About eighteen months ago, I started thinking about creating a podcast based on a Voxer group chat I launched on December 8, 2018, titled #EduRevolution. To be perfectly clear, I'm just the guy who volunteered to set up the chat in Voxer. The original members of the chat were Jon Corippo, Sonny Magana, David Culberhouse, Mike Chaix, Phil Harding and Pam Gildersleeve-Hernandez. We added a few more members along the way and the chat remains active today.
Voxer was the platform that would allow us to stay in touch via a continuous stream of typed and recorded messages to one another with a few images sprinkled here and there along the way. It's where our group could share research, crazy ideas and musings about how to improve student outcomes, engage teachers and leaders in working through educational transformation and deliver on the promise of creating a system that prepares students for their future.
The power of our group is diversity of thoughts, ideas, and experiences. We all approach the work through a different lens and this allows for the process of creative abrasion. The EduRevolution Podcast was launched with the intention of taking our Voxer chats to a broader audience that includes more diversity of thought, perspective, professional experience and lived experience. My goal is to interview courageous people who are committed to revolutionizing education such that each student is prepared with the knowledge, skills and dispositions they need to reach their full potential.
The inaugural episode of EduRevolution Podcast has launched! I'd invite you to give it a try. It's available where ever you listen to your podcasts. Please visit the EduRevolution website for free resources and check it out on Twitter
Here's a quick bit of dialogue from the show, just to give you a taste:)
Jon Corippo
If I could jump in like it's even worse than that because if you read some John Taylor Gatto, you need to remember that the kids have been conditioned by the machine to tell the teacher that they like what they're getting. That's why it's so hard to break the cycle. So, this is when I hear language arts teachers say, "oh my freshmen in high school love it when I read to them." Trust me, they do not. They love telling you they love it because you love hearing it. They also love not working. So, when they're not working, you may read the whole period, you can read anything you want because I don't care right now. And you're not going to get better by that. That would be like saying, "Oh, this football coach tells the best stories. I could listen to his stories, all practice long." That's not going to be a good season.
Sonny Magana
It's not gonna; it's not going to enhance performance. No, but what does enhance performance is being actively involved in the performance. So, shifting students’ roles, from passive consumers of worksheets, practice, lecture, whatever content and shifting them to become active producers of knowledge representations changes the game in measurable ways. And that's really why I'm so excited to be on this podcast that we continue the work that Jon and I are doing with the T3 framework the EduProtocols and the newly developed T3 EduProtocols, because it helps reduce teacher workload; shift the cognitive load to students, so they're producing representations of their learning. And that has an impact equivalent to an acceleration in learning productivity.
Jon Corippo
Yeah, well here, I'll give you a real-life example of what somebody's saying Mike. This is-- you're gonna crack up when you hear this, so I'm doing some PD for a district back east, I started my PD Friday at 4:15am. We did an hour and then I went back to bed, and then at 645, I got up and went to school. Right. But guess what, when I got to school, I checked my Twitter and teachers were already doing the things that I had shared in a 45 minute PD. Wait, they were already doing things, and had already gotten student feedback. And you guys know what thin slides are-- one teacher did thin slides and you know what the kid commented in the Google slide deck? "I could do this every day of my life!"