Hallway Conversations

Episode 058: Flourishing Together - Learning

Are you flourishing? Are your students? Your school community? What do we mean by “flourishing” anyway? This is week 3 of 4our five-week series in which we are reading and discussing Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe’s new book Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools. The book is divided into five sections, and in this episode, we discuss part three of the book, which is all about learning. We obviously talk about student learning–which is the real focus of schooling!--but we also spend quite a bit of time thinking about professional learning for educators, which is also essential for flourishing schools, students, and teachers. Further, we think about ways we can be surprised and delighted by students and their creativity and learning.

• We would love to hear your reactions to this book as well! Please feel free to share your thoughts, questions, comments, and wonderings with us at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com. 
• If you’d like to pick up a copy of the book for yourself (which we definitely recommend!) you can purchase it here: Amazon link

Episode 057: Flourishing Together - Relationships

Are you flourishing? Are your students? Your school community? What do we mean by “flourishing” anyway? This week we continue our five-week series in which we are reading and discussing Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe’s new book Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools. The book is divided into five sections, and In this episode, we discuss part two of the book, which is all about “relationships.” We use the Triple A protocol (What do you AGREE with? What do you ARGUE with? What do you ASPIRE to?) to guide our conversation around this section of the book, and make connections to our own practices. 

• We would love to hear your reactions to this book as well! Please feel free to share your thoughts, questions, comments, and wonderings with us at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com. 
• If you’d like to pick up a copy of the book for yourself (which we definitely recommend!) you can purchase it here: Amazon link

Episode 056: Flourishing Together - Purpose

Are you flourishing? Are your students? What do we mean by “flourishing” anyway? This week we begin a five-week series in which we are reading and discussing Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe’s new book Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools. The book is divided into five sections, and In this episode, we discuss part one of the book, which is all about “purpose.” We share some of our noticings and wonderings from our reading, and make connections to our own practices. 

• We would love to hear your reactions to this book as well! Please feel free to share your thoughts, questions, comments, and wonderings with us at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com. 
• If you’d like to pick up a copy of the book for yourself (which we definitely recommend!) you can purchase it here: Amazon link

Episode 055: What’s the Value in Project-Based Learning?

We start off today’s show with a check-in question, wondering about who we would like to interview if we each had our own talk show. Our responses probably say quite a bit about each of our own unique personalities! Our main topic today is a question from a listener; Loretta asks, “In the past few years, our school has embraced Project Based Learning as a preferred teaching method. What are your thoughts on PBL? And what do you think are some of the best things about PBL and maybe what are some of the downfalls of teaching in a PBL style?” This was a timely question, as Matt and Abby had visited a PBL school just the week before we recorded this episode! We think together about the similarities and differences between having students “do projects” and implementing “project-based learning.” We further explore some of the habits of mind that seem to be important for implementing PBL at a classroom level and at a school level. Expanding audiences, exhibitions of student work, student empowerment–we talk about it all!

• Friends, we are preparing for our first book discussion! We are going to be reading and discussing Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools by Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe. We would love it if you would read along, and even submit questions you might have! The book has five sections, and we will be discussing one section each week beginning with next week’s episode, dropping on March 30, 2022. We would love it if you would read along with us, and even submit your questions, comments, wonderings. Drop us a note at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com You can order your copy of the book here: Amazon link

Spring Break 2022 Bonus - Awards

Many thanks to you, our dedicated listeners! We are on Spring Break this week, and so we are pulling one of Dave's favorite episodes out of the archive. In this episode, we discuss a question from a listener about end-of-the-year awards ceremonies--maybe this will be good food for thought for you at this point in the spring as you might be thinking ahead to the end of this school year? We hope you'll be challenged and encouraged by listening.

• Friends, we are preparing for our first book discussion! We are going to be reading and discussing Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools by Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe. We would love it if you would read along, and even submit questions you might have! The book has five sections, and we will be discussing one section each week beginning on March 30, 2022. We would love it if you would read along with us, and even submit your questions, comments, wonderings. Drop us a note at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com You can order your copy of the book here: Amazon link

Episode 054: Not Just the Icing on the Cake

We jump in with a check-in question this week, things we are currently learning. A diverse set of answers to this question among the three of us: a new computer programming language, running a caulk gun, and getting out of our comfort zones to meet new people. (Care to guess who said which one of these?)

In this episode, we have a question from a listener! Susan asks, “Many teachers struggle with integrating faith and learning well–doing it more than a devotional activity or an add-on to a lesson. How can we do this in a God-honoring and natural way?” In response, Matt shares a bit from an article by one of our colleagues, Dr. Leah Zuidema, entitled “Integral, Not Integrated” and we think through some different ideas of what faith-informed teaching might look like in practice. In particular, we discuss ways of moving beyond “sprinkling on a little Jesus,” to teaching in a way that makes faith more than just icing on the cake.

• Friends, we are preparing for our first book discussion! We are going to be reading and discussing Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools by Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe. We would love it if you would read along, and even submit questions you might have! The book has five sections, and we will be discussing one section each week beginning on March 30, 2022. We would love it if you would read along with us, and even submit your questions, comments, wonderings. Drop us a note at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com You can order your copy of the book here: Amazon link

Episode 053: Righteous Non-Compliance?

Today we started with a check-in about our favorite books or series that we would love to go back and read again for the first time. One of us said The Chronicles of Narnia, one said Henry Huggins, and one said The Hunger Games. Care to guess who claimed each one? We’d love to hear about your favorite books as well; you can share yours with us at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com.

The question we tackle for our discussion today came from our dear friend and colleague, Ed, who asked us to think through this question: “While compliance is not the goal of schooling, what do we and our students miss if we don’t ever emphasize compliance? Should we prepare students for aspects of life that expect our compliance whether or not we agree?” Together, we think through the nature of why we have expectations for students’ behavior, and when they definitely should comply…and when a healthy (or even a righteous) non-compliance is a good thing? We’ll be very curious to hear what you think!

• We are going to start a short series in a few weeks in which we will be reading and discussing the new book, Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools by Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe. We would love it if you would read along, and even submit questions you might have! More information about this coming next week, but if you are interested, you can order your copy of the book now. - Amazon link

Episode 052: Preserving, Pruning, and Pioneering

Today’s check-in question caused us to reminisce about our favorite road trips, and you definitely don’t want to miss Matt’s story about a mysterious stranger who just might have been an angel in disguise. After this, Dave raises a question inspired by another podcast he was listening to recently: thinking about education today, what is something we should preserve, something we should prune, and something we should pioneer? As we share our ideas, we grapple with the role of librarians, whether we should chuck standardized tests or not, the value of Accelerated Reader, the challenge of managing the work teachers are expected to do outside of school hours, and more. As always, we would love to hear your feedback; email us at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com.

• The podcast Dave mentioned that inspired today’s conversation was Episode 496 of the Holy Post podcast, which you can access here: https://www.holypost.com/holy-post-podcast/episode/2b3b958e/episode-496-the-embrace-of-tyrants-and-the-despair-of-pastors

Bonus Episode: A Word of Encouragement

This bonus episode is made up of a couple of leftovers that didn’t make the cut from our last episode about teaching and technique, but we thought you might still find this part of the conversation interesting, and maybe even helpful. We hope that this is a word of encouragement for any educators out there who might feel like they are losing their fire in the face of all the challenges of teaching today. May God bless you and give you what you stand in need of to serve well!

Episode 51: Good Teaching Can’t Be Reduced to Technique (Can It?)

As we check in at the beginning of this episode, we reflect on our first year in this podcasting adventure. Listeners, we are SO grateful for you! And we want this show to be the sort of thing that encourages, challenges, and blesses you, so we would love to hear your feedback, questions, comments, and wonderings. You can always contact us at hallwayconvospod@gmail.com.

In this episode, Matt brings us a quote from Parker Palmer’s book, The Courage to Teach, and shares a story of a recent interaction with a fellow educator who is grappling with the idea of the standardization of education–and wondering whether “teaching” is just being reduced to “technique.” We think through some of the challenges of developing as educators, and the difference between thinking of teaching as a science, as an art. After some disagreement about this, we settle on the idea that teaching is both an art and a science, and think through some of the ramifications for how that impacts our work as educators.