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Blended Learning Best Practices That Still Hold Up (Recorded 2021) - episode #5 of all time

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NUMBER 5 IN OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 10 EPISODES OF THE FIRST 1,000. This one originally aired in 2021 and has been downloaded more than 25,000 times — the fifth most-listened-to episode in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Thomas Arnett and the Christensen Institute surveyed nationally representative samples of teachers and administrators about what teaching actually looked like during the pandemic. The headline finding was brutal and clear: seventy-nine percent of hybrid teachers were running concurrent instruction — the room and the Zoom at once — and in the free-response comments they said flatly that it could not be done well. Hardest year of my career, said teachers who had been teaching for thirty years. But a small minority said the opposite. They said it worked. What they did differently is the whole reason this episode still matters five years later: instead of stretching one live lesson across two audiences, they built their lessons as online resources students...
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How to Teach Writing with Digital Media

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Dr. Sarah Levine taught secondary English in a Chicago public school for ten years, where she founded a youth radio program to make writing feel real to her students. She is now a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and Executive Director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. In this episode she gives you the smallest possible version of an authentic audience — an audience of one — and it turns out that's enough. Her students record a memory about someone they love and give it to that person as a gift. Levine's research found that kids revise just as hard for that one listener as they would for public radio. Strong verbs, no cliches, concrete images — every rule of good writing gets more important when there's nothing to look at. This episode originally aired in 2021 and comes in at number six in our countdown of the top 10 episodes of the first 1,000. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why "who's going to read this besides you?" i...
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Neuroscience Research: 5 Ways to Superior Teaching

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Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath has lectured at Harvard, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and has worked with more than 150 schools around the world. In this episode he gives five findings from brain science that change what you do Monday — starting with the one most of us have backwards. Memory isn't built by how you put information in. It's built by how often your students pull it back out. This episode originally aired in 2019 and comes in at number seven in our countdown of the top 10 episodes of the first 1,000. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why rereading notes doesn't build memory, and what to do instead - Why students can't read your slides and listen to you at the same time - The attention threshold, and how to reset it every 10 to 15 minutes - How to find the story behind a fact so the fact sticks - Why facts have to come before skills, demonstrated with a cricket match you won't understand a word of Full show notes, resource...
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What is Mastery Learning and How Do You Implement It Effectively?

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Mastery learning is the driver's-test rule applied to school: if a student fails the test, they take it again until they pass. Jon Bergmann teaches that way, full time, in chemistry and physics. This is #8 in the Top 10 of the First 1,000, a two-week countdown of the most-downloaded episodes of the 10 Minute Teacher leading up to episode 1,000 on September 28, 2026. Jon Bergmann is one of the two teachers who started the flipped classroom movement — and he has spent the years since making the case that flipping was never the destination. Mastery was. He came back to the classroom in 2019 specifically to teach this way, and he wrote the how-to manual he wished he'd had. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why mastery learning is a simple idea most schools already accept everywhere except the gradebook - How an exchange student who arrived in January, with no chemistry background, accidentally proved flipped mastery could work - What a mastery unit looks like in physics — f...
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Engage Every Learner: 8 Timeless Classroom Principles #9 Episode (updated for 2026)

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Eight ways to engage every learner — recorded in 2021, and every principle still works. This was #9 in our all-time top 10 countdown, and it isn't a ten-minute episode: it's a full session of classroom principles and tools for re-engaging students. I've edited this one lightly to remove a few apps that no longer exist and to fix my numbering. But I left the AI ethics segment in on purpose. Back in 2021 — well before ChatGPT — educators were already teaching students to think about whether we should, not just whether we could. Those students got a head start, and that history is worth hearing. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why slow, steady progress ("innovate like a turtle") beats a total overhaul - How to relate before you educate — and the research behind why it works - Four ways to give students a safe channel to tell you how they're doing - How to bring students into evaluating your own teaching practices - What teaching AI ethics looked like ...
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Are You an Upset Teacher? How to Understand What Is Wrong (#10 of all time)

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This is #10 in the Top 10 of the First 1,000 — a countdown of the ten most-downloaded episodes in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher, running weekdays through September 18. Ranked on total downloads including re-airs, this conversation with Michelle Blanchet has been heard 23,379 times . It originally aired on September 27, 2021 as episode 764 . I am re-airing it unchanged because the problem it solves did not go away. Michelle Blanchet, co-author of The Startup Teacher Playbook , teaches a method for figuring out the specific thing that is wrong — not the vague heavy feeling, but the actual named problem — so that you can make an improvement and feel forward progress. Social emotional learning is not just for students. This one is about you. Show notes: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/are-you-an-upset-teacher-how-to-understand-what-is-wrong/     Check out this episode!
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AI in Schools: Stop AI Detection, Start Learning Detection

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AI with intention. AI with integrity. Is it possible? Tony Frontier, author of AI with Intention , is talking about how we value learning in the age of AI. He shares the language we can use to evaluate what we're doing, how we're talking about AI, and how we're measuring learning, and ultimately, why education needs to change more than ever. Experience AI, a program co-founded by Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this podcast episode. All opinions are my own.  http://experience-ai.org I also open this show with some highlights from the Report of MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training and what it means for learning, and they use a term I think we should all be discussing: cognitive surrender. We cannot let our kids cognitively surrender and let AI do the work for them. They also talk about helping students understand that their learning, integrity, and judgment are the product of college, not the grades. So m...
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