Roughly four in ten American high school students report not feeling connected to anyone at their school. Host Scott Titsworth talks with Dr. Dominique Smith — principal of Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego and co-author of the new second edition of Belonging in School: Creating a Place Where Kids Want to Learn and Teachers Want to Stay — about why the effort students spend trying to fit in is the very thing that pulls them away from learning.

Smith came to school leadership by an unusual route, holding a master’s degree in social work alongside a doctorate in educational leadership, and he is a national trainer for the International Institute for Restorative Practices. In this conversation he breaks belonging into eleven distinct dimensions, makes the case that it functions as the gatekeeper for learning, and describes what a teacher can actually do on a Monday morning with no budget and nobody’s permission.

Belonging in School, second edition (Corwin): https://www.corwin.com/books/belonging-in-school-2e-301936

Health Sciences High and Middle College: https://www.hshmc.org

Teaching Matters is hosted by Scott Titsworth, Professor of Instructional Communication in the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University. The show is produced in collaboration with WOUB Public Media and the Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact at Ohio University.

Questions or guest suggestions: Teachingmatterspodcast@ohio.edu

On this episode of Teaching Matters, host Scott Titsworth talks with Zaretta Hammond, a teacher educator and the author of Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice. Hammond argues that teaching strategies are not the same as learning: teachers can cover the content, model each step, and supply every scaffold, and the student still has to do the thinking, which is why she describes over-scaffolding as the teacher doing too much of the cognitive work. She is not against scaffolding; she says teachers have to know where the wobble is.

The conversation covers cognitive redlining, a term she borrows from redlining in real estate, and the signs she looks for when she walks into a school; the five learn-to-learn moves she wants teachers to hand over to students; the idea of the first pancake and a classroom culture of errors; and why cognitive friction, the confusion and productive struggle she says all learning starts with, is what AI and packaged pacing guides can take away.

To learn more about Zaretta’s work visit her website Ready for Rigor: https://ready4rigor.com

Most districts are still arguing about whether to ban artificial intelligence or allow it. Alex Bronson thinks both sides of that argument are losing. In this episode, host Scott Titsworth talks with Bronson, Director of K-8 Science at Uncommon Schools, about why prompt engineering is not the same thing as literacy, and why she believes the work of preparing students for an AI-saturated world starts in kindergarten with computational thinking rather than in high school with chatbots. They discuss the K-8 sequence she has built, the ethical and equity stakes for students in underresourced communities, and what schools owe teachers who are being asked to teach something they never trained for.

Learn more by visiting https://uncommonschools.org/