Driven 2 Educate

Erin Mote is the co-founder of Brooklyn LAB and serves the school in an advisory capacity. Throughout her career she has served as advisor to the Clinton Foundation, Wal-Mart, Chevron, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Erin shares how she and her husband conceived the idea of Brooklyn LAB while walking the streets in their neighborhood and wrote out their ideas on a napkin. It was on that walk that she was considering a return from consulting to a public service role so she could have an impact on her community. Their contemplative discussion led them to the same conclusion of creating a school that was accessible to all and provided opportunities where previously none existed for students. They decided to reimagine and rethink the education and human capital model for students. Particularly focused on complex learners, learning disabilities, homeless and students that had come into contact with the criminal justice system. In the few years since its inception in 2014 the school has grown to 2 campuses with 4

Catlin Tucker is an accomplished educator, author, speaker and blended learning advocate. She has been a teacher for 15 years and pioneered efforts for blended learning in schools that are not always set up for this approach to learning. She freely shares her methods through lessons learned via her site, blog and books to encourage and inspire fellow educators for the betterment of youth. She is continuously developing and modifying her methods, technology choices and approach to teaching. This year she is piloting a new program called New School; based on work done at a school in  San Diego. It is a Co-teaching and cross-curricular approach involving English, Science and Technology. She along with another teacher share 60 students across 3 block periods in adjoining classrooms. She has thrown out homework and instead opted for setting daily and weekly goals. This leaves autonomy in the students hands as to how they manage their time and interests in the classroom. If they complete their work and manage

Founder and Managing Director of #TeachlikeTED, Rachael Mann assists educators in applying the principles of effective presentation delivery. She trains educators across the country on how to transform educational leadership and the classroom through these principles, and how to transform the lives of students by teaching them how to share their ideas in a TED-style fashion. Rachael also speaks to student groups and trains them in leadership, presentation literacy, global collaboration, and communication skills. She is a former high school Career and Technical Education teacher with 14 years of classroom experience. Since leaving the classroom, she has served as the Director of Educators Rising at the Arizona Department of Education and as the Network to Transform Teaching State Director through Northern Arizona University. She has a Masters Degree in Educational Leadership through Northern Arizona University, serves as a fellow for the Association for Career and Technical Education Arizona, and is on the boa

The Office of Innovation in Rhode Island is a unique collaborative environment in that it partners with the Governor's Office and with the Rhode Island College in order to bypass Red tape (whenever possible) to accelerate growth in 3 different Innovation Clusters: Education, Government and Technology. Specifically the Education Cluster is involved with putting together multiple agencies in order to support, develop and grow education innovation within the state. Daniela and her team have an open communication and collaborative approach to innovation work.  They encourage and seek avenues for information sharing within the community, across the state and the nation. She sees her office as a harbor or switch master by acting as the connector to reach goals and even more importantly, to seek out new goals and plans for future change, not yet discovered. Daniela provides an overview of Clusters and how they serve to spur growth in respective areas. She exampled Silicon Valley with Tech Start Ups and St. Loui

Connie Yowell is the CEO and Visionary of LRNG one of the key initiatives for Collective Shift, a non-profit organization in Chicago. Prior to her current role Connie was an Academic and Professor with the MacArthur Foundation for 15 years. She credits her experience and time there with the path that has led her to running Collective Shift and launching LRNG.  She believes that ideas and work are a steady act of mix, remix, and synthesis. Connie credits her work and thought process to those she has encountered and continues to encounter on a regular basis including, researchers, scholars, practitioners and youth. While at the MacArthur Foundation, she worked on a grant making portfolio with a budget of $250,000,000 in 2003. People were trying to understand the development and impact of digital media on the learning experiences for youth. From that deep research and experience, several fundamentals ideas came about in terms of how youth best learn. There must be a connection between youth and their learni

In this episode Kari Keefe, Co-Founder and CEO of the KC Social Innovation Center, shares her background and inspiration for seeking out avenues, collaborators, investors and opportunities to create long-term impactful education changes in Kansas City. Kari is rather unique in that she is not an educator by profession. Her formal education and experience relates to marketing and consulting for retail marketing. Over time she became bored helping others "with marketing widgets that didn't have a lot of purpose or value." After becoming a mother she realized the deficiencies and non-existent availability of next generation schooling paths and diverse education opportunities within the urban environment of Kansas City. Despite living in an urban middle class neighborhood, the only opportunities for innovative education were in surrounding suburban communities. Kari was able to place her children in private schools but knew this was not an avenue available for all. This prompted her to dive deeper and educate her

Michael Golden, CEO and Co-Founder of Educurious, presents a comprehensive overview of the great endeavors Educurious is making in the area of project and program-based learning. Michael shares insight and program approaches that incorporate the collaboration of communities, educators, employers and students to offer opportunities to students unparalleled in a traditional school environment. Educurious currently has operations in 20 states and was founded on the premise of changing the learning experience for young people to foster empowerment for success in school and future careers. This student centered approach permits students the ability to think of themselves as a developing experts on a trajectory towards becoming a master. This different position gives them more and more control, allowing them to make the most of each opportunity. Partnerships with large corporations such as Boeing and the National Screenwriters Guild match students with mentors that will assist and guide them on their individual and

David Rothschild is the Director of Social Entrepreneurship for the Fossil Foundation and leads the global grants program. He personally has over 20 years experience from first-hand on the ground work to philanthropy and strategy. He has worked internationally in the Amazon, during his career at the Skoll Foundation, working with indigenous people to enable them to advocate and participate in government level land use planning. This experience readily translated for use in his current role that focuses on Global Grants programs to "unleash the potential of underserved youth." The Fossil Foundation is under the parent Fossil Group, known for its watches. The foundation seeks to form partnerships with institutions founded with innovative initiatives to further the progress of developing the potential of youth across the globe. They look for ways that their partnerships can be the most catalytic and find ways that Fossil's capability can be leveraged whether through time, money or knowledge. For instance, David

Mike Lanza is author of Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Place for Play. Prior to becoming an author he was a software and Internet entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He recently gained a great deal of exposure both positive and controversial from a New York Times Article, "The Anti-Helicopter Parents Plea: Let Kids Play!", featuring Mike, his family and their front and back yards. The concept behind playborhood is to create self-reliant, confident and independent kids. In order for kids to want to spend time outdoors, as opposed to being plugged into the readily available technology, they need to have a place that they can go to socialize. This physical location must be close by. If it isn't close enough, they aren't going to even try. That's why using the back or front yard in a neighborhood is the perfect location. The article has led to a response article, questioning his affluence as the basis for him being able to provide a specialized environment for his kids. Lanza's response is although h

Art Smith as an innovative educator who is instrumental in changing the structure and practices of traditional learning. He has spent the past 20 years teaching History in Middle School. From the very moment he set foot in a classroom he's sought to change the traditional classroom environment, removing desks and shifting to tables. These changes progressively developed over time from simple classroom changes to now, working as part of a novel, pilot school concept, based in experiential and project-based learning.  The LIberty Academy focuses on a reverse internship structure in which students can explore career paths and choose their learning paths. The careers are based on the cluster concept and include: Agriculture and Natural Resources, Communication Arts, Human Services, Health Services, Business and Building Pathways.  Each semester, six to eight community business partners team up with the school to create unique projects. Then, student groups of eight to twelve youth must creatively tackle

Gary Schoeniger is an author, educator and entrepreneur. He is an internationally recognized thought leader in the field of Mindset. In this podcast, Gary shares his philosophy on Mindset and his research accumulated over the past 25 years. He highlights the differences related to the causal and effectual reasoning. Causal, the must-know-before-you-go approach, is a learned process whereas Effectual, must-go-before-you-know, is our natural thought process for exploration and learning. Gary says, it is through formal education and society that the effectual reasoning is replaced and we are conditioned to a causal thought process. This in turn stifles the way in which we approach education, employment and entrepreneurship. Gary is careful to delineate and expand upon the definition of entrepreneurial thinking to be that of a detective that takes on an iterative process of discovery after learning about a problem to discover the solution. Through Gary's insight and sharing we learn about his Entrepreneurial Lea

Paul Bulakowski an entrepreneur, scientist and educator who has found his calling in the neuroscience education environment. Paul shares his enthusiasm for inspiring students and empowering them to be their own education navigators. His research is founded upon methods utilizing neuroscience to unlock neural pathways to enhance student learning potential. Starting out as a self-proclaimed baseball jock disinterested in school for the most part until, as a senior, he took Neuroscience and Psychology. His teacher shared that they would be "learning together" as it was the first year for the course to be offered. She went on to let him know that if he continued learning about neuroscience he could be an expert because it was so new. This intrigued him and sparked a passion within that led him down a path of Learning Research Professorship and ultimately Entrepreneurship. While focusing his efforts on research, he became attracted to the concepts and connections between brain processes and the senses. Beginning

Guest: Blake Boles Educator, Author, Entrepreneur, and Trail Runner Blake was traditionally educated in the public school system of Bakersfield, CA. Other than being occasionally bored he felt he had a decent experience as a student within the traditional school system. He was a good student with good grades. He is a advocate and proponent of Self-Directed Learning and has written a book on the subject and founded a company that enables young adults and teenagers the opportunity to explore their own paths through travel both nationally and internationally. He did not begin to explore the idea of education or being an educator until his 3rd year in college  at Berkeley. His ideas of Astrophysics weren't as he pictured. He had envisioned astrophysics to be an adventure like those experienced in the movie "contact." When he fully understood the reality of being at computers for hours on end he sought alternatives. After being given a copy of John Taylor Gatto's Book "A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving Th

Emma Huvos, an Outdoor Permaculturalist Educator, shares a bit about her background and philosophy for the concentration on nature and natural unbounded environments in early education. While in college, Emma began to explore and evaluate her past and current education. Despite being an accomplished conforming student who followed the structure rules achieving all of the goals and standards set forth in the traditional educational system she still felt unfulfilled. She realized a very large missing component in her life was her disconnection from nature. After graduation she accepted a position in at a charter school in Washington DC. For the first year, because of construction within the school, her students were not able to play outside or regularly experience education and play beyond the confines of the classroom. While doing her best to bring the outdoors in and grow plants taped to windows she knew this wasn't enough. Once construction was complete she was able to take her students the following year ou

When Jan Brown was invited to help Louise Batamuriza, a Rwandan preschool teacher, with her new school in January 2012, she didn't think twice. After 40 years in education, Jan was ready for a new challenge and so TEACH Rwanda was born. As a result, lives began to change dramatically on two continents. The vision—to bring best practices in early childhood education to Rwanda—quickly expanded. Today, TEACH Rwanda is transforming the Rwandan early childhood education infrastructure across the country! Janet F. Brown, M.Ed., has decades of international experience as a teacher of diverse young children and teacher educator. She has served as Director of Publications for the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Managing Editor for Crayola, and as Editor of Dimensions of Early Childhood published by the Southern Early Childhood Association. Jan has worked extensively as a consultant with Art As a Way of Learning® through Northampton Community College. She is a regular volunteer

With a rich background in educational and business leadership, Donna Deeds is the queen of partnerships. Donna has served as assistant superintendent in the Durango School District in Durango Colorado, as an elementary school principal, and is the owner of Fast Schools, an education consulting organization. After seeing the big gap between what happens in high schools and what real world of work is expecting, she had the idea of marrying corporations, businesses and the community with education. That's how the CAPS program, which she lead, designed and executed, was founded. The Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) is designed to provide high school students the skills needed to succeed in the competitive college environment and global work force. CAPS is an example of how private industry, such as Black & Veatch, Cisco, Cerner, Sprint, Bayer, Burns and McDonnell, Ford Motor Company, Garmin and the public education system can partner to produce personalized learning experiences that educate the

What if it was OK to fail? What if we redirected our pursuit to be perfect to be more empowering than destructive? What if we encouraged our children to find what lights them up and excel in these areas rather than having to be perfect in everything?  Petra Kolber is a fitness expert turned positive psychology advocate who has presented in over 30 countries and at over 300 conventions. She has consulted for companies such as Reebok, Gatorade, Adidas and California Walnuts. She has spoken at TEDx and she wrote the monthly Happiness Challenge for Spry Living Magazine. Petra speaks and writes about how we can strengthen our courage muscle and stretch our dreams. Her passion and work is called The Perfection Detox –dropping the weight of perfection (and teaching our children to do the same) so we can soar into our potential. As a two - time cancer survivor her mission is to teach people how to live their lives fully, with passion and "on purpose". In today's conversation, Petra gives brilliant insight into t

St. Mark Child & Family Development Center – often described as the beacon of light at the top of the hill in Kansas City – is a center of wonder and amazement for all children attending. Despite the fact that it lies in one of the poorest zip codes of the county, Deidre Anderson, the Executive Director of United Inner City Services, and her team of teachers believe that this should not be the biggest determining factor for the students' life outcome. The team works hard to expose their children to the richness and fullness of all opportunities that are available in school and life. This vision makes their development center not like any other in that area. Having served as the director for at-risk programs in the Hickman Mills school district, Deidre already got a glimpse into the often non-existence preschool education of children in Kansas City, which is why it is her greatest joy to now help build exactly that foundation. Knowing how vital early childhood education is, St. Mark Child & Family De

One of Michael Warwick's students, Doreen, had a beautiful voice and a dream of having a job as a singer on a cruise ship. In Michael's view, this was a very achievable dream with talent like hers. But, with her limiting beliefs, partly encouraged and created by her mom, he knew she'd never achieve it if she didn't transform her beliefs. Michael, a musician turned teacher, had already been really bothered by the self-limiting, self-talk and conversations he overheard in his classroom. But, this was his turning point. Having suffered from depression and gotten the help he needed through psychotherapy, he was convinced that students could benefit from the tools he was learning, too. So, little by little, he introduced topics such as gratitude and visualization to his students. Which was, at first, met by a lot of curiosity on their part but would change their lives later on. Today, Michael is an expert and facilitator of personal, interpersonal and cultural transformation and change. As the founder of the Exam

When Murray L. Woodard II looks at the performance and data points of Kansas City education, he doesn't just see numbers, he sees his community. He sees himself. Being born and raised in Kansas City, Murray was one of the students that he is now passionately serving. This gives him a unique perspective and an inner drive to bring people together in order to improve educational outcomes for students of his home city. Murray is the Program Officer for Education at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where he provides support to the Foundation's education-focused initiatives through program development, program management, building relationships, and research. Previously, Murray was the External Partnerships Coordinator for Kauffman Scholars, Inc. (KSI) and an integral part of the operations team. Earlier, he was a post-secondary coach for KSI and worked to support Scholars facing the challenges of life in college. Murray now leads the Foundation's community engagement and ownership work, which includes the Gr