Episodes

Today's conversation is with Kris Swett, who wrote the following: “My passion is for the alternative. Making sure schools can better serve different students' needs, my life's work is to create alternative educational models. Conventional schooling is falling by the wayside and technology, and a global community becomes our new reality. We cannot teach the students of the future with the ways of the past." Though Kris has held a number of roles in education today’s episode is going to focus a gr...

Listeners, Real World Learning is a Kansas City-based initiative, incubated at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in partnership with the community, that works to prepare its region, students, and employers for the future. Through immersive experiences like projects and internships with leading employer partners, students get a head start on achieving their career goals at an early age. I learned about Real World Learning through its facilitator at the Kauffman Foundation, educator in residen...

Andrew Culberson lives and works in New Brunswick, which is one of the 10 (and three territories) provinces that make up Canada. Andrew is a learning specialist for the New Brunswick Department of Education, with a focus on school counseling, mental health and high school change. He has been working in leadership roles in schools and in education and early childhood development over the past 18 years. In many ways Andrew embodies and thrives on what we at What School Could Be care deeply about, ...

Meet Lee Fertig, the Head of School at the Nueva School in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lee has more than 30 years of leadership and teaching experience in a wide variety of educational settings including five international schools in Ethiopia, Brazil, Spain, and Belgium, a leading independent school in New York City, and a voluntary integration public magnet school in Minneapolis. In addition, for many years Lee has been training at the Principals’ Training Center (PTC). You will hear more about...

My guests for this episode are The River School’s Dr. Christane Connors and Dr. Sharlene Ottley. The River School is located on MacArthur Boulevard in Washington, DC. The pillars that The River School stands on, listed at their website, include the following: a commitment to progressive education, a play-based, child-centered thematic curriculum, a commitment to diverse and inclusive classrooms and active learning. So how does The River School stand out from similar independent, progressive elem...

My guest for this episode is a Fairfax County Public Schools music teacher, Annie Ray. For many of you listeners, her name will immediately ring a bell. To introduce Annie, I am going to read verbatim from a National Public Radio online article posted on February, 7th, 2024. “GRAMMY Awards don't only go to the people who produce and perform songs. For just over a decade, they've also been given out to those who teach others how to make music. The Music Educator Award, presented by the Recording ...

My guest for this episode is Garrett Smiley, the co-founder of Sora Schools, a description of which, frankly, is very hard to pin down. Sora is an online learning experience, but beyond that, it is a complex and fabulous answer to the question, What could school be? So that you, listeners, know what you are in for in this episode, I am going to quote directly from Sora’s website. “Our curriculum is designed to meet the needs and goals of all students, while delivering a program that is empowerin...

My guest is Allie Wong, a PBLWorks National Faculty member who is extremely passionate about Project-Based Learning, mainly because as a graduate from a PBL high school herself, she has seen firsthand the benefits of student-centered, authentic and real world learning. From 2012 through 2022 Allie worked as a math science instructor, as a dean of students, as school director and as a graduate school of education instructor at High Tech High, the network of elementary, middle and high schools mad...

Today's guest is Sarah DeLuca, a K-1 early childhood educator at Hanahauʻoli School in Honolulu, where she has been teaching and learning with and from her students, colleagues, and families since 2009. Sarah was born and raised in Honolulu and graduated from ‘Iolani School. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon in International Studies and her masters in teaching at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She has lived and studied in Italy and enjoys traveling to spend tim...

My guest today is Hannah Grady Williams. Hannah grew up in North Carolina as the oldest of seven homeschooled children and started college online through College+ when she was 14, meaning she graduated from high school and college, with a degree in international business, at the same time. Hannah notes that by roughly grades seven and eight, she was mostly teaching herself, although she did have outside instructors for some subject areas. She shared with me that most of her “education” came from...

Joann McPike is the Founder and Board Chair at THINK Global School (TGS), a traveling high school, and much more. In September of 2010, TGS began its first semester in Sweden with 15 students hailing from 11 countries. The traveling high school has since visited every continent except Antarctica, hosted dozens of influential guest speakers, campaigned for human and environmental rights, mounted art exhibitions, created thousands of essays, blog posts, and videos, sent graduating students to univ...

This 2021 remastered Game Changer conversation is with X in a Box CEO and former Pixar executive Elyse Klaidman, educator Jorge Flores, and student Matteo Aldon. They focus on the remarkable Story Xperiential program, a nine-week course that takes participants behind the scenes at Pixar, and helps students become remarkable story-tellers. Their 2021 pilot cohort had 350 participants across the US and Canada, with a whopping 92% completion rate. Story Xperiential was created by Elyse Klaidman, To...

EL Education was born out of a collaboration between The Harvard Graduate School of Education and Outward Bound USA. What started as a concept has grown into a movement. Its mission is to create classrooms where teachers can fulfill their highest aspirations and students achieve more than they think possible, becoming active contributors to building a better world. In its core DNA, EL Education is all about this one question: What if school served a higher purpose? Over the last ten years EL Edu...

Pittsburgh has spawned two major contributions to educating our youth: Mr. Rogers and Remake Learning, which will be the focus of today's rebroadcast of a What School Could Be Game Changer conversation back in 2021. You will meet Remake Learning’s founder, Gregg Behr, and co-author Ryan Rydzewski of their book about Mr. Rogers, When You Wonder, You’re Learning, released in 2021. You’ll be flooded by childhood memories, and marvel at how the values of Fred Rogers pointed us to such an inspiring v...

The subject of today’s episode is not a school in the traditional definition of the word. It is a learning hub, a learning studio, a series of experiences and creative moments in time, if you will, that lives on the outer edges of education, but should, in my humble opinion, be in the DNA of every public, private and charter school in the US and the world. Today we travel to 450 Massachusetts Ave in Cambridge, Massachusetts to see and hear about NuVu Studio, a place so remarkable it could be cal...

I encourage all listeners to watch this short video before listening to the episode. Richard Boerner, the Superintendent at the American School in São Paulo, otherwise known as Graded, is leading his faculty, students and extended community on an Homeric and epic voyage of discovery into learner-centered, deeper learning. In this episode, find out how. For the past 30 plus years, Richard has held a variety of administrative and teaching positions in an array of international and US educational s...

Frankfurt International School (FIS) student, Sophia Dietrich has an international background that includes being born in Denver, Colorado, growing up in France, then growing up again in Germany. A senior at FIS, she has already developed an international mindset and, interestingly, a passion, dare I say, for Japanese culture and its values of harmony, tranquility, purity, and respect. It is safe to say Sophia is a globalist who has a broad and deep understanding of the world, and education. And...

Today my guest is Dorothy Maxwell, an educator in face-to-face and online teaching and learning for more than 50 years. She holds a bachelor's degree in Business Education from the University of Maine, a Master’s Degree in Education and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Educational Leadership from the University of Southern Maine. She has served as President of the National Business Education Association, the Eastern Business Education Association, the New England Business Education Association...

Today I am going to share with you a special something, a very short special something. One of my former podcast guests, Jonathan Medeiros (NBCT, Kauai High School) reached out to me to see if I might join his high school students who were using podcasts as a way to demonstrate their learning in a language arts class. I was only too happy to say yes. That virtual session, last spring, 2023, was marvelous. I shared the story behind my show and they shared the projects they were working on and how...

Today my guests are Jonathon Medeiros and Natalie Lalagos. In the spirit of my episode with the folks at Embark Education in Colorado, I talk to Natalie first, then Jonathon, then I bring them together for some reflections and final thoughts. By way of context, the Social Justice Education in Hawai‘i Project is a joint initiative of the Hanahauʻoli School Professional Development Center and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s college of Education. It is aimed at growing the capacity of local e...

Listeners, I could not be more stoked to share that today my guest is Michael Nachbar, the Executive Director of the Global Online Academy, otherwise known as GOA, a pioneering network of more than schools and educators reimagining learning to empower students and educators to thrive in a globally networked society. Michael was appointed the executive director of GOA in 2011, its inaugural year. Since 2011 he has collaborated with global educational institutions to develop a network of over 100 ...

This is the 5th in a series of special episodes that come from the Game Changer and Big Think speaker series in the WhatSchoolCouldBe.org archives. Keep in mind the audio comes from Zoom calls and YouTube webinars, so expect a couple bumps and knocks along the way. On the other hand, the conversations you will hear are incredible for their depth and insight into what school could be, and what could be school. In this episode Dr. Sandra Chapman joins What School Could Be hosts Kapono Ciotti and S...

My guest for this 110th episode is Kentucky’s Dr. Carmen Coleman. Boy-oh-boy, did I look forward to this conversation, and enjoy prepping for it! Back in April of this year, 2023 I finally had the chance to meet Dr. Coleman in person at the Deeper Learning Conference, held at High Tech High. I felt like I had just met the Jane Goodall of student-driven learning. Dr. Coleman is Kentucky bluegrass through and through. Her first teaching job was at the elementary school her mom taught at, and she a...

Today my guest is Cerina Livaudais, a computer science coach, mentor and guide, and education leader at DreamHouse Academy Ewa Beach, on the West Side of the island of Oahu in Hawai'i. DreamHouse was founded by a team of individuals led by Alex Teece, a former guest on this show and a brilliantly innovative leader who worked relentlessly to get DreamHouse’s charter application passed. Alex recently handed over the reins at DreamHouse to Ryan Mandado, whose name will come up at the end of this co...