Harvard Graduate School of Education ProfessorKaren Brennan sees classrooms as magical spaces when we begin with curiosity, not just content.

“When I think about design process, from the initial moments of young people working on projects, all the way to the end where they've gone through the highs, the lows, the emotional vicissitudes of bringing their ideas into the world, the messy middle through to the end, there is a role for questions in every moment,” she says. “Start with questions, for me, is really about an attitude of leading with student interests.”

Drawing on a yearlong study of 25 teachers across elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, Brennan describes how powerful learning begins by asking genuine questions, or really questions teachers don’t already know the answers to. She is the co-author ofStarting with Questions: The Classroom as Design Studio, which explores what happens when educators take students’ ideas seriously.

Rather than treating questions as a closing ritual at the end of a lesson, Brennan argues for an orientation shift: start with what learners are thinking about, what they care about, and what feels hard or exciting to them. Grounded in traditions of progressive education, this approach does not reject content knowledge. Instead, it reframes the role of teachers as expert guides, offering domain expertise, metacognitive scaffolding, affirmation, and structure within a classroom culture that values intellectual humility.

Brennan comes to the classroom from a design studio background, a space that embraces tinkering and where self-directed learning happens in community. In studio-based environments, students pursue projects that matter to them while learning alongside peers and with the support of teachers. Self-direction, she explains, is not scriptless chaos but more structured, scaffolded, and deeply relational.

That mindset also shapes her optimism about artificial intelligence. Brennan argues that AI is not about offloading thinking, but about expanding what learners can imagine and build. “I feel like we don’t give learners enough credit,” she says. “When there’s all this handwringing around AI stealing assignments, maybe we were asking students to do things that weren’t that important to begin with. If AI can do it, maybe we need to be looking for new opportunities for interestingness for learners.

In this episode, Brennan pushes beyond traditional classroom approaches toward a powerful idea: how classrooms become transformative when we make space for students’ questions and trust their capacity to pursue them.

When Doug Larkin and Suzanne Poole Patzelt set out to study the relationship between teacher pay and retention, what they found surprised them.

“Without fail, no matter what school we went to, what state we were in, that was always the number one response,” Poole Patzelt says. “We did nothing to put that at the top. That was far and beyond the number one reason why teachers stayed was because of who they were working with.”

She adds, “We are relational organisms. We rely on relationships and other people.”

Pay, Larkin explains, mattered but differently than we often assume. Teachers generally felt their compensation was adequate. What didn’t hold up was the idea that increasing pay would directly increase effort or retention. “It doesn’t fit that behavioral logic,” he says. “If we pay teachers 10% more, they’re going to work 10% harder. That’s not what was happening here at all.” Instead, what consistently surfaced were collegial cultures where teachers felt supported rather than scrutinized.

In their new book, The Reasons Teachers Stay, they draw on a six-year longitudinal study of US schools, districts, and communities with high rates of teacher retention. In the districts they studied — spanning rural, suburban, and urban communities — a defining feature was a “real lack of teacher isolation.” Teachers shared resources. They kept doors open. Administrators fostered trust. Poole Patzelt notes that many of the top retention factors were intertwined: supportive leadership strengthened teacher relationships, and those relationships reinforced a broader culture of care.

Each district operated within its own cultural and political context. Still, the strongest schools resembled what Larkin calls a “healthy ecosystem for teachers,” where induction went beyond onboarding and new teachers were not left in “sink or swim” environments.

To make sense of these dynamics, Larkin introduces the “teacher embeddedness” framework, a way of understanding retention not as a single decision, but as the accumulation of many small connections. He shares a metaphor from elementary schools where principals are duct-taped to a wall as part of a reading challenge. One strip of tape does nothing. But layer enough pieces together, and they hold someone in place. “Each little thing you can identify,” he explains, “is another piece of tape that holds that teacher in place.”

In this episode, they introduce the “teacher embeddedness” framework and gain better insight in why understanding what keeps teachers in the job might be the biggest shift a district can make.

Disagreement is a part of everyday life, yet most of us avoid it whenever possible. Harvard Kennedy School Professor Julia Minson knows where and why our conversations often go wrong and how we can learn to disagree better.

Minson, whose research focuses on how people engage with opposing viewpoints, says fear drives avoidance. “Most of these conversations are a pleasant surprise, but people don't expect that. And so they just continue going around with the worst-case scenario in their heads, instead of exploring the reality that's out there,” she says. People worry that disagreements will be unpleasant, fruitless, or that the other person’s perspective will be shocking or even “crazy.” Research shows these assumptions are often wrong: when we actually engage, opposing views are usually more reasonable, moderate, and defensible than expected.

The problem isn’t only avoidance. Many conversations fail because participants focus on persuasion, treating arguments like battles to be won. Minson says that shifting the goal from winning to understanding changes the dynamic entirely, turning disagreement into an opportunity to learn rather than a contest to conquer.

To help people navigate challenging conversations, Minson and her colleagues developed a practical toolkit called conversational receptiveness, or the framework they call HEAR. Minson emphasizes that these skills take practice. Starting with low-stakes conflicts, like deciding when to set an alarm at home, helps build habits that carry into more emotionally charged conversations at work or in classrooms. “I really think that practicing on small, daily disagreements makes you more able to come up with the words when it's a big, important one and you're really frazzled,” she says.

In this episode, the Harvard EdCast explores how to disagree better, practical steps for transforming conversations, and the obstacles that often get in the way of constructive dialogue.