Podcast
The Harvard EdCast
Hosted by Harvard Graduate School of Education · EN
In the complex world of education, the Harvard EdCast keeps the focus simple: what makes a difference for learners, educators, parents, and our communities. The EdCast is a weekly podcast about the ideas that shape education, from early learning through college and career. We talk to teachers, researchers, policymakers, and leaders of schools and systems in the US and around the world — looking for positive approaches to the challenges and inequities in education. Through authentic conversation, we work to lower the barriers of education’s complexities so that everyone can understand.
The Harvard EdCast is produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and hosted by Jill Anderson. The opinions expressed are those of the guest alone, and not the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
25episodes
Episodes
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Why Half of College Students Feel Alone and How to Fix It | Alexis Redding
Apr 800:28:17Tap to summarize00:00 – Rethinking the “Best Years” Narrative 01:30 – Are Students in Crisis—or in Transition? 03:00 – What the Data Really Says 05:00 – Loneliness as a Normal Developmental Experience 07:00 – The Expectation Gap 09:00 – When Language Gets Complicated 11:30 – The Institutional Dilemma 13:30 – Meeting Students Where They Are 15:00 – The W-Curve Explained 17:30 – Why the W-Curve Matters 19:00 – Beyond the Traditional Student 20:30 – Building Connection in Online Learning 22:00 – From Theory to Practice 23:30 – The Power of “Micro-Mentorship” 25:00 – Supporting Students Through Big Decisions 26:00 – Advice for Parents 27:00 – Final Takeaways
Transcribe →Why Moving Ahead in Math Isn’t Always the Right Move | Jon Star
Apr 100:25:53Tap to summarize00:00The case for rethinking how we challenge advanced math students 00:49Why focus on high-performing students during a time of learning recovery 01:09The tradeoff: prioritizing struggling students vs. supporting advanced learners 02:51Inside the classroom: the real challenge of differentiation 03:17Why accelerating students can make teaching more difficult 05:21The downside of treating math like a race 06:37A better approach: depth over speed 07:44When accelerationdoesmake sense (and for whom) 10:43What “math enrichment” really means 11:07Why worksheets and puzzles aren’t enough 12:13Simple questions that push deeper thinking 13:39What to do with early finishers 15:06Practical strategies teachers can use right away 16:19Why grades 3–5 is a key turning point 19:13Why this issue looks different in high school 20:03The reality of teaching accelerated students 21:31How common is deep, discussion-based math teaching?
Transcribe →The Pressure to Chase Prestige in College Admissions | Jeff Selingo
Mar 2500:21:54Tap to summarize00:00 Why families fixate on elite colleges—and the rise of the “panicking class” 01:15 How rankings shape decisions (and why they mislead) 03:10 The truth about differences between top-ranked schools 04:45 Why choosing a college feels so confusing 06:15 How test-optional, early decision, and the Common App changed everything 08:20 Inside the “black box” of holistic admissions 10:05 Who makes up the “panicking class” 11:40 Reality check: most colleges accept most students 13:00 Prestige pressure as a parenting culture problem 14:30 What “fit” really means—and where to start 16:00 When prestige leads to the wrong choice 17:10 How to decide after admissions disappointment 18:40 What should change in college admissions 20:10 Will parent attitudes shift in the future? 21:30 Closing thoughts
Transcribe →What Mississippi Got Right About Reading | Kymyona Burk
Mar 1800:26:28Tap to summarize0:25 — Why reading scores still struggle 2:15 — Rise of the science of reading 5:00 — Aligning leadership to drive reform 7:30 — Consistency and long-term commitment 10:00 — Implementation matters more than policy 12:30 — Where literacy efforts break down 14:30 — What teachers need to do 17:00 — From percentages to individual students 19:00 — Why some states lose momentum. 20:30 — “Mays vs. shalls” in policy 22:00 — How long it takes to see results 23:30 — Third-grade retention 25:00 — Why early intervention matters most 26:01 — Mississippi Marathon / Closing thoughts
Transcribe →What Students Really Need from Sex Education | Shafia Zaloom
Mar 1100:27:48Tap to summarize0:00 — Introduction 1:05 — The three types of sex education most people receive 3:20 — What comprehensive sexuality education actually means 5:10 — Why consent alone isn't enough 7:00 — Why sexuality education shouldn't be siloed in health class 9:20 — Why conversations about sexuality should start early 11:30 — Teaching body awareness and safety 13:30 — Why kids ask questions about where babies come from 15:20 — The biggest challenges educators face today 17:30 — Why teachers often fear administrative backlash 19:00 — How school leaders can move forward despite resistance 21:00 — What progress would look like in 10 years. 22:30 — Closing thoughts
Transcribe →How Questions Can Transform Student-Centered Learning
Mar 400:18:50Tap to summarizeHarvard Graduate School of Education ProfessorKaren Brennan sees classrooms as magical spaces when we begin with curiosity, not just content. “When I think about design process, from the initial moments of young people working on projects, all the way to the end where they've gone through the highs, the lows, the emotional vicissitudes of bringing their ideas into the world, the messy middle through to the end, there is a role for questions in every moment,” she says. “Start with questions, for me, is really about an attitude of leading with student interests.” Drawing on a yearlong study of 25 teachers across elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, Brennan describes how powerful learning begins by asking genuine questions, or really questions teachers don’t already know the answers to. She is the co-author ofStarting with Questions: The Classroom as Design Studio, which explores what happens when educators take students’ ideas seriously. Rather than treating questions as a closing ritual at the end of a lesson, Brennan argues for an orientation shift: start with what learners are thinking about, what they care about, and what feels hard or exciting to them. Grounded in traditions of progressive education, this approach does not reject content knowledge. Instead, it reframes the role of teachers as expert guides, offering domain expertise, metacognitive scaffolding, affirmation, and structure within a classroom culture that values intellectual humility. Brennan comes to the classroom from a design studio background, a space that embraces tinkering and where self-directed learning happens in community. In studio-based environments, students pursue projects that matter to them while learning alongside peers and with the support of teachers. Self-direction, she explains, is not scriptless chaos but more structured, scaffolded, and deeply relational. That mindset also shapes her optimism about artificial intelligence. Brennan argues that AI is not about offloading thinking, but about expanding what learners can imagine and build. “I feel like we don’t give learners enough credit,” she says. “When there’s all this handwringing around AI stealing assignments, maybe we were asking students to do things that weren’t that important to begin with. If AI can do it, maybe we need to be looking for new opportunities for interestingness for learners. In this episode, Brennan pushes beyond traditional classroom approaches toward a powerful idea: how classrooms become transformative when we make space for students’ questions and trust their capacity to pursue them.
Transcribe →Why Teachers Stay: What Research Reveals About Retention
Feb 2500:28:06Tap to summarizeWhen Doug Larkin and Suzanne Poole Patzelt set out to study the relationship between teacher pay and retention, what they found surprised them. “Without fail, no matter what school we went to, what state we were in, that was always the number one response,” Poole Patzelt says. “We did nothing to put that at the top. That was far and beyond the number one reason why teachers stayed was because of who they were working with.” She adds, “We are relational organisms. We rely on relationships and other people.” Pay, Larkin explains, mattered but differently than we often assume. Teachers generally felt their compensation was adequate. What didn’t hold up was the idea that increasing pay would directly increase effort or retention. “It doesn’t fit that behavioral logic,” he says. “If we pay teachers 10% more, they’re going to work 10% harder. That’s not what was happening here at all.” Instead, what consistently surfaced were collegial cultures where teachers felt supported rather than scrutinized. In their new book, The Reasons Teachers Stay, they draw on a six-year longitudinal study of US schools, districts, and communities with high rates of teacher retention. In the districts they studied — spanning rural, suburban, and urban communities — a defining feature was a “real lack of teacher isolation.” Teachers shared resources. They kept doors open. Administrators fostered trust. Poole Patzelt notes that many of the top retention factors were intertwined: supportive leadership strengthened teacher relationships, and those relationships reinforced a broader culture of care. Each district operated within its own cultural and political context. Still, the strongest schools resembled what Larkin calls a “healthy ecosystem for teachers,” where induction went beyond onboarding and new teachers were not left in “sink or swim” environments. To make sense of these dynamics, Larkin introduces the “teacher embeddedness” framework, a way of understanding retention not as a single decision, but as the accumulation of many small connections. He shares a metaphor from elementary schools where principals are duct-taped to a wall as part of a reading challenge. One strip of tape does nothing. But layer enough pieces together, and they hold someone in place. “Each little thing you can identify,” he explains, “is another piece of tape that holds that teacher in place.” In this episode, they introduce the “teacher embeddedness” framework and gain better insight in why understanding what keeps teachers in the job might be the biggest shift a district can make.
Transcribe →How to Disagree Better: Strategies for Constructive Conversations
Feb 1800:31:40Tap to summarizeDisagreement is a part of everyday life, yet most of us avoid it whenever possible. Harvard Kennedy School Professor Julia Minson knows where and why our conversations often go wrong and how we can learn to disagree better.Minson, whose research focuses on how people engage with opposing viewpoints, says fear drives avoidance. “Most of these conversations are a pleasant surprise, but people don't expect that. And so they just continue going around with the worst-case scenario in their heads, instead of exploring the reality that's out there,” she says. People worry that disagreements will be unpleasant, fruitless, or that the other person’s perspective will be shocking or even “crazy.” Research shows these assumptions are often wrong: when we actually engage, opposing views are usually more reasonable, moderate, and defensible than expected.The problem isn’t only avoidance. Many conversations fail because participants focus on persuasion, treating arguments like battles to be won. Minson says that shifting the goal from winning to understanding changes the dynamic entirely, turning disagreement into an opportunity to learn rather than a contest to conquer.To help people navigate challenging conversations, Minson and her colleagues developed a practical toolkit called conversational receptiveness, or the framework they call HEAR. Minson emphasizes that these skills take practice. Starting with low-stakes conflicts, like deciding when to set an alarm at home, helps build habits that carry into more emotionally charged conversations at work or in classrooms. “I really think that practicing on small, daily disagreements makes you more able to come up with the words when it's a big, important one and you're really frazzled,” she says.In this episode, the Harvard EdCast explores how to disagree better, practical steps for transforming conversations, and the obstacles that often get in the way of constructive dialogue.
Transcribe →Civics at 250: Teaching Democracy in an Unfinished Nation
Feb 1100:18:04Tap to summarizeAs the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, how should schools teach this foundational document?Harvard lecturer Eric Soto-Shed joins The Harvard EdCast to discuss how civics education is evolving from patriotic education and action civics to media literacy and reflective patriotism. He explains why students should engage not only with the Declaration’s democratic ideals, but also with its contradictions.In a politically charged moment, Soto-Shed argues that classrooms shouldn’t just prepare students for civic life, they should function as civic spaces themselves. The goal isn’t memorization. It’s helping young people understand that democracy is a work in progress — and that they have a role in sustaining and strengthening it.
Transcribe →Understanding the Lives of Migrant Children in America
Nov 2600:21:54Tap to summarizeWith about one in four children in the U.S. now living in immigrant families, Harvard Associate Professor Gabrielle Oliveira argues that supporting their wellbeing should be a national priority – not just for the children themselves, but for the strength of society as a whole.Yet for many Americans, migration is often seen as risky or even reckless, especially when it involves bringing children across dangerous borders and leaving everything familiar behind. Oliveira reframes this perspective to migration is an act of profound care.“Almost [no one] wants to leave their homes,” she says. “All things being equal, you want to stay where you were born with the people that you know, and love, and close to your roots. Most people that are coming, they're running for their lives in many ways. So, this is not this idea of people trying to come here to take something from the society, here to take their jobs, to take their safety, to take any of that, but it's kind of almost this beautiful thing about the United States being the safe haven where things are possible, and there's hope.”She has spent years embedded with Latin American migrant families living in Massachusetts, documenting their journeys, their struggles, and the hopes that drive them to uproot their lives, which she shares in her book, Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life.Oliveira explains that while public conversations about immigration center on fear and scarcity, the families she followed see education as a stabilizing force and a pathway to dignity. For parents, schooling in the U.S. represents the chance for their children to flourish, not merely academically but as kind, purposeful human beings. Yet for teachers, supporting these students can be complicated by the pressures of curriculum, testing, and limited training in trauma-informed practice or what Oliveira calls “constrained care.”“If you're going to talk about a multicultural piece, why not actually talk about the home country of that child, and let that child write, and talk about that, and tell the stories, which then will increase trust in the classroom,” she says. “We know that if teachers, and students trust each other, the students are going to be a lot more inclined to want to engage more, to want to show up, and learn more in the classrooms versus if they feel that they cannot be their whole selves in the classroom.”In this episode, Oliveira shares how children and families navigate migrating to America and its schools, and offers strategies for educators.
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