Episode 101 | Special Episode with guests from past 100 episodes surprise guests – April 9, 2022. 5:30 PM Eastern
Toks Bakare is a graduate of the Technology Innovation and Education masters at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At Harvard, Toks founded the student organization Leading Education in African Development (LEAD). In the last year, LEAD has brought conversations on education in Africa to four conferences across the university and hosted a short series of webinars discussing the impact of COVID-19 on education in Africa. Before studying at Harvard, Toks spent more than 10 years focused on improving access to quality inclusive education through applied behaviour analysis (ABA). In 2014 she founded asktoks.com, a for-profit social enterprise that provides ABA to children with developmental disorders. Having observed the scarcity of ABA professionals in low and middle income countries, she dedicated her time at Harvard to exploring ways to use technology in her field. She worked on increasing ABA-capable therapists and accelerating professional development in ABA for West Africa. She can be contacted at toksbakare@gse.harvard.edu.
Professor Ok-hwa Lee is a specialist in educational technology and has been a practitioner in pre-service teacher education for 32 years. Currently, she served in the Department of Education at Chungbuk National University in South Korea. She has been a pioneer of the e-learning and technology applications in Korea and has been an active speaker in the global society. She was a member of the Presidential Educational Reform Committee and the Presidential e-Government Committee, also consulting members for various ministries regarding technology and education. Professor Ok-hwa Lee has rich experiences of international collaborations with the Europe Erasmus mobility program and research collaboration with Australia, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the Asia Cyber University, OECD, NECC (USA), Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, and ACER (Australia). Recently, Professor Lee has played a key role on the Korean government ODA (Official Development Assistant) programs to Nigeria, Republic of the Sudan, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and several South Asian countries (e.g., ICT capacity building for Nicaragua secondary school teachers; an international study of High Performing Systems for Tomorrow; Project evaluation for teaching capacity building for ICT education is Bangladesh, and an international study of classroom observation by ICALT for teaching skills). The focus of many of these projects has been on school effectiveness with international partners. She has been the executive director for the Asia Society Korea chapter and visiting professor at the Beijing Normal graduate school of education. She can be contacted at ohleekorea@gmail.com.
Gabriel Rshaid is the co-founder and Director of The Learnerspace, a consulting company seeking to impact education advocating for effective change. He is also co-founder of The Global School, the first school of its type in Latin America, attempting to make educational change a reality. Formerly Headmaster of St. Andrew’s Scots School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the oldest bilingual school in the world. He is a passionate educational futurist who is intent on sharing his belief that it is the best time in history to be an educator. Gabriel is the author of five books: “Learning for the Future”, “The 21st Century Classroom”, “From Out of This World: Leadership and Life Lessons from the Space Program”, “Extreme Curriculum Makeover: A Hands-On Guide for a Learner-Centered Pedagogy” and “The Whole Teacher: a One Way Journey to Rediscovering Joy and Passion in Teaching”, a co-author of “The Take-Action Guide to World Class Learners”, and has contributed to numerous other books and anthologies. A former board member of ASCD and chair of ESSARP, he has spoken and led professional development workshops all over the world, working with educators to help create the future of education. He can be contacted at gabriel.rshaid@thelearnerspace.org.
Shawn Loescher, Ed.D. is an active practitioner with over 25 years of experience, both domestically and abroad, in educational innovation and school system redesign. He currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Urban Discovery Schools, charged with developing an inner-city K/12 public school system. He has focused his attention on the development and implementation of programs and services to address school site culture, the program of study, college and career readiness, social-emotional learning, human resource development, and all aspects of operations using both Design Thinking and action research. In 2019, Dr. Loescher was named one of 16 worldwide recipients of the TED-Ed Innovative Educators Award (Note: video embedded below). He earned his doctorate from Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at ASU with a focus on leadership, innovation, theory, and policy and his dissertation (“Hope as strategy: The effectiveness of an innovation of the mind“) was named the AERA Action Research SIG Dissertation for 2020. He’s a sought-after keynote and TED talk speaker, guest lecturer, consultant, and think tank participant. Shawn is a deep-thinking, thoughtful reflective practitioner and humanistic to the core. He can be reached at sloescher@outlook.com.