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Being an educator in the 21st century is indescribably complex. There’s a constant pressure to meet standards and help students achieve, but there’s also a need to allow learners to color outside the lines in an effort to prompt creativity. The Arizona K12 Center believes effective teaching and learning is grounded in quality teacher development and teacher leadership. To support educators along the continuum, the Center developed “3Ps in a Pod” to further dissect practice, policy, and passion in the field of education. Voiced by several of the Center's directors, "3Ps in a Pod" features numerous guests with ideas, perspectives, and stories relevant to what educators do both in and out of the classroom. This is a conversation, not a lecture. Ditch your notebook, but be ready to share. There’s no need to cram for a pop quiz, but we hope you’ll pledge to be a lifelong learner.
In recognition of National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools on September 30, we are discussing the history of American Indian boarding schools and the continued legacy of this part of our history.
Hosts Daniela and Donnie welcome Marcus Monenerkit from the Heard Museum to the podcast to speak about the history of American Indian boarding schools and the Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories exhibit at the Heard Museum.
Monenerkit shares about what students and families experienced, including a bit of his own family’s experiences and about the American Indian boarding schools now present on Steele Indian School Park in central Phoenix. He speaks to the trauma and challenges students and their families faced and how that continues to affect American Indian individuals and families today.
He also details some of the policy and mindsets that led to the creation of American Indian boarding schools, how they changed over time, and what current-day American Indian boarding schools are like today.
Here are a few resources connected to today’s discussion:
Learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
In January of 2023, Dr. Dani Portillo became the superintendent of Roosevelt School District, the first Latina to hold this position. In today’s episode, Dr. Portillo talks with hosts Kathleen and Josh about her journey into education and her vision for Roosevelt School District, an elementary district in south Phoenix.
Roosevelt, an elementary district in south Phoenix, currently serves about 7,400-some students and employs about 1,400 people. Dr. Portillo shares the importance of this mid-size district to south Phoenix, including the teaching of students but also the impact on housing values and community development. She shares about her vision for the district and how integral Roosevelt schools are to advancing the south Phoenix community.
Dr. Portillo shares about both the challenges and what she most enjoys in her new role, especially working with adults for the benefit of all students. She also shares about what she enjoys in her free time, including suspenseful movies and gardening. She also recommends a recent book she’s appreciated, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Dr. Portillo also shares about how her parents have influenced her approach to education and the work ahead of her.
Learn more about Dr. Portillo and Roosevelt School District at rsd66.org.
Learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
3Ps in a Pod is taking a break this week, but we’ll be back in your podcast feed next Thursday. We hope whether your fall break is this week or later this month, you’re able to take time to rest and rejuvenate.
And thank you for all you do to support Arizona’s learners, from all of us at the Arizona K12 Center.
Janet Wong left a law career and dove into writing poetry and helping others see the power of poetry. In this episode of 3Ps in a Pod, Janet talks with hosts Josh and Juliana about her approach to poetry and shares a variety of ways you can use poetry in your classroom.
Janet shares how poems can be used as a way to get to know your students, as a brain break, as a way to teach revision, and to practice being creative. She reads several poems in this episode, including from this past summer’s Beginning Teachers Institute, where she was a keynote speaker and had participants write multiple poems.
Janet Wong is the 2021 winner of the NCTE Excellence in Poetry for Children award, a lifetime achievement award that is one of the highest honors a children’s poet can receive. Wong is the author of more than 40 books for children and teens on a wide variety of subjects, including writing and revision (You Have to Write), diversity and community (Apple Pie 4th of July), peer pressure (Me and Rolly Maloo), chess (Alex and the Wednesday Chess Club), and yoga (Twist: Yoga Poems). She also serves on the Yale Law School Executive Committee.
You can find Janet on X, previously Twitter, at @janetwongauthor and through her websites, janet-wong.com and pomelobooks.com.
Learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
In this final episode of our series with The Learning Scientists, Dr. Megan Sumeracki dives into more detail about the three teaching and learning strategies of elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding.
The Learning Scientists, a group of cognitive psychologists, have developed six main strategies to support your teaching and your students’ learning. In the previous episode, Dr. Sumeracki and Dr. Althea Need Kaminske talked about the strategies of spaced practice, interleaving, and retrieval practice. Today, Dr. Sumeracki talks in-depth about the remaining three strategies:
A synopsis of these strategies and resources to help use them is at this link and you can find the full research paper at this link.
Learn more about The Learning Scientists at learningscientists.org and learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
In the last three episodes, we’ve explored some different aspects of the cognitive psychology behind how we learn. Today, we’re taking that context and applying it to six strategies to support your teaching and your students’ learning.
In this episode, Dr. Althea Need Kaminske and Dr. Megan Sumeracki, two of The Learning Scientists, begin talking about these six strategies:
Spaced practice, repetition spaced out over time
Interleaving, interspersing different topics in a lesson
Retrieval practice, working at accessing memory
Elaboration, connecting new learning to previous learning
Concrete examples, providing supporting information
Dual coding, using visuals
A synopsis of these strategies and resources to help use them is at this link and you can find the full research paper at this link. They dive in more deeply with hosts Josh and Paula about spaced practice, interleaving, and retrieval practice and will further explore elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding in next week’s final episode of this series.
Learn more about The Learning Scientists at learningscientists.org and learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
We continue our series with The Learning Scientists on this episode of 3Ps in a Pod. Today, hosts Josh and Paula talk with Dr. Althea Need Kaminske and Dr. Megan Sumeracki about working memory and perception.
Dr. Sumeracki and Dr. Kaminske give multiple examples demonstrating how background knowledge shapes your perception and what that means for how we communicate or give instructions to students or anyone else in our lives.
The Learning Scientists also discuss the processes of moving from learning to applying concepts and what that looks like for both students and for pre-service teachers moving into the day-to-day of teaching. They then discuss what it is to pay attention, how that connects with short-term and long-term memory, and how mind wandering can actually be helpful in learning and creating memory.
The group also begins to talk about strategies that truly support how cognition actually works. Dr. Kaminske talks specifically about note-taking and how quality note-taking that supports actual learning requires a slowed down lecture, for example, or taking the time when reading a textbook to not just rewrite statements but to process and structure the information in their own way. They also discuss the idea of active learning.
In the next episode, Dr. Sumeracki and Dr. Kaminske build off of this conversation and discuss more strategies and interventions you can apply that support the cognitive processes discussed in this episode.
Learn more about the Learning Scientists at learningscientists.org, and learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
We’re back with part two of our series with The Learning Scientists! Today, cognitive psychologists Dr. Megan Sumeracki and Dr. Cindy Nebel pick up where we left off in the first part of this series.
They jump into a demonstration with hosts Josh and Paula that illustrates some aspects of how our brains work. That leads into a discussion about why it’s cognitively so important to understand your students’ contexts in learning.
Paula also asks Dr. Sumeracki and Dr. Nebel to discuss what it means to use research-based curriculum and why we need to depend on research rather than our intuition when it comes to teaching. They also discuss the benefits and uses of interleaving versus blocking content.
Here are links to the resources mentioned in this episode:
Learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
We’re starting off a five-part series with The Learning Scientists, a group of cognitive psychological scientists focused on how we learn. Today, hosts Josh and Paula talk with Dr. Megan Sumeracki and Dr. Cindy Nebel about the science of learning.
As cognitive psychological scientists, The Learning Scientists are a group interested in research on education, specifically on the science of learning. They aim to motivate students to study by increasing the use of effective study and teaching strategies backed by research and decreasing negative views of testing. Dr. Sumeracki and Dr. Nebel share more about what that means and the differences between their area of study and that of neuroscientists.
They detail why it’s so important for educators to know some cognitive psychology to better understand students’ needs when learning. Hosts Josh and Paula then share some of the misconceptions that struck them when they read Understanding How We Learn, A Visual Guide and discuss them with The Learning Scientists.
The Learning Scientists and hosts Josh and Paula will continue their conversation in next week’s episode of 3Ps in a Pod. Learn more about The Learning Scientists at learningscientists.org, and learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
STEM education can look very different across Arizona, which is why the Arizona STEM Acceleration Project came to be to help advance STEM in schools across the state. In this episode, hosts Donnie and Daniela talk with Mike Vargas and Amanda Whitehurst share how the Arizona STEM Acceleration Project (ASAP) works to transform how educators deliver STEM education.
The Arizona STEM Acceleration Project has three components for the program’s teacher fellows:
ASAP has completed its first year and is embarking on its second. In it’s first year, 433 fellows in about 300 different schools completed the program, affecting almost 90,000 students. About 90% of fellows who started ASAP completed and were able to energize STEM education in their classroom. The fellows represented every county, every major city, and most reservations in Arizona.
Those fellows completed almost 15,000 hours of professional development and created 1,771 STEM lesson plans that are now in this online lesson plan archive that is free and open for all Arizona teachers. These lesson plans are all specific to STEM and the Arizona State Standards.
ASAP also provided about $850,000-worth of classroom equipment and paid $2 million in stipends to the teacher fellows.
In this episode, Amanda also shares examples of how ASAP fellows’ projects have directly impacted students and their future goals. You can find more of those stories on the ASAP website’s fellow highlight section.
ASAP is also partnering with the Arizona K12 Center to introduce a National Board Certification STEM cohort for teachers interested in pursuing National Board Certification alongside other STEM educators. Read more about that opportunity here, and contact Donnie Dicus at ddicus@azk12.orgto join.
Learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.
Amanda is a wife. A mother. A blogger. A Christian.
A charming, beautiful, bubbly, young woman who lives life to the fullest.
But Amanda is dying, with a secret she doesn’t want anyone to know.
She starts a blog detailing her cancer journey, and becomes an inspiration, touching and
captivating her local community as well as followers all over the world.
Until one day investigative producer Nancy gets an anonymous tip telling her to look at Amanda’s
blog, setting Nancy on an unimaginable road to uncover Amanda’s secret.
Award winning journalist Charlie Webster explores this unbelievable and bizarre, but
all-too-real tale, of a woman from San Jose, California whose secret ripped a family apart and
left a community in shock.
Scamanda is the true story of a woman whose own words held the key to her secret.
New episodes every Monday.
Follow Scamanda on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Amanda’s blog posts are read by actor Kendall Horn.
