Confronting Our Biggest Challenges

A podcast from Teachers College, Columbia University focusing on work in higher education that aims to improve our world.

Pursuing the Public Good is connected to a broader initiative at Teachers College focusing on efforts to tackle crucial challenges in Teacher Education, Mental Health and Wellness, Sustainability, and Digital Innovation.

Learn More about the Public Good Initiative

Tamara Britt:
Welcome to Pursuing the Public Good, where we talk about how research and scholarship in higher education connects to practice with a focus on impact. I am Tamara Britt, General Counsel and Interim Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Teachers College, Columbia University. In our first episode, I am talking to Teachers College president Thomas Bailey about our new Public Good initiative. We will cover things like why it's essential to focus on the public good now and what listeners can expect from this podcast as we go deeper on the four focus areas of teacher education, sustainability, digital innovation, and mental health. So President Bailey, great to be talking with you.

Thomas Bailey:
It's great to be here with you.

Tamara Britt:
I understand that for the next few episodes, you're going to be interviewing a series of guests, but this week I'm going to interview you so that we can learn more about your vision for this initiative and the podcast. So thanks for inviting me to be in this conversation.

Thomas Bailey:
And thank you for agreeing to host this podcast.

Tamara Britt:
My pleasure. So why would you launch a Public Good initiative? And for that matter, why are you launching now?

Thomas Bailey:
Well, so Teachers College is a graduate school of health, education and psychology. So those are all areas where we are trying to improve people's lives. Both our faculty and our students come here because that's the perspective that they have, whether it is that they want to work with individuals, let's say, as counselors, whether they want to work with groups of people, whether they want to be leaders and change policy on a broad scale. So we attract students and faculty who have those values, who have that perspective. And of course, we do many good things. As I have talked to faculty, I've been really impressed with the many things that each one is doing. And of course, our students go out into the world and make change, they're leaders, they're teachers, they're counselors, many other things. That's all great. But as an institution, I have to ask, are we really maximizing as much as possible the effect that we have?
Now, it's hard to compare the current times with the past, but there's no question that we are under tremendous stress right now. Certainly we're Teachers College and we know that there's a teacher shortage, a crisis really in the country. Many schools can't find enough teachers. Enrollments in teacher education programs are going down. I don't think we've even begun to understand the effects that COVID has had on us in so many ways. We know there are direct issues like learning loss and those are being measured, and those are significant. But what about the other ways this has disrupted our lives?
Think about what you were doing in the winter of 2020. I had a nice visit to Rome with my wife. We had a meeting of a set of ed school deans basking in the sun in Napa Valley, and three weeks later, we were sitting in our apartments listening to every hour, four or five sirens going up Amsterdam Ave to our local hospital. And then of course, then there's climate change. So I think that we are facing a really difficult time, but here at Teachers College, we have many of the tools to address those. I think that the combination of psychology, health, and education in many ways work together. But does each of us within the college know what our colleagues are doing and how we can effectively work together?

Tamara Britt:
So given these competing interests, you talked about teacher ed, the shortages, why these four areas in particular?

Thomas Bailey:
Anytime you choose to focus on some things, there's some things you're not focusing on. And I want to say I totally value all of the things that we're doing here, and we are attracting students and faculty to do things. But let's look at this. Teacher education. Enrollment in teacher education programs have plummeted in the last 10 years. While we considered education to be that much more important, fewer people are choosing to go into that. And that's not surprising. When you think about the challenges that teachers have now, they have a increasingly diverse group of students besides the political issues and being on the front lines and questioning whether they can teach about race or what they can say about various other things. Now we're Teachers College, we're an ed school, and I think it is totally our responsibility to do what we can to address that set of issues. If not, what are we doing? 
So I think that's one issue. What about mental health? Certainly there are ways to address mental health through individual counseling, but we need to take a broader view of that and go beyond how can we address mental health issues other than through an individual counseling, which by the way, I think is crucial and should continue. Sustainability, I have a two-year-old granddaughter. She's going to be 78 in 2100. What kind of a country or life is she going to have and what do we do now to talk to her about what that means? How do we address and solve the problems of anxiety that people have besides how is it that we set up a population that will take seriously sustainability and try to work towards solving those problems in a concrete sense.

Tamara Britt:
So going beyond recycling-

Thomas Bailey:
Going beyond recycling. Recycling is important-

Tamara Britt:
Yes.

Thomas Bailey:
But going beyond recycling. And then technology. So we've emphasized the use of technology as a tool for addressing issues of mental health. But at the same time, we also understand that the technology often is one of the things that's brought up as causing stresses in mental health. And just recently, the governor of New York State, in her State of the State Address talked about the problems of technology, the problems that students have as they overuse technology, especially their use of social media. So there's tremendous potential in technology, all the areas that we're looking at, technology interacts in a way that can be very positive, but how is it that we use those? How do we make sure while at the same time, understanding the problems that may be there in the use of technology and how that might have negative effects on students' mental health.

Tamara Britt:
So you talked about potential. What are some of the things that you're excited about in these four areas that are connecting our work at TC with the Public Good?

Thomas Bailey:
Well, I think there's something in every area. So let's take teacher education. We have a problem of attracting teachers and another serious problem of retaining them. I mean, it's easier to retain a teacher than it is to find another one and to train them up. We are trying to work in partnership with our local schools to develop a program where, first, we've always emphasized the very rich clinical experience with our teachers, but we also want to continue to support them as they go into their work. So it's not just a situation where we take a brand new teacher and put them in a classroom and expect them to operate like a veteran person. We don't do that with medicine.

Tamara Britt:
Right, right. There's a residency period-

Thomas Bailey:
Exactly. And not only that, we also pay residents for that. We don't pay teachers to go actually teach supervised in classrooms. So we're working on trying to develop a model, and we are doing that with some help from the state to actually provide a stipend to students as they're getting their experience teacher education. So I mean, really we need to go beyond that in many ways and have a policy perspective towards that. I think that our psychology program is a wonderful example. Some of the things that we're doing in that is developing apps that the teachers can use or caregivers can use to help them. In many cases, they have their own challenges and stresses and unknown things that are taking place. Doug Mennin, who I will interview, has developed a set of technology tools that allow people to understand the stresses that they're under and take some action to address that. And I do think, once again, the combination that we have of psychology, health and education together gives Teachers College a unique approach to this.

Tamara Britt:
So President Bailey, some people listening to this podcast may not understand what we're talking about here. So we're a School of Education, Psychology and Health. So maybe let's give them a brief overview of the areas of psychology that we cover here at Teachers College.

Thomas Bailey:
We have many different areas. So we have clinical psychology, we have organizational psychology, counseling psychology. So we're training individual therapists. We're training people to think about organizations from a psychological point of view, counselors for schools. So I think there's a broad range of psychology, and I think one of the things that we have the potential to do here at Teachers College is combine psychology with teaching because there are many tools that come from psychology, not only apps, but just in general approaches that teachers could benefit from. So that's another way in which our interdisciplinary nature can really play a key role in solving some of those problems. Something else, our Center for Sustainable Futures is developing curriculum for New York City public schools in sustainability, addressing many of these issues that we're talking about. That is getting students and faculty and teachers really to take on the challenge of sustainability to address some of the questions of anxiety that they're doing.

Tamara Britt:
And I just saw a writeup in the New York Times about this Center for Sustainability and the model that Teachers College is rolling out in New York City, and it looks like it might be something that can be replicated.

Thomas Bailey:
Well, I think it is, of course. And Oren Pizmony-Levy was featured in that, talking about the workshops that he has organized, working with the schools and the Department of Education here in the city to develop professional development so that teachers can come and learn how to be able to infuse issues of sustainability into their work, not just in science class for a couple of lessons, but rather you can think about how to infuse issues of sustainability throughout the curriculum.

Tamara Britt:
Excellent. So we've covered teacher ed, mental health, sustainability. Anything else you want to say with respect to these areas on digital innovation?

Thomas Bailey:
Yes. Well, of course, I think in a way technology is being used in all of these areas. We were also working with teachers from around the city to try to think about how it is they can use technology, and of course, the question of an artificial intelligence comes up. And so how is it that faculty or teachers can use artificial intelligence? We're in a situation where in many cases, the students are more adept at the technology than the teachers. So how is it that we can train teachers to be able to effectively use technology?

Tamara Britt:
And to get ahead of their students, right? Exactly.

Thomas Bailey:
The episode that we're going to have with Nathan Holbert is how can you use play for education? And I think it's interesting, you'd like education to be able to be seen as playful, as enjoyable, as something that brings happiness. So I think that's an example of how we can use technology for education and I think is really vital right now.

Tamara Britt:
So given that, what do you hope will come out of an initiative supporting this work?

Thomas Bailey:
Okay. Well, we're starting first by cataloging all of the things that we're doing. And then I'd like to go from incubation to implementation. So I've emphasized a lot about combining different approaches using interdisciplinary practices. So we want to try to promote different ways of doing that, and then scaling those to greater implementation. We're going to build partnerships. We're getting wide scale impact really making true change. I think it's important that we are taking an approach which is exploiting our strengths. I want to emphasize one thing that we're doing is that we're looking at issues instead of at subject areas. We're trying to break down those barriers to bring us together in various ways. I understand that often in academics, there's a tension between that because people need to publish and do things in their areas, working in an interdisciplinary way may make that more difficult.
But as an institution, we need to recognize that and also reward that. So once again, I think what's important is that we are taking these broad sets of problems, and we're not limiting those to particular areas or fields. We are explicitly bringing together different fields to address those issues. So I've emphasized so much throughout this kind of a nexus of psychology, education, and technology. We have experts on all of those. When you think about, for instance, the techniques, let's say Doug Mennin talks about, do we all know how to do that? Can we infuse that into our curriculum for teacher education so that teachers know how to use those techniques? So that's a way of promoting a type of interdisciplinary work that we can do at Teachers College because we have those skills. We have all of those different things working together. Then I also hope that the public and future students and funders will understand the kind of contribution that we can make here at Teachers College because the unique combination of skills and areas that we have.

Tamara Britt:
Well, I for one, am excited. So looking forward to that. So what about this podcast? Of all the mechanisms you could have used to bring these topics forward, why share topics in this form?

Thomas Bailey:
I love podcasts, and I guess we're all multitaskers, so we should probably not do that. But nevertheless, we are all doing that.

Tamara Britt:
Guilty, guilty.

Thomas Bailey:
And I try to take a walk every morning and I'm looking for things to do. Now, of course, a lot of times I can just listen to music or I can listen to a novel. I will admit that I do some of that. But at the same time, I have found listening to the podcast at Teachers College, I've listened to many of the podcasts that, there are a whole series of podcasts, I suggest everybody goes to the podcast section of our website so that they can listen to that. So I think that's one aspect I think is people can do it when they're commuting. They can listen on the subway or if they want to just sit in their living room and listen to a podcast, they can do it. But I also like the informal conversational element of podcasts as well. So I think that's a different way.
I mean, we have many ways of consuming information, but I think this is an additional way to do that, which offers a kind of question and answer format, which I think is useful. I mean, often when I'm listening to podcasts, if it's a skilled moderator as you are, a skilled moderator-

Tamara Britt:
Oh, no, no.

Thomas Bailey:
You know, they're asking the questions I want to ask. And so I think those are some reasons why I'm very pleased. I love listening to them some myself, and I've very much enjoyed participating in them when I've been able to do that. But it is really only one way in which we are talking about the public goods initiative. It will be on the website. We'll have a series of events, presentations. You and I are traveling around the country to California and Florida.

Tamara Britt:
We sure are.

Thomas Bailey:
And so we will be talking about these themes in those salons that we're having in California, in Florida, we've already been to Asia. We certainly will be back to Asia. So there are many different ways in which people will be able to learn about this initiative. So of course, one of our audience is our Teachers College community, but also we hope this reaches a broader audience because it really raises a set of issues that need to be addressed. And I think we certainly have an approach to addressing those problems that will be of interest to a broader audience as well.

Tamara Britt:
So it sounds like President Bailey, that we at Teachers College want to inspire innovation, that this is not just something that we want to keep under a bushel here at TC. We want to spread it to the world.

Thomas Bailey:
Yes. Well, that's a fundamental part of what we're trying to do. I have emphasized, I want us as an institution to be able to have the best impact that we can have addressing these really difficult issues. And I think we can do that. But I think there are lots of things that we need to work together to break down our silos, to exploit and understand the advantages that we have in the multiple multidisciplinary programs that we have here.

Tamara Britt:
Well, I appreciate that, and I'm sure some of our listeners appreciate that as well. True confessions, this is my first podcast. I've never listened to a podcast before, much less participated in one. So I appreciate that we will have other avenues, and this is also an opportunity for people like me to get in on what has now taken over the world and that's podcasts and Teachers College is going to be at the forefront. So thank you.

Thomas Bailey:
Well, let me tell you, nobody would've known that this was your first podcast, to say nothing of your first hosting. So you've done a great job.

Tamara Britt:
Thank you. Appreciate it. Well, we're looking forward to hearing more in this series about the Public Good. So President Bailey, thanks so much for talking to me today on Pursuing the Public Good.

Thomas Bailey:
Well, thank you for having me. It's been wonderful to be here.

Tamara Britt:
And thank you all our audience for listening. Please join us next week when President Bailey talks with Professor Celia Oyler about challenges and opportunities of preparing teachers to enter classrooms in this time in our society. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Thomas Bailey:
Pursuing the Public Good is produced by the Office of the President, the Digital Futures Institute, and the Office of Institutional Advancement at Teachers College, Columbia University. Take a look at our show notes for links to learn more about the work of our guests and the Public Good initiative at Teachers College. Access transcripts, and see our full credits for this episode.