Learning Together

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a confident person. How confidence is often confused with arrogance, how a lack of confidence can be disguised as apathy or disengagement, and why it is so important for our children to feel confident when engaging in dialogue about a variety of topics. 

Before we can cultivate confidence in our children, we need to understand what it means to be confident adults, especially during uncomfortable conversations. I love how Leah Mermelstein frames paradoxical dialogue with her podcast cohost, Angela Stockman: “Our conversations revealed something powerful: while we share a foundation in teaching and literacy, our differences often create a productive tension. Rather than avoiding these conversations, we leaned into them and we found that wrestling with our differences deepened our work with both teachers and students.”

How do you cultivate confidence in yourself?  Your learning community? Your students? Your own children? How do you model and practice leaning into the “productive tension,” as Leah calls it, to wrestle with and reflect on what matters most to you? I’d love to connect, share more about cultivating confidence, and be a thought partner for you. Reach out to me here to begin the conversation.

What I’m Reading & Listening to Now

How We Cultivate Confidence

What if confidence is the curriculum? This month, four educators from radically different contexts (jungles, voting booths, classrooms, and street corners) make the same quiet argument: Children rise to the level of belief we extend to them, and confidence isn't something children earn; it's something adults either grant or withhold. 

From STEM busking on street corners to handing students the keys to their own civic future by offering courtroom and voting booth experience, each conversation is a case study in what becomes possible when a learner is trusted before they've proven themselves worthy. Tune in, and ask yourself what you've been waiting for before you trust the children in front of you.

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04/06 (Part 1) & 04/10 (Part 2) Season 5, Episode 32
Regenerative education is a way of being alive in the world.

Benjamin Freud, Ph.D., is reimagining school from the jungles of Bali. His ideas are equal parts unsettling and electrifying. Regenerative education isn't a philosophy Benjamin teaches; it's how he actually lives. Our conversation highlights what school looks like when someone builds it from the ground up, without any of the assumptions we forgot we were making.

04/13 (Part 1) & 04/17 (Part 2) Season 5, Episode 33
Democracy isn't a spectator sport and it starts in the classroom.

Colleen O'Brien, Ed.D., has spent years watching students go from checked-out to showing up, and she's pretty clear on why it happens. Civic apathy isn't an attitude problem. It's a confidence problem. Colleen is a civics educator and doctoral researcher who's done the work to back this up: the reason students disengage isn't apathy. It's that nobody made them feel like their participation mattered (yet).

04/20 (Part 1)  & 04/24 (Part 2) Season 5, Episode 34
Every child is already a leader. Someone just has to believe it first.

What happens when a teacher truly believes in a child? Not just says it, but proves it? In this episode, Muriel Summers, co-creator of Leader in Me and co-author of Teacher Believed in Me, reveals why entrusting kids with real responsibility is the most powerful thing an adult can do and why holding back might be the most dangerous. 

04/27 (Part 1) & 05/01 (Part 2) Season 5, Episode 35
What if the best science classroom was a street corner?

David Price has taken science busking to 26 countries, and in this conversation, he proves exactly why it works. From street corners to Singapore championships, this episode illuminates why STEM is irresistible to any audience, anywhere in the world. During this episode, David pulls you into a live demonstration before you realize what's happening, and that's exactly the point.

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