List (recent to oldest)of Posted Podcasts and Transcripts
Updated: Sep 18
Episode 6 - Creating Safe Nurturing Environments that Engage Learners and Foster Thriving and Robust Learning - Revised August 26
This podcast will examine the 16 Success Drivers and how they can be holistically enacted and embodied in schools and across learning ecosystems. Listeners will learn and be able to think about the drivers and their interconnections, understand why a holistic approach is essential for equity and thriving, and explore principles for implementation across roles and settings. Organizations, tools, materials, and research will be identified that can support implementation and adaptation.
Eric Gordon, Queena Kim, Vivian Gadsden, Jillian Ahrens, and Karen Quartz
Part | Title (with hyperlink to discussion) | Presenter | Short Description | Transcripts (with hyperlinks) |
A | David Osher | What the entire episode touches on and why | ||
B | Eric Gordon, Queena Kim, Jillian Ahrens, & Karen Hunter Quartz | What were people actually trying to create for young people? Working from very different positions: district, teaching and organized labor, school, as well as research and design. | ||
C | Eric Gordon, Queena Kim, Jillian Ahrens, & Karen Hunter Quartz | In this part, the conversation moves closer to the people who actually carry out the changes. | ||
D | Eric Gordon, Queena Kim, Jillian Ahrens, & Karen Hunter Quartz | This part of the conversation is about learning while doing. Both Cleveland and UCLA had to make decisions without knowing in advance everything they would eventually learn. | ||
E | Karen Hunter Quartz | The conversation begins with teachers and unions, but it quickly becomes about something larger, what it means to organize a school democratically. | ||
F | Vivian Gadsden | The first part of this conversation with Vivian was about seeing children and family more fully. | ||
G | Vivian Gadsden | The second part turns to resilience, one of the matters Vivian helps us understand more deeply, and to a warning: don't let resilience become the answer. |
Transcripts are all AI-generated and unedited.
Bios
Eric Gordon is the CEO of Positive Education Program, an organization that provides services—both direct and consultative in nature—for children challenged by complex developmental trauma, mental health issues and autism, their families, and the professionals who support them. Previously, Eric served as Senior Vice-President of Student Development and Education Pipeline at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C). Eric also served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) from July 2011 through June 2023. During his tenure CMSD saw dramatic improvement in academic performance, including a 29-percentage point gain in graduation rates to a record 80.9%. Among his many awards, CEO Gordon received the Green-Garner Award of the Council of the Great City Schools in 2016, distinguishing him as the top Urban Educator of the Year, and the Mary Utne O'Brien Social Emotional Learning Leader Lifetime Achievement Award from CASEL.
Queena Kim is the Principal of UCLA Community School, a TK–12 public school in Los Angeles operated in partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. In this role, she provides instructional and organizational leadership for a diverse, multilingual school community serving students and families in the Koreatown area, with a focus on academic excellence, equity, and community-centered schooling. Previously, Ms. Kim served UCLA Community School in multiple leadership capacities, including founding teacher, instructional leader, and assistant principal. Under her leadership, UCLA Community School has expanded from an initial elementary program to a full secondary pathway, with strong outcomes in student engagement, bilingualism, and college readiness. The school is widely recognized for its distributed leadership model, often described as "leading from every chair." Ms. Kim was honored with the Teacher-Powered Schools Extraordinary Achievement Award.
Vivian L. Gadsden, Ed.D., is the William T. Carter Professor of Child Development and Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) and Co-Faculty Director of the Penn Early Childhood and Family Research Center. She is also Director of the National Center on Fathers and Families at Penn. Gadsden's scholarship focuses on learning and literacies across the life course, with particular attention to equity, access, and social change for children and families in historically marginalized communities. A nationally and internationally recognized scholar, Gadsden is an elected member and Vice President of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an AERA Fellow, and an inductee of the Reading Hall of Fame. She is a past President of AERA and serves as Co-General Editor of the 2023 and 2025 volumes of the Review of Research in Education.
Jillian Ahrens, MA, is 2nd vice president of the Cleveland Teachers Union, a union representing nearly 4,000 of Cleveland's teachers, paraprofessionals, and other related-service personnel. Ahrens, a 22-year veteran of the CTU Executive Board, currently serves as co-director of Grievances and is on the negotiations team. In addition to her union duties, Jillian is a first-grade teacher for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District at Memorial K-8 School. She has been recognized as a Master Teacher by the state of Ohio. In 2013, Ahrens was honored by CASEL with the Mary Utne O'Brien Award for Excellence in Expanding the Evidence-Based Practice of Social and Emotional Learning. She played a key role in Cleveland's Humanware efforts from its inception in 2008.
Karen Hunter Quartz, Ph.D., is an education researcher and practitioner-scholar based at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies, where she serves as an adjunct professor and directs the UCLA Center for Community Schooling. Her work focuses on how community schools and research–practice partnerships can strengthen democracy, equity, and public education, with particular attention to teacher autonomy, retention, and the social conditions that shape teaching and learning. Quartz has played a central role in the development of UCLA-affiliated community schools. She led the original design team for the UCLA Community School, which opened in 2009, and later served on the design team for the Mann UCLA Community School.
Episode 6: Making Supports and Opportunities Fit—and Work—for Young People
Episode 6 brings together thirteen conversations about how schools, families, communities, and child-serving systems can organize supports around the strengths and needs of young people. The conversations move from understanding individual needs to building coherent systems of relationships, shared responsibility, equity, and opportunity.
# | Podcast Title (as a hyperlink) | Presenter | Short Description | Transcripts (as a hyperlink) |
Intro | David Osher | An introduction to Episode 6 and its central question: How can we organize supports and opportunities around the individual strengths, needs, relationships, and contexts of young people rather than asking young people to navigate fragmented systems? | ||
A
| Rey Saldaña | Rey Saldaña reflects on the importance of caring adults who remain present in young people’s lives, build trust, and provide the relationships and support that help young people stay engaged and thrive. | ||
B
| Rey Saldaña | Moving beyond individual relationships, this conversation explores how trust and caring relationships can become part of a broader schoolwide strategy for supporting young people. | ||
C | CatherineBradshaw & John Lochman | Bradshaw and Lochman explore why behavior must be understood in relation to children’s development, relationships, environments, and circumstances—and why effective support begins with understanding what lies beneath and around behavior. | ||
D | CatherineBradshaw & John Lochman | Evidence-based interventions are not simply inserted into schools unchanged. This conversation examines the importance of adapting approaches to the young people, communities, and contexts in which they are implemented. | ||
E | Eric Bruns | Eric Bruns introduces Wraparound, an approach that organizes individualized support around one young person and family while bringing together the people and systems needed to respond to complex needs. | ||
F | Eric Bruns | Effective individualized support depends on relationships and collaboration among the people surrounding a young person. This conversation explores the human system required to make coordinated care work. | ||
G | Eric Bruns | This conversation examines how coordinated, individualized systems of care can remain committed to young people with complex needs rather than allowing them to fall through gaps between programs and systems. | ||
H | S. Kwesi Rollins | Participation means more than inviting young people and families to the table. This conversation explores how their knowledge, perspectives, and lived experience can become genuine influence and shared power in decisions that affect them. | ||
I | CatherineBradshaw | Rather than continually adding programs, schools need systems in which different approaches work together. This conversation examines how schools can move from disconnected initiatives toward coherence. | ||
J | Jane Quinn | Jane Quinn describes the difference between a school filled with programs and partners—the “Christmas tree” school—and a genuinely coherent community school. She explains how needs and assets assessments, shared structures, community-school leadership, and alignment around student success can turn disconnected resources into an integrated strategy. | ||
K | Jane Quinn | Quinn explores what it takes to move from partners working alongside one another to becoming one team with shared responsibility for results. The conversation emphasizes the whole child, authentic family and student participation, community representation, shared data, joint problem-solving, and collective ownership. | ||
L | Jane Quinn | In the final conversation, Quinn connects community schools to equity, democracy, and the history of schools as centers of community life. She shows how needs and assets assessments, youth voice, family engagement, health, opportunity, and community knowledge can move from the margins to the core of schooling. |
Bios
Eric Bruns is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Bruns's research focuses on public child-serving systems and how to maximize their positive effects on youth with behavioral health needs and their families. He co-directs the National Wraparound Initiative and the National Wraparound Implementation Center and directs the UW Wraparound Evaluation and Research Team. Dr. Bruns has led multiple federally funded research and intervention-development projects (NIMH, SAMHSA, CMS) to define and evaluate the impact of intensive care coordination models. He is also Associate Director of the UW SMART Center, where he leads the Center's Technical Assistance Core and directs its Institute for Education Sciences (IES)-funded Post-doctoral Research Training Program.
Catherine P. Bradshaw, Ph.D., M.Ed., is a university professor and the senior associate dean for research and is a faculty fellow with the University's vice president of research. She was previously an associate professor and the associate chair of the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her primary research interests focus on the development of aggressive behavior and school-based prevention of behavioral and mental health problems. Her research focuses on bullying and school climate; emotional and behavioral disorders; and the design, evaluation, and implementation of evidence-based prevention programs in schools. She has led more than 10 federally funded randomized trials of school-based prevention programs. She has published more than 335 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. She is currently the editor of the journal Prevention Science and senior associate editor for Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Education.
John E. Lochman, PhD.; ABPP, received his PhD from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Lochman is the Doddridge Saxon Chair of Clinical Psychology at The University of Alabama. He has primary research interests in examining the short- and long-term effects of prevention programs provided to high-risk aggressive children, and treatment programs for youth with externalizing disorders. These school- and community-based programs (Anger Coping Program; Coping Power Program; Fast Track Program) use cognitive-behavioral, social problem-solving, and social-skill training approaches with children, and behavioral parent training with parents. Ongoing grant-funded multi-site prevention research projects are examining the components of interventions, the additive effects of universal and indicated (targeted) interventions, and comprehensive interventions designed to prevent conduct disorder, substance use, and delinquency. Dr. Lochman’s graduate teaching responsibilities include child psychotherapy and basic practicum supervision. Dr. Lochman serves on grant review committees at NIMH and at several private foundations. He is the editor of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, is an associate editor for Behavior Therapy, and is on the editorial board for the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
Rey Saldaña, MS, is the President and CEO of Communities In Schools® (CIS®), the national organization that surrounds students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life. Saldaña is a CIS alumnus who served as the Regional Advocacy Director for the Raise Your Hand Texas Foundation and the Chair of the San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Agency-VIA. Before that, he served four terms on the San Antonio City Council, where he was first elected at age 24, becoming the youngest council member in the city's history. Saldaña holds a master's degree from Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. In 2023, Saldaña was awarded Stanford University's President's Award for the Advancement of the Common Good.
Kwesi Rollins, MSW, guides the Institute for Education Leadership's portfolio of programs designed to develop and support leaders with a particular emphasis on Family and Community Engagement, Early Childhood Education and Community-based Leadership Development. Kwesi directs the District Leaders Network on Family and Community Engagement and Leaders for Today and Tomorrow. He has years of experience working with local communities and state agencies to improve cross-sector collaboration and service delivery systems supporting children, youth and families. He has been recognized as the Big Brother of the Year in the District of Columbia. He holds an MSW degree from the University of Maryland at Baltimore School of Social Work.
Jane Quinn, Ph.D., is a social worker and youth worker with over five decades of professional experience, including direct service with children and families, program development, fundraising, grantmaking, research, and advocacy. From 2000 through 2018, she served as the Vice President for Community Schools at Children's Aid, where she directed the National Center for Community Schools. She was the principal author of the 1992 Carnegie study entitled A Matter of Time: Risk and Opportunity in the Nonschool Hours and the co-author of three books on community schools, including the 2023 volume entitled The Community Schools Revolution: Building Partnerships, Transforming Lives, Advancing Democracy. Jane has a master's in social work from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in urban education from the City University of New York.
Episode 5 - Building Conditions for Learning, Well-being, and Thriving
Eight individual discussions with Megan Bang, Zaretta Hammond, Stephanie MacMahon, and Kim Schonert-Reichl by David Osher
Description
Learning is not just the transfer of information. It is not just memory, cognition, or skill acquisition narrowly understood. Learning is deeply human. It involves emotion and attention, identity and meaning, culture and context, relationships and belonging, the body and the brain, the present moment and the histories that young people bring with them.
Those conversations showed us what is possible. They helped us understand the human potential for deep learning: learning that is active, meaningful, culturally connected, socially supported, emotionally engaged, and capable of changing how young people understand themselves and the world.
At the same time, our work on equity-centered thriving helps us name the larger aim. Thriving is not only about individual success or academic performance. It includes wellbeing, groundedness, agency, belonging, meaning, contribution, and the capacity to live well with others in a more just and sustainable world.
This podcast discusses how to build strong conditions for learning, well-being, and thriving in schools and communities. Listeners will learn about the elements of supportive environments, understand why these conditions drive both equity and robust learning, and explore the principles of application. Organizations, tools, materials, and research will be identified that can support implementation and adaptation.
Bios
Zaretta Hammond, M.A., is a teacher educator and international education consultant. Ms. Hammond is a former high school and community college writing instructor. Through her company, Transformative Learning Solutions, she supports schools, school districts, teacher education programs, and other institutions in understanding how to integrate culturally responsive practices, the science of learning, and authentic assessment. She is the author of the bestselling book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, and of the recently released Rebuilding Students' Learning Power: Teaching For Instructional Equity And Cognitive Justice.
Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl, Ph.D., is the NoVo Foundation Endowed Chair in Social and Emotional Learning and Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. From 1991 to 2020, she was a Professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology, and Special Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research focuses on identification of the processes that foster positive human qualities such as empathy, compassion, altruism, and resiliency in children and adolescents. She is editor of the Journal of Social and Emotional Learning and a board member of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Before her graduate work, Kim worked as a middle school teacher and as a teacher at an alternative high school for adolescents identified as at risk.
Megan Bang, PhD., (Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a Professor of the Learning Sciences and Director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. Dr. Bang studies dynamics of culture, learning, and development broadly with a specific focus on the complexities of navigating multiple meaning systems in creating and implementing more effective and just learning environments in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics education. She currently serves on the Board of Science Education at the National Academy of Sciences and is a member of the National Academy of Education and an AERA Fellow. She was Deputy Director of the Spencer Foundation and is a co-editor of the 2025 Review of Research In Education.
Stephanie MacMahon, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in the Science of Learning and in Arts Education, teaching in both the ITE and post-graduate programs in the School of Education at The University of Queensland, and is the program coordinator for the newly established Science of Learning Field of Study. She has over 20 years of experience as a P-12 educator and school leader. Stephanie is also the Program Director of the UQ Learning Lab: a group of multi-disciplinary researchers, educators, and industry partners who collaborate to transform learning, teaching, and training in diverse school and post-school contexts through the science of learning.
Across these conversations, you will hear several ideas return.
First, the conditions for learning and the conditions for thriving are deeply connected. Relationships, culture, safety, challenge, voice, place, and measurement all shape what and how young people learn — and whether they can thrive.
Second, thriving is relational. It is not something we can locate only inside a child. It is shaped by the classroom, the peer group, the adults, the community, the land, and the systems that surround young people.
Third, equity requires more than access. It requires cognitive justice, cultural and epistemic respect, and the opportunity for every young person to become a powerful learner.
Fourth, educators need the same kinds of conditions that students need: trust, time, challenge, feedback, community, and the chance to learn by doing.
And finally, the work is practical. It can begin with a greeting by name. It can begin with asking students what helps them learn. It can begin with going outside and learning from the place where the school sits. It can begin with examining whether students have important adults at school. It can begin with redesigning professional learning, so teachers are not passive recipients of strategies, but active makers of knowledge.
The promise of the sciences of learning and development is not that they give us a single formula. They help us see what is possible. The work on equity-centered thriving helps us see what we are aiming toward. Session 5 asks what conditions make both real — the conditions that enable the science to become practice, and the practice to become a pathway for young people to learn deeply, thrive fully, and contribute to a more just and sustainable world.
Please note that the transcripts are AI generated.
Introduction and context setting – David Osher
Part A – Megan Bang (two parts)
Part B- Zaretta Hammond (two parts)
Part C – Stephanie MacMahon (two parts)
Part D – Kim Schonert-Reichl (two parts)
Selected materials mentioned during the interviews:
(Materials will be added to this list over time)
Jones, D. E., Greenberg, M., & Crowley, M. (2015). Early social-emotional functioning and public health: The relationship between kindergarten social competence and future wellness.
American Journal of Public Health, 105(11), 2283–2290. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302630
Hammond, Z. (2025). Rebuilding students' learning power: Teaching for instructional equity and cognitive justice. Corwin.
Edutopia. (2008, February 25). How to teach math as a social activity [Video]. https://www.edutopia.org/video/how-teach-math-social-activity/
The World Bank. (n.d.). What is learning poverty? https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education/brief/what-is-learning-poverty
DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (1998). Professional learning communities at work: Best practices for enhancing student achievement. National Educational Service.
Deloria, V., Jr., & Wildcat, D. R. (2001). Power and place: Indian education in America. Fulcrum Publishing.
Hammond, Z. L. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin.
Schonert-Reichl, K. A., Guhn, M., Gadermann, A. M., Hymel, S., Sweiss, L., & Hertzman, C. (2013). Development and validation of the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI): Assessing children's well-being and assets across multiple contexts. Social Indicators Research, 114(2), 345–369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0149-y
Jacobs, D. M., & Lytwyn, V. P. (2020). Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A dish with one spoon reconsidered. Ontario History, 112(2), 145–173. https://doi.org/10.7202/1072237ar
Episode 4 –
How to Leverage the Science of Learning and Development to Foster Robust Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning
It is in five parts, plus a short introduction to the episode. The discussions are with:
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Stephanie Jones, Annemaree Carol, Jim Pellegrino, and
Carol Lee.
What also makes these conversations so important is that they bring together many of the leading scholars who have helped define, extend, and translate the science of learning and development across disciplines, institutions, and countries.You will hear from researchers whose work spans developmental psychology, neuroscience, learning sciences, cultural studies, educational policy, assessment, social-emotional development, and human flourishing.Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, for example, is a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education. Her groundbreaking work has transformed how we understand the relationship between emotion, meaning-making, reflection, civic reasoning, and deep learning.Stephanie Jones, director of Harvard's EASEL Lab and faculty director of the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, has helped shape international understanding of social, emotional, and behavioral development and how learning environments can foster wellbeing and thriving from early childhood through adolescence.
Annemaree Carroll is the co-founder and head of the University of Queensland Learning Lab, where multidisciplinary researchers work in partnership with education and industry professionals to identify and address important learning and training priorities.
Her research has helped educators think more carefully about co-regulation, emotional climate, teacher well-being, stress, and the conditions that allow learning communities to function in healthy and sustainable ways. Her cutting-edge research also shows how classroom emotional climate can be measured and addressed in ways that have already improved outcomes for students in Australia.Jim Pellegrino has been one of the central architects of contemporary learning sciences and assessment research. His work on deeper learning, transfer, adaptive expertise, and the design of meaningful assessment has influenced educational policy and practice around the world. He has chaired or co-chaired multiple National Academy of Sciences committees, including landmark studies on assessment, deeper learning, and educational practice.Carol Lee, immediate past president of the National Academy of Education, has fundamentally reshaped how educators understand culture, identity, literacy, and intellectual development. Her pioneering work on cultural modeling helped establish the idea that the lived experiences and cultural practices young people bring into classrooms are intellectual resources for rigorous learning. She also co-edited both The Handbook of Cultural Foundations of Learning and the 2023 Review of Research in Education volume focused on the science of learning and development.And while the first three episodes in this series were primarily U.S.-focused, the conversations that follow are intentionally both American and global in scope.That reflects an essential reality: the science of learning and development is not the work of any one discipline, institution, or nation. It is an evolving international conversation shaped by scholars, educators, and practitioners across the world.You will hear that global dimension reflected throughout this series in the scholarship of our guests, in examples drawn from multiple countries and cultures, and in the growing international dialogue around equity-centered thriving, human development, civic participation, and the future of education.That international conversation is also reflected in two webinars from the Global Science of Learning Network linked on the podcast website, as well as in the 2023 and 2025 volumes of the Review of Research in Education, which examine the implications of the science of learning and development and equity-centered thriving for schools, communities, and democratic societies.Together, these conversations invite us to think not only about how young people learn, but about what kinds of societies, relationships, and futures education can help create.
Please note that the transcripts are AI generated.
Introduction and context setting – David Osher | ||||
Interview | English Transcript | Spanish Transcript | ||
Part A – Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Stephanie Jones | ||||
Part B- Stephanie Jones (in two parts) | ||||
Part C – Mary Helen Immordino | ||||
Part D – Annemaree Carroll | ||||
Part E – Jim Pelligrino & Carol Lee | ||||
Episode 3 - has three 30 minute parts
John King with commentary from Linda Darling-Hammond and Robert Pianta: Creating safe, nurturing environments that engage learners and foster thriving and robust learning.
Welcome to a framing conversation, one that provides intellectual orientation and a cornerstone conversation in the architectural sense upon which the entire podcast series rests.
John reminds us that the school at its best is not merely an academic institution. It is a sanctuary, a place of safety, a place of intellectual challenge, a place where a young person is known, and that knowing can change a life trajectory. His story is not abstract. It's grounded in his lived experience and teachers who built community, who combined rigor with nurturance, who created classrooms where a child could both belong and stretch.
That insight is echoed and deepened in the accompanied dialogue with Linda Darling-Hammond and Bob Pianta. They remind us that education is fundamentally relational, that the brain develops through experiencing connection. That excessive stress inhibits cognition, while psychological safety and belonging enhances it.
Part A - John King
Part B - Linda Darling-Hammond and Bob Pianta in two parts
First Part
Second Part
Episode 2 -
Part 1 - Sarah Woulfin, and Robert Jagers (Part 1 - From Recovery to Coherence: Implementation, Relationships, and the Conditions for Learning)
Part 2 - From Engagement to Partnership: Sharing Power in Learning Ecosystems
Part 3 – A - - Commentators Joe Bishop and Karen Pittman
Audio Podcasts EnglishTranscripts Spanish Transcript
Episode 1 - Addressing Educational Inequities in the wake of Covid-19
Part 1 - Gloria Ladson-Billings & Michael Feuer
Part 2 - Governor Bob Wise
Part 3 - Scott Palmer
AI has generated all transcripts, and some of the names cited and punctuation used have been distorted.
The music is “A River Runs through my Soul” has been provided by and used with permission from Jane Sapp as a part of her Songs from the Dream Project – We’ve all got stories. The complete recording is available on YouTube and Spotify. The lyrics are by Rose Sanders.
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