Welcome to "Agile Ed", the podcast that redefines teaching and learning! Join us in exploring learner-centred education fuelled by curiosity and critical thinking. Each episode features conversations on unlearning, relearning, and innovative practices that foster engagement and durable learning. We believe teaching should be agile—responsive to learners and the evolving social context and community dynamics. Whether you’re an educator or a lifelong learner, Agile Ed offers fresh ideas to inspire growth and explore innovative strategies for lifelong learning!
The Lasagna Check: An On-Air Syllabus Review Consultation (Part 1)
In this episode of Agile Ed, we put our own courses through the lasagna check.
…or at least we start to. We only
got through the first layer: the dish!
With our fall syllabi and course calendars open in front of us, we turn our layered model for sustainable teaching into an on-air course design consultation. Rather than simply saying we value relationship-rich education, scaffolding, productive failure, and intrinsic motivation, we start asking a more challenging question: can we actually see those things in the courses we’ve designed?
We begin with the dish that holds the lasagna together: relationships. From designing meaningful interactions on the first day of class to building grade negotiations into a 200-student course, we explore what it means to create opportunities for students to build relationships with instructors, peers, TAs, course content, the wider university community, and beyond.
As the consultation unfolds, those decisions lead us into questions about difficult conversations, flexible deadlines, feedback, student choice, TA involvement, and how much support is enough before scaffolding starts getting in the way of learning.
It’s a live, imperfect course-design conversation about trying to walk the walk—and discovering what changes when you use the lasagna model not just to describe good teaching, but to examine your own.
14 Aug 2026
The Pretty Pencil Case Principle: Instructor Edition
In this episode of Agile Ed, we turn the Pretty Pencil Case Principle around on ourselves.
As a new semester approaches, it’s easy for instructors to fall into the same trap as students with their fresh notebooks and brand-new school supplies: this time, everything is going to be perfect. The syllabus will anticipate every question. The course calendar will be flawless. Every activity will be meaningful, every deadline intentional, and somehow we’ll manage all of it without creating an impossible amount of work for ourselves.
Starting with an 18-page syllabus, we unpack information overload, “Frankenstein” course outlines, duplicated deadlines, first-year students learning how to navigate university, and the tension between being comprehensive and actually being useful. We also get into the messier work of course redesign: giving each other feedback, letting go of things we’ve already carefully planned, making space in the semester, and asking whether all that extra effort is actually helping our students—or us.
Along the way, we rethink the end of the semester, experiment with grade negotiations and scalable oral defences, and remind ourselves that sustainable teaching means designing for the humans who have to teach the course, too.
Because instructors get excited about pretty pencil cases in September, too.
23 Jul 2026
What Does Education Look Like When We Prioritize Cooperation and Collaboration?
In this episode of Agile Ed, we ask what education might look like if we stopped organizing so much of it around competition and started prioritizing cooperation and collaboration instead.
We explore the ways competition is baked into academic culture—from authorship and intellectual property to teaching, grading, and the pressure to protect our own ideas—and what can happen when we deliberately push against those norms. Along the way, we turn the conversation toward course design: collaborative learning, group formation, student choice, feedback, grading, and creating opportunities for students to learn with one another rather than simply alongside or against one another.
We also get practical about the realities of doing this work. What happens when class sizes grow, TA support shrinks, and the course you imagined is no longer sustainable? Drawing on our lasagna model for sustainable teaching, we reflect on how relationships, scaffolding, productive failure, and intrinsic motivation can help us decide what really matters and ultimately what we can let go.
It’s a conversation about de-centering ourselves, sharing ownership of learning, and designing educational experiences that make cooperation more than something we say we value.
Attributions
Megan Barker (colleague mentioned regarding approaches to group formation): linkedin.com/in/megan-barker-a9661960/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-barker-a9661960/)
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Spotify
5.0 / 5
4 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 8 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
15
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
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