Teach The Way They Learn

Teach The Way They Learn is an Academica Media production hosted by Liliana Salazar, and its organizing question stays fixed: which teaching strategies actually reach every group of students? Salazar restates that mission at the top of episodes, along with a challenge to set tradition and comfort aside in favor of techniques that might serve students better. Some episodes, she says, are hers alone. Others bring in guests, and the guests are where the show finds its range. The Jason Doughty conversation on classical learning describes the classroom as a community. Its standout story concerns a third grader described as genius level but utterly silent. The fix was small. Each morning she handed over index cards noting something from her homework she found interesting, and later in the day she was called on to talk about it, because the rest of the class was losing out on her. Technology gets two full episodes with David Calvo, on ChatGPT in the classroom. He argues that restrictions in U.S. schools are driven largely by academic-dishonesty concerns, and notes that plenty of teachers and students use the tool anyway, just not on school networks. The conversation also describes asking it to rewrite a single text in third-grade language or in academic language, so an older student reading far below grade level can still work with grade-level material. The aim, as framed there, is scaffolding within the zone of proximal development, never lower expectations. Other conversations travel further from the classroom. With Dr. Eileen Marty the subject is the science of pandemics, including how a virus in the upper airways differs from one that reaches deep into the lungs, where the body's defenses are less ready. Salazar mentions she has been taking notes, then raises her concern that the world did not respond when the World Health Organization declared an emergency in January 2020. Mike Diamond's episode is framed around hope. Salazar asks him to trace the road from Perth through substance abuse to the realization that he could not keep living that way, with parents and educators of struggling children in mind. Anxiety gets a two-part treatment with Arlene Dyer, whom Salazar introduces as a very dear friend; that episode also finds Salazar and producer Ross Ulises explaining a pause brought on by COVID-19 while schools moved to virtual learning. The register is warm and effusive, from welcomes repeated three times over to thanks for Ross always taking care of her. And the sign-off keeps circling back to the line behind the show's name: if a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn. Listeners after something they can use right away might start with the David Calvo pair.