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Jared and Jared are joined by John White and Rick Dalton to discuss the important role education and career planning play in students’ lives. Rick believes every student deserves a chance to forge their own route to a bright future – no matter where they’re from, or what resources are available to them. For over 30 years he’s worked side-by-side with schools, colleges and businesses to help students find their own “brilliant pathways” by becoming college and career ready. https://brilliantpathways.org

Interview with Annie Morrison and Litsy Witkowski In this episode, Jared and Jared are joined by Litsy and Annie from Rivet Education. They share how Rivet’s Professional Learning Partner Guide is helping educators find higher quality professional learning that effectively supports the implementation of high-quality instructional materials. Annie Morrison is a public relations professional with more than 16 years of experience in the education, retail, broadcasting, and nonprofit sectors. As co-founder and principal consultant at Rivet Education, she works with state education agencies to develop and execute cohesive academic strategies to scale the use of high-quality instructional materials with a specific focus on the communications needed to execute those strategies well. Before founding Rivet, Annie served as the Director of Communications for the Louisiana Department of Education where she managed and led educator relations for the agency. During her seven years with the agency, she developed and executed state-wide and national public relation strategies related to the state’s academic plan, impacting over 100 school systems and 50,000 educators state-wide. Litsy Witkowski specializes in working with states to establish the conditions for strong instruction in every classroom. Her work is grounded in the belief that teachers deserve both high-quality instructional materials that get students excited to learn and job-embedded support that allows them to use those materials in a way that maximizes student outcomes. Before founding Rivet, Litsy served as Rebecca Kockler’s Chief of Staff on the Academic Content team at the Louisiana Department of Education. In this role, Litsy helped develop and lead a multi-pronged strategy for scaling the adoption and implementation of HQIM across the state. This included overseeing the PL that LDOE provides directly to educators (e.g. Teacher Leader Summit and Supervisor Collaborations); developing and leveraging a strong vendor marketplace (e.g. LDOE’s PD Vendor Guide); harnessing the power and expertise of local educators to provide content- and curriculum-specific professional development to thousands of teachers across Louisiana (e.g. Teacher Leaders and Content Leaders); and aligning incentives to these strategies (e.g. school system planning process).

In this episode, the guys continue their discussion on reading reforms in recent years and focus on new developments in the availability of high-quality curriculum. Jared and Jared specifically dive into why it is so important for districts to adopt high-quality curriculum and the challenges of creating curriculum that align with the science of reading.

In this episode, Jared and Jared discuss the overall challenges of teaching and assessing reading acumen and how we can improve reading as teachers, administrators, and parents. The co-hosts discuss the evolution of reading in the classroom and instruction. This is part one of three of why reading is so hard to teach and evaluate in education and the changes to practice.

Jared and Jared discuss some aspects of virtual learning that are going well so far this school year. They discuss topics like student schedules, virtual learning platforms, synchronous vs. asynchronous instruction (and why we need to ditch those terms), and the content students are learning. Jared and Jared are also joined by Robin McClellan, from Sullivan County Schools, as she shares some aspects of their virtual learning plan that are working well for students and parents.

Does Career Ready Mean College Bound for Soon to be High School Graduates? In this episode, we discuss the overall view of career-ready and how does it connect to college or a skilled trade. Many career-ready programs do not mean they are preparing students to go to college. In some applications, these programs may train high schoolers to take trade or information technology jobs. Some school districts have partnered with their local Chamber of Commerce to create programs that prepare graduates to take local jobs in the current economy. We discuss some examples of programs and how to partner with industry to create these programs to engage the community and gain useful training learning industry skills. Some educators have found value in these programs but should consider issues of scheduling, safety, experiential learning, and creating learning experiences.

This episode of the edspective podcast, Drs. Bigham and Myracle discuss school grade retention and what options should be available given the current COVID pandemic given the challenges with technology and shifting the curriculum online. One of the primary reasons why districts and states suspended assessment, some schools were unable to change to online learning or how long the virus was going to stay around during the spring. Now we are entering the 2019-2020 school year, COVID appears to be here to stay. Yet, schools may determine some students are behind and could be held back. We discuss how those decisions might impact students and schools if not carefully documented. However, we consider most schools did not retain students within the same grade. Drs. Bigham and Myracle interview the podcast producer Dr. Silver regarding his experiences and how he would react if the school system were to hold Dr. Silver’s son back in school.

For the second episode of the Edspective podcast, the co-hosts discuss how standardized testing might look in Fall 2020, given the current COVID-19 context. We discuss how various states handle standardized testing suggesting that postponing standardized testing might be the best approach given all the ambiguity regarding the virus, transmissions rates, viral load, and other variables still unaccounted for in the current model. Further, we suggest that such testing could be high stakes in ways we have no account for, including using the performance metrics as a grade for a class. Therefore we suggest that school systems should carefully weight the unknowns against the push to reopen.

In the first full episode of the Edspective Podcast, Drs. Bigham and Myracle introduce the podcast with the types of topics and themes pertinent to teachers, educators, administrators, and parents. In this episode, we discuss the current COVID-19 crisis and how each of us should approach the upcoming school year in the new normal. They discuss the current trends in elementary and secondary education. We discuss the current research and the ways different school systems are addressing the unforeseen in the upcoming year.

TBA