know about online and distance lea...
Dr. Meira Levinson
March 12, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutes - 54.2 MBDr. Meira Levinson is a normative political philosopher, writer, and Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Meira joins Justin Reich to discuss an emerging field of educational ethics, what that means in the classroom, and just how nontrivial that can be in practice. “So as you start sort of peeling back the onion of the data, you think... I don't know if it's even possible to compare this charter with this district in terms of quality. And on the other hand, in...
Dr. Rich Milner
March 05, 2020 10:00 - 43 minutes - 39.6 MBRich Milner, Educator, Scholar and Author of the book “Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There: Understanding Diversity, Opportunity Gaps, and Teaching in Today’s Classrooms", joins Justin Reich in a powerful conversation on how to help educators work for equity for all students. Rich encourages teachers, "If you're going to engage work that is transformative, if you're going to engage work that meets the needs of every young person with whom you work, then you've got to consider race". R...
Neema Avashia
February 27, 2020 10:00 - 34 minutes - 32 MBNeema Avashia, a Civics teacher in the Boston Public Schools, joins Justin Reich to discuss the power of bringing real-world challenges into the classroom. We hear how Neema and her students rallied the community to challenge the closing of their school, McCormack Middle in Dorchester, and won. Neema speaks to the importance of empowering students to express themselves, and shares some of her best classroom moves. Neema’s Personal and Teaching Background Bringing complex issues into the cl...
Dr. Liz Self
February 20, 2020 10:00 - 31 minutes - 28.5 MBDr. Liz Self, Assistant Professor of the Practice at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development joins Justin Reich on TeachLab. They discuss Liz’s early teaching experiences, racial equity in the classroom, and Liz’s current work where she uses clinical simulations to help teachers practice for challenging situations in teaching. Liz’s early teaching experiences Simulations for pre-service teachers Recognizing the actual problem Large reflection process V...
Geoffrey Canada
February 13, 2020 10:00 - 36 minutes - 33 MBGeoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone joins Justin Reich to discuss fighting intergenerational poverty for inner-city children, the approach Harlem Children’s Zone is taking, and how you have to address the entire context of the child, not just their academics. Baby College in Harlem Harlem Education Pipeline Equity mindset in Harlem Balancing academics with life services Job Description/Teaching Creating a Learning Environment in Harlem About Our Guest: Geoffrey C...
Milly Arbaje-Thomas
February 06, 2020 10:00 - 26 minutes - 23.8 MBMilly Arbaje-Thomas joins Justin Reich to discuss the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), a voluntary school integration program in Boston, Massachusetts. They’ll focus on METCO’s mission, its underlying values, and Milly’s personal experience with the program as a former METCO parent and as its current CEO. Milly’s personal experience with METCO METCO’s current work Restorative Justice Teacher Diversity About Our Guest: Milly Arbaje-Thomas Milly Arbaje-Thomas ...
Dr. Ilana Horn
January 30, 2020 10:00 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBDr. Ilana Horn joins Justin Reich to discuss finding the strengths in every student, listening more closely to student thinking, and finding ways to shift curriculum from “school math” to the kind of math that’s both more engaging to students and closer to what real mathematicians do. Dr. Horn offers a slew of concrete strategies for teachers and teacher educators, from roster audits, to “becoming invisible” to mediated field experiences. Making math interesting for kids Addressing context...
José Luis Vilson
January 23, 2020 10:00 - 26 minutes - 24.2 MBJosé Luis Vilson joins Justin Reich to discuss how to connect with your students, what it means to be a teacher of color, and the mission of EduColor, a movement and organization that Vilson co-founded to elevate the voices of public school advocates of color on educational equity and justice. José tells us about how he connects with students early in the school year Teacher advocacy work as a person of color How to scaffold questions with your students with three tiers Guiding step by s...
Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum
January 16, 2020 10:00 - 27 minutes - 25.3 MBIn TeachLab’s first episode, our host Justin Reich has a powerful conversation with renowned author, psychologist and educator Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. Dr. Tatum shares some of the stories that inspired her bestselling book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race and offers tips for addressing the ongoing challenges of racial issues in classrooms and schools. Dr. Tatum encourages teachers to take the first step in tackling racism by ...
TeachLab Podcast Teaser
December 16, 2019 21:21 - 51 seconds - 783 KBIntroducing TeachLab with Justin Reich, a new podcast where we investigate the art and craft of teaching. Coming to you in January. Subscribe now!