Sarah Odell is the Director of Faculty Practice and Research at the Hewitt School’s Center for Gender and Ethical Leadership in Society. We recently spoke with her about the power of research in schools. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity. Tell us a little about your role at Hewitt.  I run…

Glenn Whitman is the Executive Director of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew’s Episocpal School, where he also teaches history. The CTTL’s mission is “to elevate teacher effectiveness, student achievement, and the whole child’s school experience using the most promising research and strategies in Mind, Brain, and Education Science.” What follows…

Ellie Walsh-Moots is a Social Studies teacher, former department chair (and Jeopardy! Teachers Tournament quarterfinalist!) who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. She is passionate about studying middle leadership – that is, the experience of school leaders who maintain teaching responsibilities – within schools. A Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Grantee, Ellie spent part of 2022 researching…

“To me, innovation in education is anything that helps learners make progress that wasn’t being done before. It doesn’t have to involve technology, and it doesn’t have to involve a newfangled design. In many cases innovation can mean executing something more purposefully and deliberately to produce enormous gains.”

“With individuals, if you want bridging to happen, the first step is to foster a space of self-definition: who you are, where you stand, what you stand for. Then, from there, people can start to see the other, acknowledge the other, listen to the other, and then finally have that “bridge” moment of seeing yourself in them.”

“Really, this isn’t just about redesigning assessment; rather, it’s about redesigning the feedback loop and making sure that we build student reflection so that teachers aren’t the purveyors of learning. These are the dispositions that we all want in our colleagues, employees, and supervisors, so let’s build them in our children.”

“Education can be really performative, even when it’s called ‘authentic’… one thing I like about Premise is that there’s no need to perform.”

“When I considered my values or goals for discussion, I realized that my goal wasn’t to have kids speak more, but to encourage them to ask questions, to reference the text more often, to be unafraid to say they’ve rethought and want to follow up with a question.”

“It’s not enough to say ‘don’t do this’; we need to help give students identity and meaning apart from status, and I think teaching about citizenship and civic engagement is a phenomenal way to do that.”

“Teaching the skill of having conversations about identity is different than teaching the skill of how to apply a math formula to the real world. You can’t apply formulas to an identity. We, as educators, have to be comfortable with fumbling through conversations and not having all the answers and having to model what it’s like when you say the wrong thing or learn something.”