Getting Smart Podcast

Paul Castro, Director of School Performance for Houston A+ UP, discusses the challenges and rewards of innovating outside the box when creating a new school, and what that can mean for families, teachers and students.

Gordon Jones, Dean of Boise State University’s College of Innovation and Design, discusses how the college focuses on incubating the most innovative and exciting ideas in higher education today.

Greg Ponikvar and Alex Horowitz of Summit Olympus in Tacoma, Washington, share more about their school's personalized learning program for ninth and tenth graders designed to empower them to drive their own learning and prepare them for college and career success.

Ginger Noyes, Quest Early College High School principal, discusses how the Early College system works and how their students are performing in both high school and college. Four Quest students also share why they love attending this school and compare their current experience to attending a traditional high school.

Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg; Board Members Barbara O’Brien and Happy Haynes; and KIPP Colorado Executive Director Kimberlee share why DPS continues to lead when it comes to providing school choice for students and families.

Rob Mancabelli, Co-founder, Chairman of the Board & Chief Strategy Officer at BrightBytes, chats with Tom Vander Ark about providing educators with the right data when they’re making important decisions that can boost student achievement.

In this episode of the podcast, we share the voices of several education leaders at the 2016 iNACOL Symposium on why they attend this annual event and their most exciting takeaways.

Matt Candler, CEO and founder of 4.0 Schools, shares segments from his recent Community Summit keynote as well as Tom's personal interview with him afterward on the #FutureofSchool.

College Spark senior program officer Heather Gingrich and Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, discuss the importance of helping today's students become college, career and life ready, and how a partnership approach to this goal is really the best option.

Sandy Speicher, partner and managing director of education at IDEO, chats with Tom around what design thinking is and why it’s so important for teachers and education leaders right now.

Sangeet Paul Choudary, founder of Platformation Labs and the author of Platform Scale and Platform Revolution, joins Tom Vander Ark on the podcast to discuss what platforms are and what their future looks like in education.

The second podcast in our Place-Based Education campaign shares the perspectives of the teachers, leaders and learners at Teton Science Schools, with advice on how to implement PBE in the classroom, school, campus and community.

David Young, CEO of Participate, sits down with Tom Vander Ark to discuss the importance of developing global competencies, providing quality teacher professional development and dual language learning for today's students. We challenge you to join us in creating a #SmartPlanet. Be a globally connected educator and invite others to join too. Sign up at https://www.participate.com/ to access FREE online resources and join in the conversation with other globally aware educators.

High-quality project-based learning is not easy to implement, so the Getting Smart team is supporting a coalition of over 100 organizations and people to create guidelines to help educators do so. At a recent steering committee meeting, we asked ten EdLeaders about the benefits of project-based learning and the challenges to more high-quality PBL at scale, and share their thoughts in this podcast.

Dr. Philip Hickman, Superintendent of the Columbus Municipal School District in rural Mississippi, chats with Tom about how Columbus is proof that personalized learning and innovative education can happen anywhere. Check out his free "Ultimate Field Guide to Personalized Learning and OER Adoption" published in partnership with adaptive learning platform Fishtree: https://s3.amazonaws.com/fishtree-downloads/Field-Guide-to-Personalized-Learning-and-OER-Adoption.pdf