SEASON 4 LAUNCHES AUGUST 20 WITH STORIES OF INNOVATIVE EDUCATORS, PARENTS AND SCHOOLS THAT ARE BRINGING JOY BACK INTO THE CLASSROOM
The Mindshift Podcast is back with a new season of stories that explore innovation in education. The four-year-old podcast highlights how educators are addressing some of the trickiest problems in education with heart and creativity. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz, who also produce KQED’s wildly popular MindShift blog asked their audience what matters most to them and created an entertaining and powerful six-episode podcast season all about bringing joy back into learning and teaching.
Listen to the Season 4 trailer here.
The new season highlights how educators are addressing some of the trickiest problems in education with heart and creativity. This includes having serious conversations about social issues like race, power and privilege; how to approach anxiety; creating opportunities for overscheduled kids to play; and how bringing art back into the classroom helps kids do better in academic subjects like math, science and reading. The first episode of the new season, publishing August 20, focuses on the rise of anxiety in teenagers. While the driving factors might be different, it’s expected that around one-third of teenagers will experience an anxiety . Host Katrina Schwartz takes us inside the experience of anxiety from two teens’ perspectives and shares strategies to cope.
In another episode, host Ki Sung explores the significance of free play. For generations, kids played after school, unsupervised by adults. Playing without adults supervising their every move is incredibly important for kids’ development. But in recent years, increased schoolwork and extracurricular activities designed to groom kids for college and careers have stymied unsupervised play at home. For the September 3 episode Sung visits a school that’s using the school day to give kids the experience of unstructured play instead of working on English and math assignments. And this attempt to bring back play has won the attention of thousands of teachers who are replacing one day of school with play each year as part of a global movement.