It’s important to nurture philosophical thinking in kids throughout school and college. So argues a philosophy professor who wrote a book that highlights the natural tendencies of kids to think like philosophers. When big, important questions arise, he says, parents and educators should treat kids like conversational equals. This is a rerun of an episode that first ran in June.

The rise of generative AI technology such as ChatGPT could rapidly reshape knowledge work in the next few years. A trio of education researchers recently sat down to map out what those changes could mean for education — and what steps should be taken to bring out the best of the tech while avoiding pitfalls.

When a professor’s research showed that standard methods of teaching problem-solving weren’t working, he set out to figure out what led to more student thinking. His resulting approach is spreading through classrooms, helped by teachers sharing examples on social media.

More educators are wondering whether the grading system hinders many students rather than helps them learn. For this week’s podcast, we’re rebroadcasting an episode from this summer diving into alternative methods of marking papers in ways that encourage students to continually revise their work rather than quibble over which letter grade they deserve.

It’s statistically harder to get into a selective college these days, and who gets in and why can feel like a mystery. So students are turning to TikTok and other social media platforms to fill the void, in what some admissions folks call a “toxic” trend. We talked to a TikToker and an admissions counselor on how to help.

Since winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 2001, Carl Wieman has devoted the bulk of his energies to trying to improve teaching. That has led him to promote active learning – and to look for better ways to evaluate teaching. Will they catch on?

Students these days are terrible at sorting facts from misinformation online and on social media. But they can improve with just a few simple strategies, argues information literacy researcher Mike Caulfield. And he says those skills are even more important with the emergence of ChatGPT.

Can educators continue to teach troubling but worthwhile texts in this time of polarization and culture wars? And how can instructors make classrooms a welcoming place for debate as schools and colleges grow more diverse? This week’s EdSurge Podcast dives into the thorny issue of encouraging viewpoint diversity in classrooms.

What if Rodin’s famous sculpture of the thinking man sitting holding his chin gives us the wrong idea about how people think? A growing body of research suggests that thinking is influenced not just by what’s inside our skull, but by cues from our body movements, by our surroundings, and by other people we’re interacting with. And that has implications for educators.

Could cutting-edge virtual reality tech help to spread classical education models and alternatives to traditional public schools? That’s what one proponent is hoping, and she’s started a new online charter school delivered largely through VR headsets to try it.

A mockumentary web series made by undergraduates makes some timely observations about college admissions, and about student life after the pandemic — when students sometimes struggle to make social connections after high school experiences spent on lockdown.

The pandemic has sparked more-nuanced conversations about kids and tech, getting away from simple questions of how much screen time to allow. Now, one researcher argues, it’s time to provide better guidance on how to match tech to what children need, and can reasonably handle, at each stage of their development.

EdSurge recently took a microphone to a university campus and asked several students to share their group project horror stories. Every student we talked to had one. Then we ran them by a teaching expert to get his advice on how to avoid such scenarios.

For more than a decade, the nonprofit behind the popular storytelling podcast The Moth has run workshops in schools to help students share impactful stories from their lives. Now the group started a spin-off podcast, Grown, highlighting those student stories. Here’s what they’re learning, and why they say storytelling needs to be taught in schools.

A new documentary follows an educator and activist pushing to require schools to offer reading instruction that has been proven effective, calling it a matter of civil rights. But the main subject in the film started out reluctant to participate. Here’s why, and what he hopes comes of the film. This is an encore broadcast of an EdSurge Podcast that ran earlier this year.

A professor of urban education dug into the history of school reform in Philadelphia, and came away with questions of what motivates large-scale efforts to change schooling.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the consideration of race in college admissions has sparked a strong push to also end the consideration of enrollment legacy in admissions. Here’s what’s behind the push and a look at other ways colleges are trying to encourage diversity in light of the new ruling.

Scholars have taken to podcasting, interviewing each other about ideas and sharing their favorite areas of knowledge. Even when audiences are small, this new way of spreading information to a broader public is challenging traditional notions of what counts as research, and who gets to be an authority.

As colleges think about diversity on their campuses, they need to consider issues of class as well as race. Because especially among Black students at selective colleges, there are many types of experiences, argues University of Pennsylvania professor Camille Charles.

A group of researchers developed a tool that uses AI to test and improve digital course materials. On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, two of those researchers talk about how their project won first place in a $1 million education XPrize competition, and what it says about how to best use AI in education.

A Drexel University professor has been researching how to make children’s media more inclusive. And lately he’s been putting his ideas into practice as a creative producer of a new animated show on PBS for 3- to 6-year-olds.

“Why do some schools get better quickly, and others get stuck?” That question drove MIT professor of digital media Justin Reich to write a new book about what he’s learned as a teacher, edtech consultant and professor about making small regular improvements.

When their school implemented a new policy requiring students to lock their phones in pouches during the school day, the students had some concerns. This week on the EdSurge Podcast, we share an episode of the student-produced Miseducation podcast that looks at the pros and cons of this unusual new approach to managing smartphone use at schools.

Since the pandemic, more professors are reporting they’re having trouble connecting with their students. That’s according to Bonni Stachowiak, dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California and host of the weekly podcast Teaching in Higher Ed. She shares other trends she’s seeing in teaching, and ways instructors are overcoming them.

It’s important to nurture philosophical thinking in kids throughout school and college. So argues a philosophy professor who wrote a book that highlights the natural tendencies of kids to think like philosophers. When big, important questions arise, he says, parents and educators should treat kids like conversational equals.

For decades, proponents of open access scholarship have worked to make the research in scholarly journals freely readable to all. Will this moment of AI chatbots accelerate the effort?

In 2015, a video went viral showing a white school resource officer violently flipping over a Black student in her desk and dragging her across the room before arresting her. It sparked a lawsuit against a vague South Carolina law that brings the criminal justice system into schools for minor offenses, and a nationwide discussion about systemic racism in school policing.

A growing number of educators are wondering whether the grading system is hindering students rather than helping them learn. A new book explores alternative methods of marking papers in ways that encourage students to continually revise their work rather than quibble over which letter grade they deserve.

Sometime early in elementary school, kids are put on one of two paths: regular or gifted. Where did this idea come from? The answer goes back more than a 100 years, to a once-famous scholar named Lewis Terman. And it turns out his legacy, and the future of gifted programs, are still very much under debate.

These days teachers need some basic training in a number of fields, including mental health and social work, to be effective in the classroom, argues Stephanie Malia Krauss, author of a new book about the importance of teaching holistically in this time of pandemic and social unrest.

With every new generation of students there’s an effort to understand what’s different about them, and what motivates them as they enter society and the workforce. For Gen Z, a key factor is their skills in organizing on social media and interest in working across traditional partisan divides on issues like gun control, environmental protection and racial justice, argues Timothy Law Snyder, president of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who calls them the “solidarity generation.”

Two longtime professors hoped the pandemic would reset the small liberal arts colleges where they taught. So they wrote a book-length manifesto laying out a vision for making the colleges more accessible — and true engines of social mobility. Three years into the pandemic, they reflect on how that’s going.

A new documentary called 'The Right to Read' follows an educator and activist pushing to require schools to offer reading instruction that has been proven effective, calling it a matter of civil rights. But the main character in the film started out reluctant to participate. Here’s why, and what he hopes comes of the film.

EdSurge visited large lecture classes to get a sense of what college feels like now that COVID is more under control after years of pandemic disruptions. Students and professors say that years of remote instruction—often referred to as ‘Zoom University’—has left many students more likely to get distracted by their devices, or to place less value on class, thinking they can get whatever is happening in classrooms on their own.

Even before ChatGPT was released, AI experts were exploring how to detect language written by this new kind of bot. On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we talk with one of those experts, and others who are seeking to build guardrails to help educators successfully adapt to the latest AI technology.

Experts have described this as a 'golden age' of discovery in the area of learning science, with new insights emerging regularly on how humans learn. So what can educators, policymakers and any lifelong learner gain from these new insights?

A free-tuition online institution called University of the People has grown into a mega-college. Its founder and president says other colleges can learn from the model to drastically cut their costs.

Active-shooter drills are now common at schools and colleges. But the sometimes-intense simulations can be traumatic for some children, and some parents are asking to let their students opt out of the experiences.

Human brains are wired to think in ways that often lead to biased decisions or incorrect assumptions. A Yale University psychology professor has gathered highlights of what research says about the most common human thinking errors into a popular class at the university that she recently turned into a book.

The acclaimed author has a passion for working with students, but it’s one she has trouble putting into words. Maybe, she allows, it’s “like a chess grandmaster might play chess with a really brilliant 12-year-old and come close to losing — the experience is somehow pleasant in itself.”

Romanticized depictions of teaching in popular culture fail to capture the way teaching actually works — and they create an unattainable model that stifles the impact of teachers and professors, argues Jessamyn Neuhaus, who teaches courses about popular culture runs the Center of Teaching Excellence at the SUNY Plattsburgh.

Getting and holding the attention of students is more difficult since the pandemic, according to many college instructors around the country. So they’re looking for inspiration from other sectors — including video game design and elementary school classrooms — to keep lectures interesting.

Many professors are expressing frustration and even “terror” over ChatGPT, the latest AI tool that students may be using to write their papers for them. That has academic honor committees scrambling to revise policies and provide resources to instructors.

Schools are finding better ways to teach recent immigrant and refugee students. A new book by a high school history and civics teacher collects innovative strategies, and argues that getting the issue right is crucial for building a strong democracy.

Professors are finding that they can’t just go back to teaching as they did before the pandemic and expect the same result. It takes more these days to hold student attention, and convince them to show up. Check out part two of our series reported from the back of large lecture classes to see how teaching is changing.

A new AI chatbot can spit out long-form answers to just about any question, in a way that sounds eerily human. Students are already figuring out they can use it to write their essays, and educators are pondering how to adapt.

Is a college degree necessary these days? One father and son exemplify a generational difference when it comes to that question. Both dropped out of college in their 20s. Now dad is back in an online program, trying to finish. The son recently stopped college and isn’t sure if he’ll ever return. Listen to their debate at the end of this reissued episode of our Second Acts series on returning adult college students.

EdSurge visited large lecture classes to get a sense of what college feels like now that COVID is more under control after years of pandemic disruptions. Students and professors say that years of remote instruction—often referred to as ‘Zoom University’—has left many students more likely to get distracted by their devices, or to place less value on class, thinking they can get whatever is happening in classrooms on their own.