Meet the Hosts of the Education by Design Podcast

Phil Evans, Washington, D.C. - United States

Phil Evans

Phil Evans is a Senior IB World Schools Manager at the International Baccalaureate (IB), a global non-profit organization. As career educator who first started teaching in Australia, he moved to the United States in 2008 to teach and lead in IB schools in both the public and private sectors in Virginia and around Washington D.C., before joining the IB in 2016. Phil now develops and leads the IB Schoolwide Adoption Project to advance the pioneering work of IB schools who have been opening access to the DP and CP for all students in comprehensive high schools across the United States and Canada.

In his creative role at the IB he learns alongside schools to design and scale new services, resources, and support schools need to do this work. Phil's greatest hope is "to be proactive in bringing the community together to learn from each other, and for the IB to have a greater impact for more students in schools by addressing inequity and including all students because everyone should have access to high-quality education, and it is through our collaborative innovation and transformative work, that is made possible.”

Chad Lower

For more than 20 years, Chad has been an influential and creative contributor to the global education community. He began his teaching career in Toulouse, France at Lycée Bellevue, where he taught English classes and developed non-traditional assessments to measure English proficiency. Returning to the United States, he was a Middle and High School French and World Cultures, and Theory of Knowledge teacher. In 2013, he embraced the challenge of pioneering adoption of one of the first International Baccalaureate Career-related Programmes in North America.

For almost a decade, Chad has invested his creativity and excellence as a Curriculum Developer for the International Baccalaureate and in August of 2024 was recruited to expand the IB Schoolwide Adoption initiative; supporting schools to remove barriers to student participation and increase whole school engagement in their IB Programmes. Chad is an innovative thinker who listens to students to learn how education should adapt to nurture their self-efficacy, interests and skill development.

Chantell Wyten

As an educator Chantell’s interests spans curriculum design, research, and equity advocacy and by exploring and sharing the diversity of learning communities. As an designer and innovator at the International Baccalaureate she creates inclusive, epistemically diverse products and experiences that promote 'growing edge' opportunities for schools an learners. To Chantell, “Advocacy means harnessing our collective, transnational traditions and understandings to better align my work with considered relational possibilities - contributing to the message of living together with our planet in new ways.” I collaborate, publish and speak internationally on topics ranging from emerging trends, unschooling and futures thinking in education to teacher productivity hacks!

Chantell’s ambition is to continue taking on challenging roles where she brings fresh, strategic vision and maintain a focus on serving a wide range of stakeholders in education, and inspires non-traditional thinking about leadership and achievement in K-12 learning environments.