Category Archives: Leadership Forum

Michael Levine, PhD, was the founding executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center from 2007-2018. We’re grateful for his leadership and vision for the first decade and beyond!   When you think back on your time at the Cooney Center and the work that we’ve done, what are some of the things that you’re proudest of? The Center turned out—partly through planning, and admittedly, through sheer serendipity—to be an incredibly timely enterprise.  Who knew when we began planning a…

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel delivered the keynote address at the Cooney Center’s Learning at Home forum on Friday, January 24, 2014.

Vicky Rideout, author of Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America, presents some of the key findings from the report at a Cooney Center Forum in New York.

In 2011, The Cooney Center formed six action teams, based on geographical location.  The teams were charged with building promising practices and scalable models of the ways that media, and particularly digital media, can promote children’s learning in environments outside of school. These teams were an integral part of the Learning From Hollywood Forum where they had the opportunity to network with industry and policy leaders across media, technology, education and philanthropy, and where each team walked away with hard…

This post originally appeared in TASC’s “The ExpandED Exchange” blog. Read more to find out what our New York Action Team members have been up to! Wouldn’t you love to be a kid in one of these two new pilot after-school programs at Quest to Learn, a tech-powered public middle school in New York City? The program in green design grew out of seventh graders’ desire to invent more sustainable ways to live on this planet. The school’s multi-media news…

The Philadelphia Action Team is comprised of a set of core partners, Philadelphia Academies Inc., the City of Philadelphia, the Urban Affairs Coalition, Philadelphia Youth Network, Drexel University, and the Knight Foundation.  We attended the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s 2011 Leadership Forum, “Learning From Hollywood: Can Entertainment Media Ignite a New Learning Revolution?” hosted by Sesame Workshop and University of Southern California. Our Action Team has been working together since January to build the Digital On-Ramps Project, a four-year initiative…

Dale Lipschultz, Literacy Officer for the American Library Association, was a panelist in the “Targeted Public Engagement Campaigns” session at the Learning from Hollywood Forum. She is also helping to guide our Action Teams as they work to turn their collective energy into collaborative projects. I came to the Forum with an open mind tempered by a healthy dose of skepticism. As a pragmatic Midwesterner, I wondered if it was reasonable to learn anything relevant from Hollywood. After all, I…

We were thrilled by the energy and enthusiasm that the Action Teams brought to the Cooney Center Leadership Forum last May. The seven groups that we brought together willingly embraced our call to work as local networks of organizations dedicated to making an impact on the future of children’s learning in their communities. We have invited each Action Team to share their experiences at the Forum with us, and hope that they will continue to keep us posted on their…

Lots of people have asked us when speaker presentations from last month’s Leadership Forum would be available online. It’s taking us awhile to get the video edited down, but we are pleased to say that many of our speakers’ presentation slides are now available online. You can see them now on slideshare.net. If you’re wondering whether a speaker had a presentation or not, simply check out the agenda and concurrent panels on the Learning from Hollywood site; if we have…

According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the typical American child — age 8 to 18 — spends no less than seven and a half hours a day engaged with media. According to research from Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, younger children are also consuming media heavily — about 4 hours a day for the typical five year old. Television, cell phones, computers, etc. are not just part of these children’s lives — in a very…