New View EDU

National Association of Independent Schools
  • 4.7 (15)
  • EDUCATION
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

The NAIS New View EDU podcast heads into its ninth season seeking fresh perspectives on the skills and dispositions that students—and school leaders—need to thrive in a shifting world. As external factors like AI, global instability, and polarization continue to change education, we're turning to experts from inside and outside independent schools to help chart a positive, purpose-driven path forward. Co-hosts Debra P. Wilson and Morva McDonald dive deep into the opportunities and challenges that rapidly evolving technology presents for schools, and they speak to experts like Vriti Saraf and Peter Nilsson about how to approach the changing landscape. They examine how to make learning meaningful and neurologically enriching, guided by new research from Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her team at USC CANDLE. Authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop provide insight into engaging adolescents in the learning process while caring for their well-being, and Eleanor Daugherty and George Abalekpor from Georgetown share how centering student voices and perspectives creates the conditions for thriving in higher education and beyond.  Conversations with Jason Craige Harris and Kenji Yoshino bring in the bigger picture for school leaders this season, as they discuss how to grapple with questions about leadership, human dignity, and maintaining inclusive and welcoming environments in a tumultuous moment. And Jeff Selingo returns to help make sense of what these years of ongoing cultural and educational shifts mean for college admission and our students' futures. Packed with insights and steady, future-focused guidance, Season 9 of New View EDU is not to be missed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. JAN 22

    Mattering: A Special Live Episode with Jennifer Wallace

    Episode 83: Mattering LIVE Episode With Jennifer Wallace Available January 22, 2026 What if we could unlock the secret to a life of deep connection and purpose? That’s the premise of Jennifer Wallace’s new book, Mattering. In this special live edition of New View EDU, recorded on January 15, 2026, Jennifer shares everything she has learned about the importance of mattering with NAIS President Debra Wilson. Guest: Jennifer Wallace Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes In This Episode: “Researchers who study it say that after the drive for food and shelter, it is the drive, the motivation to matter, that shapes human behavior for better or for worse. So when we feel like we matter, we show up fully, we engage, we connect, we contribute. When we are made to feel like we don't matter, we can either turn against ourselves, become anxious, depressed, turn to substances to try to alleviate the pain, or lash out in anger, right? Road rage, online attacks, political extremes, these are desperate attempts to say, oh, I don't matter? I'll show you I matter.” (10:03)“Something like 70% of the workforce, employees are reporting feeling disengaged. The way I view disengagement through the lens of mattering is that when we feel, as individual workers, like we don't matter, for whatever reason that is, it's a painful feeling. It releases these painful neurochemicals in our brains, and to stop that, if we don't feel like we have a voice or agency, to stop it, is to disengage. That's the coping strategy that we employ.” (16:40)“And so what I argue in the book to leaders, again, not just school leaders, to anybody, is that mattering at work is critical. If we want to support, if we know that children's resilience rests on the resilience of the adults in their lives, and we know that adults spend the majority of their waking hours in the workplace. If we can go and make adults feel like they matter at work, that is how we can bring caregivers and parents home to their kids as their best selves, sturdy adults, so that they could act as the first responders to those kids' struggles. You cannot do it if you are constantly beaten down at your job. You cannot show up as your best self.” (52:19) Related Episodes: 79; 78; 77; 72; 60; 54; 51 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    56 min

  2. 11/18/2025

    The New Dream Schools With Jeff Selingo

    Episode 82: The New Dream Schools With Jeff Selingo Available November 18, 2025 What is a “Dream School?” Almost since the college admissions process began, students have had ideas about where they dream they’ll end up after high school, and increasingly, those “dream schools” have existed on a very short list of what we think of as prestigious, name-brand institutions. But what if we’re wrong about that list? What if everything we think we know about the factors that make a college great has been misguided? Higher education expert Jeff Selingo joins host Debra Wilson for a frank discussion of what needs to change in our approach to college admissions, and his new book, Dream School. Guest: Jeff Selingo Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes In This Episode: “I want to bring back some normalcy to high school so that not everything is about, not everything you do is about getting into college and into the right college, that you're doing things because you want to challenge yourself. You enjoy them, you want to try new things out…There's so much pressure around me to apply to a certain set of schools, and I wanna change that conversation.” (6:08)“The November 1 deadlines, the October 15th deadlines now, even earlier deadlines, has just moved up the entire college search process now really into the junior year. And then now what used to happen in the junior year is happening in the sophomore year. So you're not even getting through half of high school without really thinking about college.” (11:33)“I mean, the big unknown here, Debra, is the role of AI in the job market. What are the jobs of the future really going to be and what are they going to need? What are the skill sets they're going to need? It was pretty certain over the last 10 years that we've seen, one of the reasons why liberal arts colleges have kind of gone out of favor is because we've seen a huge shift in majors to the business and STEM because parents thought that's where the jobs were…Now parents are asking, huh, what is the, now what's the next major? And by the way, maybe this brings the liberal arts back into vogue and maybe the liberal arts institutions with their ability to have a mix of problem solving and communication and critical thinking and bring in hands-on learning to that, that might bring them back in a way that we didn't quite expect.” (34:14) Related Episodes: 76; 74; 63; 44; 36; 29; 22 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    44 min

  3. 11/11/2025

    How AI Changes Everything and Nothing With Peter Nilsson

    Episode 81: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing With Peter Nilsson Available November 11, 2025 Right now, it may feel as though AI has changed everything about education. It has, says Peter Nilsson – but it has also changed nothing. That’s the paradox at the core of his forthcoming co-authored book, Irreplaceable: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing about Teaching and Learning. He sits down with host Morva McDonald to share what has actually changed, what hasn’t, and how his work using technology to bolster innovation in education has led him to this place. Guest: Peter Nilsson Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes In This Episode: “Unlike medicine and unlike law, education is diverse in the way that it is applied in different classrooms. There isn't only one way to teach the Great Gatsby. There isn't only one way to teach Beloved. In fact, every classroom should be different in the way that it engages it because every classroom has different students. So while knowledge on Wikipedia compiles everybody's contributions to the page on physics compiled to one page, curriculum does the opposite. Curriculum doesn't compile. It disaggregates. It diversifies.” (5:22)“It's impossible to expect every teacher, every school, even to be able to develop the wisest, most effective responses to every change. That's just not how innovation happens. What happens is people all across networks figure out small little things. And the more those small little things can share across the network, the more any individual node on the network can have the most comprehensive, high quality, effective response to that thing.” (16:52)“Students now can do more, so much more than they ever could do before. Every student having something like this vision of an AI tutor is a game changer for so many reasons. But nonetheless, students will still need time. They will still need help. They will still need practice. They will still struggle to ask the right question. They will still come in confused about something. They will still need teachers to help them build confidence. Everything is changing in terms of how we do this on a human, individual level where we're interacting with a machine that is more and more like a human, but nothing is changing in that the messiness of our own human learning remains.” (22:31) Related Episodes: 71, 69, 68, 49, 45, 31 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    39 min

  4. 11/04/2025

    Equipping Students in the Age of AI with Autumn Adkins Graves, St. Anne's-Belfield School

    In this episode from NAIS podcast Member Voices, Jackie Wolking speaks with Autumn Adkins Graves, head of St. Anne's-Belfield School (VA). In their conversation, Graves shares the importance of curiosity in the age of artificial intelligence, and how her school created a portrait of a graduate with a futurist lens. She also talks about change management and how we affirm what's working well to move things along and how we have to stop trying to control tech or dismiss it. New View EDU will return next week with a new episode on How AI Changes Everything and Nothing, with guest Peter Nilsson. Related Resources: Member Voices PodcastAI Resources for Schools and EducatorsRecent Episodes of New View EDU Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    41 min

  5. 10/28/2025

    The Future of Inclusion With Kenji Yoshino

    Episode 80: The Future of Inclusion With Kenji Yoshino Available October 28, 2025 In this time of rapidly evolving law and opinion around terms like diversity, equity, and inclusion, what is the work of school leaders who believe in building stronger, more connected, more inclusive communities? Legal scholar and author Kenji Yoshino is the author of a forthcoming book called How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America. He joins host Morva McDonald to talk about the legal precedents of the past, the shifting culture of the present, and the strategies that can secure the future of equitable practice. Guests: Kenji Yoshino Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes In This Episode: “I think lawyers are actually terrible at lots of things, but we're actually rather good at saying, yes, we disagree, but you're not my enemy, right? You're my debate opponent, and you're actually my friend on the other side. And so let's actually behave as if, let's carry ourselves in that way and let the best ideas win.”“I think that the younger generation has a greater understanding not of who they are, but, or not just of who they are, but also the skills that are going to be needed for us to survive, much less thrive, in a multicultural society that is much more global, much more diverse. And so the capacity to speak across difference, to work across difference, to bond across difference is going to be a critical skill for us going forward. And that's the set of skills that are embodied within DEI.”“So the question I always ask is like, it's really easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and to get blown back and forth as the pendulum swings back and forth, right? But rather than doing that, like just sit in your values and think five years from now, who will I want to have been in this moment when everyone was telling me like cave or do this or do that? Like what is the kind of values based decision that I can make here that will make me proud of myself five years from now, rather than proud of myself tomorrow or proud of myself next week?” Related Episodes: 77; 66; 64; 62; 37; 30; 17; 7 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    47 min

  6. 10/21/2025

    The Disengaged Teen With Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop

    Episode 79: The Disengaged Teen With Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop Available October 21, 2025 Why do so many students seem to lose their love of learning when they reach adolescence? Is there something about the way we approach school for this age group that leads to greater disengagement and apathy? And how can we change our systems, and the ways we relate to teens both in and out of school, to help support their development and flourishing? Authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop join host Debra Wilson to talk about their book The Disengaged Teen, and what they recommend to parents and educators in the age of rapidly evolving AI. Guests: Jenny West Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes In This Episode: “We also heard a lot that it was, parents often figured out things weren't going well when it really kind of blew up. So engagement is a continuum. And some of the behaviors we see early on that we can kind of shrug our shoulders and say, that's just, you know, teens being teens, right? To sort of bring that negative construct in. And some of it is, for sure. Like I don't want to freak out parents unnecessarily, but sometimes seeing those behaviors continuously and not digging into them then was like, kids get to a point where they're telling themselves, there's no point. I'm not going to try at anything. And it's because they failed a test and didn't want to tell anyone or didn't know how to ask for help.” (15:31)“We argue in the book that we need to make a shift from what we call the age of achievement, where through no fault of anybody inside the system, virtually every education system around the world, just how it has been designed from eons ago, is about ranking and sorting. Otherwise, we wouldn't have grades. Do you know what I mean? We wouldn't have that. That is the core. The purpose really was, ages ago, of funneling up into higher ed. How do you select? And so we're saying we are definitely seeing the strains on that design.” (31:24) Related Episodes:76; 71; 63; 60; 59; 51; 40; 31 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    44 min

  7. 10/14/2025

    The Power of Transcendent Thinking With Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

    Episode 78: The Power of Transcendent Thinking With Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Available October 14, 2025 “What does it mean to be a self-actualizing, fully integrated, socially contextualized human being in this new world order? And how would we design opportunities…to help a young person develop not just what they know now, but to potentiate in ways that change who they could become?” Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang returns to New View EDU to share the work she and her team at USC CANDLE are doing to answer these, and other, deeply provocative questions about the science of teaching and learning. Her new research hones in on a specific type of cognitive process, which she terms “transcendent thinking.” And as Mary Helen explains during this conversation with Debra Wilson, transcendent thinking may be the key to unlocking long-term developmental outcomes for students. Guest: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes In This Episode: “So what we have here is this incredible suggestion that when kids dispositionally engage with complex, curious, deep thinking about big ideas. Not only are they deeply engaged by that, but they are physically and functionally growing their capacity to think in ways that over time produces a neural substrate that supports wellbeing. So we're actually growing a robust brain that enables us to be well, to manage in relationships, and to feel good in our own skin and to develop identities that transcend that are about big ideas and purpose and values.” (18:21)“What we show is that teaching well is not more work, it's different work. It's work in which you really engage with the thought patterns, what it feels like for these students to be thinking. What are their emotions about here? Are they having emotions about, you know, the amazing power of right triangles to help us, you know, sort of understand the geometry of the world and how powerful it feels to really engage in that kind of mathematical thinking? Or are they having emotions about, yay, I did it, I'm done. Or, boo, I didn't, and now I'm freaking out because I'm going to flunk, right? Because when the emotions are mainly about those outcomes, what we're finding is that the school is not promotive of development in the same way. It may be promoting quote unquote learning, maybe, but in the service of what? What are you going to use that learning for?” (33:33) Related Episodes: 75; 72; 69; 59; 58; 47; 35 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    47 min

  8. 10/07/2025

    Dignity-Affirming Leadership in Schools With Jason Craige Harris

    Episode 77: Dignity-Affirming Leadership in Schools With Jason Craige Harris Available October 7, 2025 At a time when conflict and polarization feel like an unrelenting fact of life, how can we build stronger, kinder school communities where everyone feels seen, known, and valued? That’s one of the pervasive questions facing school leaders right now, and one that Jason Craige Harris is ready to help us answer. He joins Morva McDonald for a conversation about refocusing our leadership practices to center human dignity, and why he feels that reframe is so vital to our continued wellbeing. Guest: Jason Craige Harris Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes In This Episode: “We have to engage in a bit of a listening tour to hear how people are experiencing their cultural reality.  And one of the reasons why is because our brains are storytelling factories. And in the absence of information given to us, whenever we detect gaps, we create, right? We fill it with our own sort of assumptions. And those assumptions, I'm not saying they're automatically wrong, but they're not automatically right most of the time.” (6:58)“For a long time in my work, I framed things in terms of what I was against. Like I had a really clear idea of like, I don't want exclusion. I don't want assimilation. I don't want violence. I'm not even sure I really want tolerance. And so my whole imagination was defined by being anti- forces that were debilitating and dehumanizing. And at some point I realized, gosh, like, I'm not sure I've spent much time trying to thickly describe the world that I want, like what I'm fighting for versus what I'm fighting against...Let's just say that if exclusion somehow disappears, if racism disappears, if whatever -ism it is disappears, then will we no longer have purpose?” (19:15)“I worry that some of our school communities, because of the desire to avoid controversy and division, and the complexities that come with grappling with challenging human issues, like the desire to avoid crisis, then leads some toward a kind of superficial peace, a sort of superficial consensus.” (25:16) Related Episodes: 67; 66; 64; 37; 30; 15; 13 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    43 min
See All (91)

Trailer

4.7
out of 5
15 Ratings

About

The NAIS New View EDU podcast heads into its ninth season seeking fresh perspectives on the skills and dispositions that students—and school leaders—need to thrive in a shifting world. As external factors like AI, global instability, and polarization continue to change education, we're turning to experts from inside and outside independent schools to help chart a positive, purpose-driven path forward. Co-hosts Debra P. Wilson and Morva McDonald dive deep into the opportunities and challenges that rapidly evolving technology presents for schools, and they speak to experts like Vriti Saraf and Peter Nilsson about how to approach the changing landscape. They examine how to make learning meaningful and neurologically enriching, guided by new research from Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her team at USC CANDLE. Authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop provide insight into engaging adolescents in the learning process while caring for their well-being, and Eleanor Daugherty and George Abalekpor from Georgetown share how centering student voices and perspectives creates the conditions for thriving in higher education and beyond.  Conversations with Jason Craige Harris and Kenji Yoshino bring in the bigger picture for school leaders this season, as they discuss how to grapple with questions about leadership, human dignity, and maintaining inclusive and welcoming environments in a tumultuous moment. And Jeff Selingo returns to help make sense of what these years of ongoing cultural and educational shifts mean for college admission and our students' futures. Packed with insights and steady, future-focused guidance, Season 9 of New View EDU is not to be missed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    National Association of Independent Schools
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    91
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © National Association of Independent Schools
  • Show Website
    New View EDU

You Might Also Like