Theme: Blurring the Lines Between Disciplines

TEDxWalthamED caters to the educator community in the greater Boston area. We provide a venue for educators, researchers and leaders on the cutting edge to exchange ideas with those who are passionate about education and creating future global citizens. We connect people who care and want to make a change in our world. We inspire and spread education-focused ideas and cultivate a community of doers.

Gann Academy
333 Forest St.
Waltham, Massachusetts, 02452
United States

Christopher Robichaud

Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Christopher Robichaud is Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He received his doctorate in philosophy from MIT. His interests surround ethics, political philosophy, and social epistemology, with a focus on examining the role of truth and knowledge in well-functioning democracies, and on understanding what the post-truth age of politcs is. Dr. Robichaud has been a member of the faculty since 2006. Previously, he has taught philosophy courses at Texas A&M University, the University of Vermont in Burlington, and Tufts University. Dr. Robichaud’s TEDx talk will share the simulation design work that he has been doing at the Harvard Kennedy School, which won him the Innovation in Teaching Award in 2015. Tasked with creating an intense, day-long simulation for policy students that allowed them to exercise leadership skills and practice negotiation strategies while confronting ethical dilemmas, he turned to some of the design elements found in old school tabletop roleplaying games, like Dungeons & Dragons.

Jamie Byron

Farmer, Entrepreneur + Educator at Grove

Jamie Byron is a Farmer and Founder of Grove, a Somerville based company building indoor gardening products that give people a connection to food and nature year-round in their homes. In addition to building Grove and spreading the idea of a democratized food future, Jamie enjoys teaching people about ecosystems, hanging out in nature with his dog Hank, and growing as much food as he possibly can. Jamie is excited to share his experiences bringing living ecosystems into classrooms. When kids interact with and observe nature, they learn to think beyond simple linear systems and become full systems thinkers, better able to interact with the complex world around them. How can we integrate Nature based learning into our educational systems? Will doing so make future generations smarter and better stewards of this planet? Jamie will attempt to answer these questions, bringing up more questions in the process.

Jennifer Green

Associate Professor of Special Education at Boston University

Jennifer Greif Green is an Associate Professor of Special Education at the Boston University School of Education and a clinical psychologist. She partners with local school districts to study how assessments of bullying and mental health can be used to inform prevention and intervention efforts.

Joelle Renstrom

Instructor of writing and research at Boston University, focusing on sci-fi, AI, and space at Boston University

Joelle Renstrom's collection of essays, Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature, was published in 2015. She maintains an award-winning blog, Could This Happen, about the relationship between science and science fiction. She’s the robot columnist for the Daily Beast and a staff writer for Now.Space. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Aeon, The Guardian, and others. She teaches writing and research at Boston University with a focus in sci-fi, AI, and space exploration. Her upcoming TEDx talk focuses on how teaching science fiction transforms students’ abilities to talk about pressing issues and enables them to brainstorm ways to change the future.

Kathryn Boger

Child and Adolescent Psychologist, Program Director for the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program, Instructor at Harvard Medical School

Kathryn Boger is a child and adolescent clinical psychologist, specializing in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for anxiety, mood, and substance use disorders. She has had extensive training and experience in the delivery of empirically-supported treatments in both outpatient and residential levels of care. Kathryn helped to develop and is the program director for the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program (MAMP). MAMP is an outpatient, group-based program that is recognized as a regional leader in providing empirically-supported intensive treatment for children and adolescents, aged 7-19, with anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive disorders. Kathryn conceptualized this program with a colleague in order to address the need for intensive, empirically-supported treatments for this age group and to help develop a continuum of care between weekly outpatient therapy and residential levels of care. Her goal is to provide an increased “dosage” of treatment to help kids who are struggling with debilitating anxiety learn to manage their symptoms and regain control of their lives more quickly. Kathryn will be talking about the treatment of pediatric anxiety in her TEDx talk.

Melissa Holt

Assistant Professor, Counseling Psychology at Boston University

Melissa Holt is an Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at the Boston University School of Education. Her research focuses on better understanding bullying dynamics, how bullying affects psychological and educational functioning among youth, the overlap between victimization exposures among youth, and youth violence prevention