Tutoring: The Human Superpower

Mindreading

A lot of skillful parenting and teaching depends on our ability to see the world through a child's eyes. In this episode, we'll speak with Dr. Ian Apperly, author of the book, Mindreaders: The Cognitive Basis of "Theory of Mind", about what mind reading is, why it's important, and ask to what extent we're really able to use this skill in public education today.

Where to Find Millions of Brilliant Tutors

To unleash our superpower would most likely require millions more educators than we have. So where will they come from? In this episode, we’ll explore how to find millions of tutors who are even better educated and better equipped for teaching than our average teacher is right now. 

The Cost of Tutoring

A lot of people agree that tutoring is how most children learn best. But they see it as too expensive to consider making available at the mass scale. Despite years of searching, I've never found a financial analysis explaining what it would cost. Having run a school system for ten years in which I was always directly involved in educational finances, I feel qualified to perform this analysis. And I have. In this episode, let's dive into what it would really cost to make tutoring into something public and communal instead of just a private tool--for mostly families with resources. 

The Evolution of Tutoring

Tutoring was not invented; it evolved. It evolved for a purpose. Even though it has never been free, in some circumstances, it has been worth the cost since the dawn of humanity. That purpose and that cost are still very relevant topics in modern Western societies. Join me and Professor Sheina Lew-Levy of Durham University, UK as we probe the prehistoric origins of costly education itself. Dr. Lew-Levy is an anthropologist and psychologist who studies educational practices of forager (or hunter-gatherer) people in order to search for clues about the role teaching and learning played in our shared evolutionary origins. 

“This system probably isn’t going to be a good fit for your son”

A father and son share a story about a seemingly harmless decision that set the son on a disastrous path in their local public school and what they did about it. With guests, Jeremy and Isaiah Lewis, we’ll explore some of the real-life implications of relying on a delicate system that cannot systematically meet individual kids where they’re at.

Parental Tutoring Changes Brains: Interview with Dr. Stuart Hammond

Why do parents have such a big impact on which kids succeed in school and beyond?  One of the answers has to do with a simple but poorly understood concept called “parental scaffolding”. Developmental psychology professor, Stuart Hammond, joins us today to help explain research showing how parents impact their child’s brain development with decisions that often do not seem as important as they are. 
 
Here's a link to the article we discussed.(Full article is behind a paywall)

Timmy Matthews Can Learn

Why do so many smart people find it hard to learn in classrooms? Why can’t an education system that was good enough for our grandparents be good enough for us? The first episode addresses some of the major themes and mysteries of modern education, while telling the story of Timmy Matthews–a person who, like so many of us, could learn well from tutoring but found classroom teaching to be disastrously ineffective.

Trailer

For the last three centuries, American communities have been amongst the most educationally radical in the world. The colonial education movement in the 18th century, the common schools movement in the 19th, and the high school movement in the 20th each made a quality education more accessible to everyone. The impact of these education movements contributed to many advances, most of which we now take for granted. But the world didn't stop changing and complexifying.
In the 21st century, our communities must again do something big for the education of our children, or continue to see a darkening future for generations to come. But there is hope. There is something as grand as what came before that we have yet to try. For the last 50 years, evidence has been piling up that humans don't actually learn or teach very well in traditional classrooms. We are far better at tutoring. With this podcast, Tutoring: The Human Superpower,  educator and researcher Giles Leeper explores with guests the origins, uses, opportunities, and barriers of our shared hidden superpower. Together, we explore the question, what it would mean to finally unleash this uniquely human superpower?