The Harvard EdCast

• What Textbooks Teach Us — And What They Don’t

  Texas and California often appear to be worlds apart when it comes to politics and culture, but the education students are getting – as far as their textbooks go, at least – may not be so different.University of Chicago Assistant Professor Anjali Adukia investigated more than 260 textbooks used in both public and religiously affiliated schools in the two states, analyzing their portrayal of race, gender, religion, and historical events. “I think the part that was the most surprising to me is despite this narrative of political polarization, we actually don't necessarily see that in the books themselves that are given to kids on average,” Adukia says.While there are differences, especially regarding religious content, textbooks used in both states tend to emphasize similar themes such as family, nature, and history, she says. Additionally, the textbooks also feature similar portrayals of females in passive and stereotypical roles, while males are more often linked to power, politics, and military.She argues that textbooks play a crucial role in shaping students' identities and worldviews, transmitting cultural values and societal norms. Despite changing public attitudes, these textbooks remain largely unchanged, posing important questions about how educational content influences future generations and the values that schools are endorsing.“The process of education and its associated books and curriculum materials necessarily, and by design, transmit the knowledge that we care about, the values that we care about. They transmit messages about who belongs in what spaces in society,” Adukia says. “Also, the presence and the absence of different identities can send messages to kids which can contribute to how they view their own potential and the potential of others.”In this episode, we explore the similarities and differences across textbooks in public and religious schools, and the role textbooks play in shaping students’ identities and worldviews. 

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• The Words We Choose: How Language Shapes Children's Emotional Lives

  As a third-grade teacher, Lily Howard Scott noticed how she spoke to students impacted more than just their experience in the classroom. How teachers speak to their students and intentional shifts in language can nurture children’s inner lives, foster self-regulation and reduce perfectionism, she says, and become their inner voice.“The thing about teachers, particularly elementary school teachers, is they have this superpower, which is that they catch kids at a moment where their capacity for neuroplasticity is more remarkable than it will ever be again. These kids are developing theories about themselves and their abilities, and they're bucketing themselves in all ways that may stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Scott says. “They're establishing thinking patterns that will stay with them, and elementary school teachers spend 1000 hours a year with their students in the same connected classroom… subtle shifts in language that help kids learn these basic things, that they have agency within, that they can choose which thoughts and feelings to amplify and which to quiet.”Scott shares that young children are remarkably receptive to reflective conversations about language and often adapt the terms in creative, personal ways — such as a student renaming their “inner voice” the “President Decider.” She highlights the power of reframing mistakes as "brilliant mistakes," which invites curiosity rather than shame. This shift, supported by neuroscience and the work of researchers like Lisa Feldman Barrett and Carol Dweck, helps children interpret challenges with a mindset geared toward growth and resilience.How to make these shifts is now the focus of Scott’s work and the central theme of her book, “The Words that Shape Us,” where she shares classroom-tested strategies and brain-changing teacher language.Learning to speak differently as a teacher or even parent can be challenging, but Scott stresses the importance of modeling lifelong learning alongside children. For instance, by admitting their own struggles with perfectionism or learning from errors, teachers can foster trust and mutual growth. Scott explains that language like “feelings are visitors” (inspired by Rumi’s The Guest House) helps children understand emotional regulation and agency. She admits that young children are particularly receptive to language shifts. Perhaps even more importantly, the effort to tweak how we speak to children may also play a role with children’s mental health. “If your mind is better company when you're seven, you hold on to these language nuggets and you repeat them to yourself when you're 17, so I think elementary school, it's not the precursor to serious learning. It's the most serious learning, and we should tip our hats to elementary school teachers and understand the immense and enduring influence they can have,” she says.In this episode, Scott shares insight into when children are taught empowering, compassionate language early, they carry it with them for life, enabling healthier thinking patterns and emotional well-being. She provides caution against well-meaning but common phrases like “try harder” which may inadvertently shame children. 

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• How to Educate for Social Action

  To succeed in school, in life, and as contributors to a more equitable society, students must be able to recognize, analyze, and challenge systemic injustices, say Harvard Lecturer Aaliyah El-Amin and Boston College Professor Scott Seider. Through their research, they are examining what it truly means to pursue education for justice in K–12 schools.“The kids who are in classrooms right now are our country's next generation of leaders,” says El-Amin. “They’re the people who are going to help determine whether we continue on our current path of deep injustice and human suffering, or whether we chart a new course toward a more just society — one where people across differences have equal access to well-being and thriving.”El-Amin and Seider argue that equipping young people with the tools to understand and respond to injustice is not only critical to building a more just society but also key to supporting youth development—academically, emotionally, and civically.“Young people who are more critically conscious of injustice are more civically engaged. They have higher self-esteem. They have better mental health…” says Seider. “The primary goal of nurturing young people's understanding of injustice is to prepare them to help build a better world. But we also have growing evidence that this critical consciousness contributes to positive youth outcomes.”To explore how justice-oriented education is being implemented across different contexts, the researchers studied more than 100 schools, identifying four core strategies for embedding this work throughout K–12 education:Building adult capacityCentering justice in the curriculumPartnering with families and communitiesEngaging students in social actionWhile this work may look different depending on the local context, El-Amin and Seider believe it can be implemented in schools everywhere.“Students are asking big questions about the world around them,” says El-Amin. “And when students are curious, engaged, and eager to participate in these conversations, educators have a powerful opportunity to bring them into critical consciousness and advocacy right in the classroom.”This episode of the EdCast explores how schools can become places where students are not only academically prepared but also empowered to confront—and help transform—the world they inherit.

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• Cybersecurity: The Greatest Threat Schools Aren’t Ready For

  In today’s digital landscape, schools face growing cybersecurity threats that can disrupt learning, compromise sensitive data, and leave administrators scrambling to recover. With cybercriminals becoming more sophisticated, understanding these risks and being prepared is more critical than ever, says Lisa Plaggemier, the executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance.“The vast majority of bad things that happen at institutions like schools and municipalities-- again, under-resourced organizations or organizations that have some technical debt. They haven't kept up with the latest and the greatest when it comes to technology. It's really, really, really basic things that get exploited by people that are up to no good,” she says.The Center for Internet Security recently released a report revealing that 82 percent of schools suffered from a cyber incident over an 18-month period. From ransomware attacks to AI-powered phishing scams, cybercriminals are finding new ways to exploit vulnerabilities—especially in under-resourced institutions like schools and municipalities. Plaggemier shares practical steps schools can take to protect themselves, from implementing multi-factor authentication to training staff on phishing awareness. She says the biggest mistake is not being prepared for a cyberthreats. “[This] is not something that's fun to go through, to have to answer to the press, to have to handle the crisis communications, the questions you get from parents. It then becomes such a drain on all those other things… that are a higher priority, that you realize that you've risked all those good and noble things because of a lack of preparedness,” Plaggemier says. “It's not if, it's when. So, it's all about being prepared. It's about resilience. It's about business continuity, being able to still teach school if everything's offline, and then being able to recover from the attack and go back to business as usual.”In this episode, we discuss why educational institutions are frequent targets, the role of human error in cyberattacks, and the importance of proactive security measures. 

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• Empathy, Dignity, and Courageous Action in Schools

  How we see the world and interact with each other, especially whether we create welcoming environments of acceptance, does not always come naturally. Tim Shriver, chair of the Special Olympics, and Stephanie Jones, a Harvard professor whose research focuses on social emotional development, say that it’s something we can teach, and fostering an inclusive and accepting mindset in schools and communities matters. “This is not stuff that we're necessarily born with. It all grows and emerges through experiences and all kinds of things that happen in the world. So, they are malleable skills -- they can be taught,” Jones says. “And I would go further and say that the decades of work in schools focused on things like social, emotional, and behavioral development have given us some ideas about the essentials of teaching and supporting these kinds of skills.”As a longtime advocate of students with intellectual and physical disabilities, Shriver admits he was intrigued by better understanding why some people are more open to inclusion and accepting someone who may be different from them. “From any number of points of view, difference is sometimes scary. But who are the people that know how to turn that fear or that lack of familiarity into an opening, rather than using it as a closed door?” Shriver says. “So, I started to ask myself, what is an inclusive mindset? … And the more I thought about this, the more I realized, and the more I searched around issues around it, it struck me that we didn't know.”Working together they began to identify key components of an inclusive mindset and how to foster this by acting on empathy, dignity, and courageous action. In this episode, we discuss using teachable moments where students can learn to become upstanders, and why it is important to nurture these skills in the classroom and community.

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