Scratch Your Itch

In this Backwards Podcast episode, A.J. Juliani sits down with author, professor, and speaker John Warner to discuss all things artificial intelligence (and how it impacts our current and future education system). John Warner is the author of "Why They Can't Write" and "The Writing Practices" where he discusses the need for a more creative and authentic approach to teaching writing. ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools have completely changed the landscape of writing for schools and work - this episode tackles those changes head-on.

I've heard from educators all around the country that this is a bigger issue and something we need to talk about more. Are you seeing this? In this video, I dive into some of the reasons for student apathy, and a three-part solution that works to boost engagement. Head on over to Ajjuliani.com to learn more.

Jon Corippo is a co-author (along with Marlena Hebern) of The Eduprotocol Field Guide 1 & 2. In this episode, we talk about how you can change your teaching forever, and impact student learning with Eduprotocols.  EduProtocols are instructional lesson frames that are designed to engage students in learning through critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity. EduProtocols can be used with any subject, any grade level, kindergarten through adult. Listen to the episode and head over to https://www.eduprotocols.com/ for more information!

In this episode, A.J. breaks down 10 different practical ways to transform from a sit-and-get, textbook type of classroom - to one that engages and challenges learners.

Want to empower and engage your learners? If you are anything like me then you know this has two sides, in theory, it sounds great, but often in practice, it is a hot mess! In this episode, I share some ways to scaffold student ownership and agency and give you a 9-month plan to get students to talk more, collaborate more, and create more.

This school year has been exhausting! Teachers need a more flexible, sustainable, and rewarding way to approach this work. They should not be doing the lion's share of the work in classrooms, yet that is what is happening in classrooms all over the country. If we are going to attract and retain high-quality teachers to this profession, we need to help them approach this work differently. Blended learning offers a viable path forward, shifting students into the role of active agents in the learning experience. Dr. Catlin Tucker breaks down how we can use Blended Learning to support meaningful change.

UDL Now! Author Katie Novak dives deep into the best practices with Universal Design For Learning, and how we can start removing barriers for all learners (kids and adults). If you've ever wanted to learn more about UDL, this episode is for you! And if you ever had a feeling that one size fits all learning doesn't work, here's how to fix it with real examples.

When 5th-grade teachers Vanessa Shriver and Nichole Caleris realized their Ohio students were missing some of the most important pieces of Social Studies, (due to testing focusing on Math and ELA) they decided to try something different. With the help of their Principal and 5th grade team colleagues, they created Wondrous Wednesday. Every Wednesday their students would dive deep into Social Studies projects that would connect across the curriculum. Their deep dive into history led to some amazing products being developed and awesome experiences (even in the midst of the pandemic). Hear there story in this Backwards podcast episode!

Too often our systems are set up to be rigid and standard, when we know the world is adaptable and flexible. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit our schools, it was the people who were adaptable. The system was not. The assessments were not. The policies were not. Most schools and organizations had nothing prepared to handle this virtual and hybrid situation, so like in other times in history, the burden fell on the teachers and educators to make things work. How can we build systems that are adaptable enough to support flexible learning situations and our people? That's where this solo podcast dives in to reflect on our last two years.

Melinda Wenner Moyer has been a science journalist for 15 years, covering new trends and controversies in science and medicine. She is also a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine and a faculty member in the Science, Health & Reporting Program at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Since having kids a decade ago, she's been answering parenting questions with science, too. She was Slate's first parenting advice columnist, and regularly writes about parenting (and science) for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her first book, How To Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes: Science-based Strategies for Better Parenting—From Tots to Teens, was published in July 2021. 

As the popularity of “Growth Mindset” has flourished over the past few years, we've seen many articles, books, and resources come out about how kids should be taught to have a growth mindset, over a fixed mindset. Yet, a lot of the talk around this switch in mindset is focused on what you believe will happen, versus the actual results. In my recent conversation with Trevor Ragan (founder of TrainUgly.com) we talk about all things “growth mindset” and the important distinction that happens when we see for ourselves that skills are built, not born.

The Backwards Podcast is back, and in our first episode of Season 2, Host A.J. Juliani shares a story of adaptable people solving unique problems. If we want to build something better, we almost always have to start from the ground up!

In this episode, we talk with best-selling author and curriculum expert Heidi Hayes Jacobs about her book Bold Moves For Schools and her work in education around the world.

In this episode we talk with Learning That Transfers co-authors Julie Stern, Kayla Duncan and Trevor Aleo (we were missing their fourth co-author Krista Ferraro). How can we design curriculum for a changing world? That is the question that their new book sets out to solve, and our conversation is a wide-ranging dive into all things design, especially in our current situation where education has been impacted by the pandemic.

This week we are chatting with two amazing educators: Zaretta Hammond is the author of Culture Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. She's a former classroom English teacher, and she's been doing instructional design, school coaching, professional development for the past 18 years. She's been on the national education reform organizations, National Equity Project, the former Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, and she does work every single day around the idea of practice, specifically in culturally responsive teaching and instructional equity. We'll also hear from cognitive scientist, Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D. She is the author of the book Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning and an Assistant Professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, teaching psychological science to exceptional undergraduate musicians. Pooja's research has been published in leading peer-reviewed psychology journals; featured in the New York Times, Education Week, and Scientific American; recognized by the National Science Foundation; and highlighted in numerous books, podcasts, and videos.

In this episode, we chat with NextLesson CEO and Founder Dion Lim. Dion has had tremendous success backward designing various areas of life. Now he has taken on education with his startup NextLesson and Grokspot. Listen as we talk about his upbringing, his business story, and how he is currently handling the challenge of parenting. 

In this episode of The Backwards Podcast, we talk with Building For Everyone author, Annie Jean-Baptiste, and Blended Learning in Action author, Catlin Tucker.  Annie Jean-Baptiste is the Head of Product Inclusion at Google and dives into ways we can design learning with equity and inclusion in mind. Catlin Tucker follows up with practical strategies to create relevant and meaningful blended learning experiences. 

In this episode, we talk with Atomic Habits author James Clear. This book has sold over 1 million copies and has helped change countless lives around the world. James breaks down how to actually reach your goals by backward planning your habits in ways that allow for growth and consistency.

On this episode of The Backwards Podcast, we sit down to discuss education, parenting, and what it even means to be "successful" with Esther Wojcicki.  One of the reasons people go to Esther Wojcicki for parenting advice is because her three daughters are off-the-charts successful: Susan is the CEO of YouTube, Janet is a professor at UC San Francisco, and Anne is the CEO of 23andMe. What’s more, Wojcicki has been a teacher for 36 years, helping build a world-famous media arts program at Palo Alto High School. Her latest book, How to Raise Successful People, builds upon her life story as an educator and parent, and follows the success of her first book, Moonshots in Education.

We chat with Kristen Swanson about the work she is doing at Slack as the Chief of Staff for Customer Experience, and how her years of developing curriculum, helping to start Edcamp, and teaching led her to use a backwards approach in all kinds of areas.

In this episode of The Backwards Podcast, Erica Buddington, The Langston League CEO, shares how they create mirrors by decolonizing curriculum. You'll learn Erica's story as well as the work she has been doing in curriculum with schools and districts around the country.  Since 2016, Langston League has imagined and enacted culturally responsive instructional materials that have reached over one million students, families, and community stakeholders. Langston League specializes in teaching people how to design and implement instructional material through professional development, curriculum and product design, facilitation and coaching. Since inception, we’ve served clients across multiple states and three countries, with clientele including Google Code Next, Achievement First Schools, HBO, Movers & Shakers, Netflix, Medgar Evers College, Up Academy, Because of Them We Can, and so many more.

A.J. Juliani talks with Jay McTighe, co-author of Understanding By Design (with Grant Wiggins). Jay breaks down how backward design works, what this looks like in learning, and what he has learned in training thousands of people on the backward design process over the past three decades. Inside you'll also hear about curriculum mapping 3.0 and what that means for learning, training, and planning in the future.

You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon yourself at some point in time. It always happens in the same way: Step 1: You don’t care about someone, something, or you have a pre-conceived notion of how you should feel about someone or something. Step 2: You hear, read, or watch a story about that someone or something. Step 3: You have a newfound respect, understanding, and empathy for that someone or something. This is not some magical trick that happens to all of us. It is the science of stories, and how they impact our learning and empathy for others. The short version of the science is this: Our brains pay special attention to stories, engaging more areas of the mind then when we hear or see facts. And when we learn a good story, our brains synthesize the neurochemical oxytocin. This helps us feel others’ emotions and empathize with them. In this episode I dive deep into the research, science, and impact stories have on learning experiences and building empathy in all of us.

In this episode we chat with Zaretta Hammond, the best-selling author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain. Zaretta Hammond is a former classroom English teacher who has been doing instructional design, school coaching, and professional development around the issues of equity, literacy, and culturally responsive teaching for the past 18 years.  She teaches as a lecturer at St. Mary’s College’s Kalmanovitz School of in Moraga, California. In addition to consulting and professional development, she has been on staff at national education reform organizations, including the National Equity Project and the former Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC).  She has trained instructional coaches in reading development, especially targeted at students of color and English learners.  She has also designed national seminars such as the three-day Teaching with A Cultural Eye series for teachers and school leaders. She is regularly invited to present at regional and national conferences. She has authored articles that have appeared in publications such as Phi Delta Kappan. Along with a focus on culturally responsive teaching, Ms. Hammond has a strong research agenda around literacy, vocabulary development, and equity. She has designed culturally responsive tutor training programs aimed at volunteer reading tutors for a variety of non-profit organizations. She currently designing a literacy program to accelerate low reading skills among high school students. She holds a Masters in Secondary English Education. She also writes the popular ready4rigor.com blog.  Zaretta is the proud parent of two young adult children, both of whom she taught to read before they went to school. She resides in Berkeley, CA with her husband and family. 

Today in this short episode, we’re going to be talking about empathy. Yes, empathy. I just released a new book called “Empathy Every Day.” It is 366 short vignettes, stories, quotes, and research about listening, learning, and leading with empathy. As I’m going through this writing process, I’ve been reading a lot about empathy. Particularly, I want to share eight books that spoke to me in different ways about empathy, gave me the science behind it, stories behind it, perspectives that I didn’t have on empathy. In the podcast, I share my thoughts on these 8 books that I list below. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D. is a cognitive scientist, conducting research on how students learn since 2005. She is the author of the book Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning and an Assistant Professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, teaching psychological science to exceptional undergraduate musicians. Pooja's research has been published in leading peer-reviewed psychology journals; featured in the New York Times, Education Week, and Scientific American; recognized by the National Science Foundation; and highlighted in numerous books, podcasts, and videos. Pooja’s love of learning formed at the outset of her career as a 4th and 5th grade teacher in St. Louis, Missouri. She serves as a consultant and facilitates professional development workshops on the science of learning around the world. Pooja received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, under the mentorship of distinguished memory scholar Henry L. Roediger, III (author of Make It Stick). Learn more at poojaagarwal.com and follow her on Twitter @PoojaAgarwal.

In this episode of Talking About Practice, we talk with NYT Best-Selling Atomic Habits author James Clear. James has built an audience of over 400,000 email subscribers at JamesClear.com and his new book on habits is a game-changer.  For one, it takes real research and links it up to actual real ways to make changes whether you are a creative, learner, teacher, or leader. In this episode, we talk about the new book, James' journey to becoming a blogger, author, and speaker. However, I'm most excited about the conversation we have around exploring and exploiting our passions for a bigger purpose. It is a fascinating look at why "scratching your itch" can lead to lots of trials before finally finding success.

In this episode of Talking About Practice, we talk with best-selling author, Angela Duckworth. Angela is a professor at University of Pennsylvania, and has one of the most popular TED Talks in history on Grit. Her best-selling book, aptly titled, "Grit", centers on the idea that grit leads to success. We chat with Angela about her current work with Character Lab, what she has seen work with students and adults, and what she's currently curious about. She also shares her story of growth and scratching her own itch!

In this episode of Talking About Practice, we interview Trevor Ragan. Trevor is the founder of TrainUgly.com and creates viral videos around learning and mindset. Trevor's journey began with the dream of making the Duke Basketball team, and it led him down a path of figuring out how to train like a Zoo Tiger and get past having a fixed mindset. Check out this episode to hear how Trevor's work is inspiring organizations, companies, and schools around the world to think differently about learning.