Alliance for Catholic Education

The Alliance for Catholic Education feed carries Think, Pair, Share, a conversation series led by Audrey Scott. Its opening pitch is a question with a ready answer: think education is cool? So do we. The name describes the format. By the show's own account, it pairs two conversations, one to learn about its guests and one to learn from them, then invites listeners to share their takeaways. The guests are people in and around the Alliance for Catholic Education at Notre Dame. The episode titles follow a tidy pattern of a name, the word Education, and one descriptor, as in 'Kati Macaluso: Education, Devoted.' and 'Alec Torigian: Education, Shepherded.' The get-to-know-you half is plainly personal. Taylor Kelly, the new Associate Director of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at Notre Dame, remembers planning to become a dentist and describes how education gradually became a long-term career, crediting her parents' trust in Notre Dame and in ACE Teaching Fellows. Kati Macaluso, the new academic director of the ACE Teaching Fellows Program, first took on the job as an interim and was not looking for it. A year of asking whether she was called to it, she says, led her back to an old passion: teaching as a vocation. The learn-from-them half turns to the work. Fr. Nate Wills, who directs ACE's Blended Learning Initiatives and serves as chaplain for the Notre Dame football team, recalls how Halo matched players by skill and wondering why school had nothing like it. He is candid about the classroom as well, admitting that as an ACE Teaching Fellow he gave up on differentiated instruction by day two, unable to put together one lesson plan, let alone thirty. Alec Torigian, National Coordinator for ACE's Pursuing Achievement Through Higher Education initiative, or PATH, explains 'radical accompaniment,' a phrase he says the team borrowed rather than invented. In his account it means asking students how they are as people and how connected they feel to their community, not only how their math grades and attendance look, always with accountability and never with judgment. Faith sits easily inside these conversations, from serving kids as Jesus did to making God known, loved, and served. The mood stays light. Fr. Bob Dowd, back for a second conversation, takes on a round of true-or-false trivia about the history of Grace, drawn from the Alumni Association's Facebook page, which leads to talk of five hundred men living in one hall and Notre Dame's emphasis on community in residence life. 'Think. Pair. Share. hodgePOD 23' is a year-end collection of memorable moments gathered around hope and wrapped in Christmas-carol wordplay. One of its stories follows a former ACE Teaching Fellow who stayed on as a kindergarten teacher, became principal of St. Mary Carmel on the west side of Dallas, and enrolled in the Remick Leadership Program. That compilation is the easiest way to sample the range, and for classroom technology, start with Fr. Nate Wills. What a listener gets is a close, human view of how one Catholic education program forms teachers and principals and walks alongside students, told by the people doing that work.