Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

When a student puts their head down, the question you ask next matters. Therapist and former high school teacher Charle Peck shares the one question to ask instead of "What's wrong with you?" and simple ways to support student mental health without becoming a therapist. Charle spent years teaching high school before becoming a clinical therapist, and she is the co-author of The Language of Behavior and Improving School Mental Health. On this Fab Idea Friday, she explains why your own well-being is part of the job, not one more thing on your to-do list, and why noticing is the first skill every teacher needs. She demonstrates a rapid reset, a 10- to 30-second activity that resets your energy and the whole room's. She also explains why she runs a reset with the whole class instead of singling out the one student who is struggling. And she shares a point every principal needs to hear: teachers won't refer a student unless they trust the referral system will help. ...

Why kids can't stop moving, and why some students can't sit still in class: an occupational and physical therapist explains the need behind the movement. 🏆 NUMBER 1 IN OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 10 EPISODES OF THE FIRST 1,000 — 46,509 downloads. Originally aired February 1, 2018 (episode 244). 📌 Full show notes, resources, and transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e994 Suzanne Cresswell, an occupational and physical therapist, explains why the student who is always moving isn't necessarily misbehaving. Often, she says, that movement is a strategy the child has developed to keep their brain engaged. She explains the vestibular sense (feeling gravity) and the proprioceptive sense (feeling your muscles and joints), and why classroom planks, movement breaks, therapy balls, inflatable seat cushions, and flexible seating can help a busy child stay ready to learn. 🎯 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN • What a unique learner is, and why every classroom has one • Why "acting out...

Teaching is hard, and it keeps changing. Vicki Davis opens with the 200-question test she gave the second week of her first year — a disaster that made her ask what she actually wanted students to be able to do, and set off the chain of changes that led to the internationally recognized Flat Classroom Project. Then, a 2012 study of 242 teachers in the UK and the Netherlands: 93% and 96% of them believed the learning-styles myth, and the teachers who knew more general facts about the brain believed more of the myths, not fewer. So what do we do? We keep learning, and we check the evidence. Today is about encouraging us to learn and grow. Three educators show what that looks like. Ross McGill of Teacher Toolkit spent 18 months reading MRI research for his new book on the science of learning, and he used to confiscate fidget spinners — “maybe if I had been more evidence-based, I might have been a bit more compassionate.” He explains cognitive load in plain English, why learning styles do...

NUMBER 2 IN OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 10 EPISODES OF THE FIRST 1,000. This one goes all the way back to April 2017, when the show was brand new, and it has been downloaded 27,314 times — the second most-listened-to episode in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Rob Donatelli, a high school business educator in York, Pennsylvania, brings five brain breaks you can run tomorrow with no prep and almost no supplies. A brain break, as Rob describes it, is a chance for students to step away from high-level processing, have some fun, and refocus so they can get back to learning at their highest potential. The five: a backward race through the room, 60-second pitches, Name Three Things, cell phone ping pong, and the penny arm flip. Each takes a few minutes. Several of them build the soft skills students rarely get to practice — talking, pitching, and thinking on their feet. Rob also answers the question every teacher has: what happens when someone walks in to observe and thinks you...

NUMBER 3 IN OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 10 EPISODES OF THE FIRST 1,000. This one originally aired January 31, 2022 and has been heard 27,058 times — the third most-listened-to episode in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Lisa Hollihan Allen is a K-12 reading specialist and literacy interventionist, and she came on to talk about the thing nobody puts on a lesson plan: reading stamina. Not decoding. Not comprehension. The plain ability to keep reading. Her framing is the one that sticks. Most students have word recognition well before middle school, she says — and a lot of them still cannot sustain attention on a page. So they fake read. They look at the book, the eyes move, and nothing happens, and because it all goes on inside their heads it is almost impossible to catch during independent reading time. She gives five moves, drawn from her own classroom and from the work of Penny Kittle, Laura Robb, and NCTE: give them protected time, give them choice, get them conferencing...

Every AI story in the news right now has a human being at the center of it who looked twice. A reporter read the products on Teachers Pay Teachers. A community college chemistry teacher with a full course load read fourteen meta-analyses and found the research was rotten. MIT's own faculty said policing AI was poisoning their relationships with students. In this episode, Vicki Davis and John Davis open with what those stories have in common, and why "the human in the loop" is not a checkbox. It is a teacher. Then Kathy Nimmer tells her story. She taught high school English for 29 years, totally blind, and it started with a shattered window and a first year she calls "the Rocky Mountains." She is the 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year, a National Teacher of the Year finalist, and this year the American Foundation for the Blind gave her the Helen Keller Achievement Award. She explains what it means to see students from the heart, how she built SEEDS, a program whos...

NUMBER 4 IN OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 10 EPISODES OF THE FIRST 1,000. This one originally aired in December 2021 and has been downloaded 26,813 times — the fourth most-listened-to episode in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Dr. Douglas Fisher came on to talk about Rebound, the book he wrote with Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie. The pandemic framing is dated. The research underneath it is not — and it answers a question every teacher still has: when a student is behind, do you go back, or do you go forward? Doug's answer is forward. The acceleration research says so, and it comes from a place most of us never look: gifted education. That literature has one finding that should stop you cold. On average, forty percent of instructional minutes are spent on things students already know. We call it review. Students identified as gifted have been telling us for decades what it actually is — boredom, dressed up as instruction. So you find out where students actu...

You do not have to be an AI expert to teach AI literacy. Laura Gray says nobody is one — and points to free, ready-to-teach lessons that work in any subject. SPONSORED: Experience AI, a co-developed program by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this episode. All opinions are my own and that of the guest. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program with ready-to-teach lessons  for ages 8 to 16 , in any subject. Laura asked some third graders how a smart speaker works. They told her the question gets recorded and sent to a human being who looks up the answer and speaks it back. Her own four-year-old told her a very short lady lives inside her phone. Children are building theories about these systems whether or not a screen ever comes into your classroom, which is the whole case for teaching this even if you never plug anything in. Laura's advice on the expertise problem is the part I keep repeating: nobody is an expert in AI, so sto...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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!

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...

Tim Plaehn is a teacher who writes about honor codes. In his writing class last April, he believed he had two students he knew used AI. So, he gave the whole class an opportunity to "come clean," and he said his email began dinging while 22 of the 40 students admitted they had used AI on their papers. Tim has authored the book, The Honor Code: Students, Integrity, and our Path Forward where he talks about integrity and how we need to be discussing integrity with our students. This is not an easy topic but an important one! Show notes: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e982 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   Check out this episode!

A.J. Juliani has been leading cohorts of educators and administrators to learn how to build data dashboards that improve student learning. I love how he focuses on the human aspect of learning. In today's show, we'll talk through the "interview mode" of using AI that is so powerful in addition to using data to improve the experience of school for our learners and teachers. We'll talk about personally identifiable information, the importance of removing it, and some tips and tricks for interacting with AI to generate data dashboards and other tools of your choice. 📌 Full show notes, resources, and transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e981   SPONSORED: Experience AI, a co-founded program by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this episode. All opinions are my own and that of the guest. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program with ready-to-teach lessons for ages 8 to 16, in any subject. Check out this episode!

Teaching creativity is not an "extra" that is just for art, theater, or woodshop. As teachers, we can learn how the four branches of creativity are applied in math, science, and engineering and how creativity gives us an edge in today's world. 📌 Full show notes, resources, and transcript:  https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e980 SPONSORED: Experience AI, a co-founded program by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this episode. All opinions are my own and that of the guest. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program with ready-to-teach lessons for ages 8 to 16, in any subject.    Check out this episode!

We all have a reputation, whether we build it intentionally or not. One of my son's favorite assignments from middle school was when a teacher asked him to draw a coat of arms. It included what he liked, what mattered to him, and what characteristics he wanted to portray. He was figuring out who he was. Who would even put the word "brand" with an activity like that? However, there are times we may want to take the approach of "building a personal brand." Whatever angle you want to take, Elisabeth Bostwick talks about authentic learning. Now, for those of us who automatically associate personal branding with social media, this doesn't mean that students have to post on social media at all. Students can start with their strengths and interests and select brand colors as well. Elisabeth has done this with high school entrepreneurship students as well as fourth graders. For today's Fab Idea Friday, think about activities that help students think through h...

Honesty. We need to be honest about where we are in education. Whether authentic, true, genuine learning is happening should be the question for all of us in education. None of us wants to pretend or participate in a farce. AI guilt is now "a thing" college graduates are talking about . College graduates who are not being "caught" but feel like they spent the last years pretending to learn. Dr. Christian Miller, author of The Honesty Crisis , has spent more than a decade running some of the largest funded research projects on honesty and moral character. He says that the internet was the first honesty crisis in education. AI is the second one. We talk about both sides of the desk on this one. Both the student writing their paper with AI and learning nothing, and the teacher giving AI-generated feedback without disclosing it to students. This is why an honest expert is staying up at night about the papers his philosophy students are writing (or if they are not)...

Wow, this is a sensitive topic. And remember that every person with autism has a different experience. But Claire O'Neill is a teacher and she's telling her story of school. Claire can see the roof of her old primary school from her classroom window. She remembers walking up to the school door with that gnawing, upset feeling in her stomach and the itchy, scratchy uniform that made her so uncomfortable. She says the room was either too hot or too cold. It was almost always too loud, and she says it was smelly. Claire got in trouble a lot. Now, that she's studied autism, she understands better why. Claire has spent more than twenty years teaching autistic students and is a PhD researcher at University College Cork (Ireland) studying what school is actually like for autistic teachers. Claire shares her story from an educational perspective. A full-circle moment of a PhD expert teacher reflecting upon the girl she used to be and advocating to help us all understand how ...

I find this conversation interesting because it tells a story from when ChatGPT was released about how a college student responded to it. Zach Kinzler was a junior in college. He was sitting in the front row of a systems engineering class when a friend punched him in the arm and said, "Look at this." The student had just used ChatGPT to solve the problem on the board. And Zach's journey began as he not only used ChatGPT to help him in his work but also talked openly with his professors about it. He did write his papers with ChatGPT. (OK, now I'm not for this, but this is Zach's story, and it is worth a listen.) Understandably, professors got upset. But when they did, Zach asked them to quiz him on what he wrote and what he had learned. He felt like he was learning faster. Zach leads academic sales strategies at Boodlebox and hosts the Smarter Campus Podcast. We discuss the difference between using AI to learn and using AI to skip learning. He also discusses A...

When you're busy, it can be impossible to see the smoke. The smoke of your own burnout. As a teacher, for so much of my career, I've been busy. There have been seasons when I described the feeling to my husband as "hyperventilation." There were times I wore the lack of sleep as a badge of honor. Today's guest, Dr. Jen Rafferty, was a middle school music teacher for fifteen years. Then, when she reached what she thought was the top of her career (she published her first book, was presenting all over the country) - her marriage was falling apart, her back was debilitated with pain, and she had odd red splotches on her skin that seven doctors couldn't explain. In the end, it was stress. Looking back, she realized it was burnout. So, in today's Motivational Monday, we talk about what can help a teacher move out of burnout without having to quit or just try to make themselves into a different person. I find her arguments about emotional intelligence intere...

Chronic absenteeism doesn't get fixed by counting absences. It gets fixed by asking why. Dr. Leah Marsh is Assistant Principal at Niles Middle School in Ohio and one of three finalists in the country for the National Association of Secondary School Principals Middle Level Assistant Principal of the Year. Under her leadership, Niles Middle School reduced suspensions by 32% while attendance and engagement went up. She did not relax a single standard to get there. SPONSORED: Ellis, a program of Children's Health Council, sponsored this episode. All opinions are my own and that of the guest. In this episode she walks through what her team actually did: pulling the absence data apart until it named real causes — a bus-driver shortage was one — building a Check & Connect mentoring program that pairs struggling students with one adult in the building who is glad to see them, and opening a room called the Dragon Den where a student can re-regulate and go back to class instead of...

How do we help this next generation with their relationship to screens, to each other, and to the adults in their lives? That's the question we're digging into today. Betty Ray talks about rites of passage — those moments that help children move from one stage to the next. She also has a genius way to work with children so they gradually earn more responsibility with technology. Lawrence C. Harris is a 20-year-old who looks back on his time in high school just a couple of years ago. He rose out of a traumatic childhood to become successful instead of a statistic, and now he helps other kids move forward. He has tips for reaching kids like him — the ones who don't act out, but need our attention all the same. Finally, Luddite clubs and screen-free activities are growing fast, and — gasp — here's one for you: bridge! Yes, bridge clubs are growing, and Patty Tucker shares how the ACBL Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, will help you get the cards, the supplies, and the ...

Only 18% of principals say they feel very confident about leading AI this school year — but 7 in 10 schools are already immersed in figuring it out. SPONSORED: Ellis, a program of Children's Health Council, sponsored this week's shows on the 10 Minute Teacher. All opinions are my own and that of the guest. Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the National Principals Association, joins me to unpack a survey we ran together across his members and my Classroom Matters subscribers. What we found is more encouraging than the headline number suggests: the schools making progress with AI aren't the ones with all the answers. They're the ones where principals and teachers are figuring it out side by side. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why only 18% of principals feel "very confident" leading AI — and why overconfidence would be the real warning sign - What 7 in 10 schools are already doing, and what the other 3 in 10 say they're waiting on - The number one thing principa...

Your student has an IEP all the way through high school. Then they graduate — and it doesn't go with them. Dr. Toby Tomlinson Baker was diagnosed with a learning disability in 1987, attended six different schools between kindergarten and twelfth grade, and was told by her guidance counselors not to bother applying to college. She has a PhD. In this episode she explains what actually changes the day a student walks off a high school campus, why the accommodations you fought for don't automatically transfer, and how to teach a student to ask for what they need before anyone makes them. In this episode, you'll learn: - What legally changes when a student moves from high school to college — and why a university can say no - Why self-advocacy is a skill you teach, not a personality trait a student either has or doesn't - What Dr. Baker found when she interviewed college professors about disability law for her dissertation - Why the accommodation that helps one student u...

Most teachers reaching for AI to help with a struggling student are reaching for the wrong kind of AI. General-purpose chat tools pull from the open internet, they were never trained on whether the information is accurate, and they should be nowhere near a student's personally identifiable information. Natalie Tamburello, a learning disability and education equity advocate at Children's Health Council, walks through what a teacher-facing AI built on vetted research actually looks like — and why she thinks that is where the real classroom wins are right now. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why "just ask ChatGPT" falls short when a student is struggling with behavior, learning, or the emotional side of school - What RAG (retrieval augmented generation) is, and how pulling from a curated library of vetted nonprofit resources changes the answer you get - Why the first question a good tool asks you is "what are this student's strengths?" - How to de...

Boundaries are not a heavy conversation you need a degree to have. They are small, repeated moments — and the right words handed to a child before they need them. Ashley Bendiksen, author of A Kids Book About Boundaries, shows teachers what to say. Ashley Bendiksen is a national speaker and abuse prevention advocate who spent years talking to teens about dating violence. Then she moved earlier. Her book for children ages five to nine teaches the skill underneath all of it: knowing you have a choice, and having the words to say so. In this conversation she shows what that looks like in an elementary classroom — the two-option choice, the "I don't like that" script, the pause to ask "did we ask first?" — none of which requires adding anything to your lesson plan. We also talk about your boundaries, because teaching is high-burnout work and we are modeling something for kids either way. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why boundaries are emotional and socia...

Two women were named a 2026 National Principal of the Year — and when you ask them how they did it, they both use the same word: love. In part two of this leadership series, Vicki Davis talks with Amanda Jamerson, associate principal at Shorewood High School in Wisconsin and the 2026 National High School Assistant Principal of the Year, about the restorative discipline framework that cut office referrals by 69 percent, a cell phone policy that actually worked, and why she calls all of it heartwork. Then Sonia E. Ruiz, principal of Jane Addams Middle School in Bolingbrook, Illinois and the 2026 National Middle Level Principal of the Year, explains how she built a middle school where English learners and students with IEPs make real, measurable gains — and why she leads con corazón, with heart. Show notes and full transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/becoming Cool Cat Teacher Talk episode:

Jerry Kolber built Nat Geo's Brain Games and Netflix's Brainchild — then moved his team off screens entirely. In this episode he explains why, and what teachers are doing with kids' podcasts that he never planned for. The practical piece: transition time. Coming back from lunch or recess, a short episode gets students seated, listening, and settled without a single reminder — and they don't notice they're learning. Jerry also shares how mini quizzes every three or four minutes train attention, and why "co-listening" — making a show adults genuinely enjoy — is a deliberate design choice. Then the conversation turns. Vicki and Jerry talk through what happens when AI-generated audio floods the feed, and land on the question that actually matters: if a show gets something wrong, is there a human on the other end who can fix it? In this episode, you'll learn: - Why transition time is the highest-value slot for a short podcast in your day - How question...

For twenty-five years we sent the struggling kid to the back of the room with headphones on. Todd Brekhus of Renaissance explains why that model broke personalized learning, and how teacher-facing AI hands the room back to you. Todd Brekhus is Chief Product Officer at Renaissance, General Manager of Nearpod, a former English teacher and technology director, and the creator of the myON literacy platform. We recorded this conversation at ISTE 2026. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why "personalized learning" quietly pushed teachers out of the loop, and what changes when you say "personalized teaching and learning" instead - How to pull last year's skill-level data and plan two paths before tomorrow's lesson - Why back-of-the-room intervention stigmatizes kids, and how to differentiate inside the core lesson - The case for a formative check every six to eight minutes without leaving your slides - Why Renaissance deliberately chose not to build studen...

Quantum computing is roughly where AI was nine years ago. Dr. Nneka McGee has already taught it to five-year-olds — with a penny. Nneka is the founder of Muon Global, project lead and principal co-author of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning white paper "AI + Learning Differences," and the author of an ISTE Jump Start Guide on introducing AI to young learners. Her FETC session on quantum for educators is what convinced me this belonged on the show. Her argument is simple and hard to dodge: the technologies that will shape our students' careers are being built right now, states are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in them, and we are sending kids to college without the grounding to take those seats. As she puts it — there will be a breakthrough technology like ChatGPT in quantum at some point, and where will we be as educators if we didn't do what was necessary? Then she gets practical. You'll hear how she teaches superposition, entanglement, and coh...

Alice Keeler built the Educator AI Assistant — a Google Sheets add-on that collects no data — in two days. In this episode she talks about how she vibe codes with Gemini to create extensions and tools for teachers and the classroom. Vibe coding is all the rage and everyone is talking about it. But how do you actually do it? This conversation goes specifically to Gemini, surfaces the privacy issues we should be concerned about, and casts a vision for what school IT departments are becoming — or might need to become. Alice makes the case that if a district can describe the tool it needs, someone inside that district can build it — and know it is safe, because they made it themselves. She also talks about what it costs to own the thing you built, and the question worth asking about any tool you rely on: is anyone still maintaining it? This was recorded in the middle of last year. The tools have changed and they will keep changing. The principles underneath — how we protect student priv...

A struggling Title I school built its culture around the 7 Habits — and the academics followed. Principal Muriel Summers tells how. In 1999, Muriel Summers became principal of A.B. Combs Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina — the fifth person interviewed for a job four others had walked away from. She had just heard Dr. Stephen Covey speak, and she went back to her staff with one question: do you think we can teach these habits to children? There was no framework. There was no money. What they built turned A.B. Combs into the original Leader in Me school and one of the most visited schools in the world. Muriel is now Global Ambassador for the Leader in Me, co-author of the updated The Leader in Me, and co-author with David K. Hatch of the new book Teacher Believed in Me. This is a Motivational Monday conversation for every educator heading back to school. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why Muriel fixed the school's culture first and let the academics follow — "you d...

Leadership is not a personality you're born with. It can be learned — and if it can be learned, it can be taught. In part one of a two-part series, Vicki Davis talks with Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the National Principals Association (formerly NASSP), about what principals across the country actually told us about AI in their schools — and why the number one thing they need isn't a tool, it's time. Then Muriel Summers describes taking a struggling Title I elementary school and rebuilding it around a single conviction: every person in that building is a leader, including the five-year-olds who interview teacher candidates. The thread running through both conversations is the idea Vicki's mother gave her — make your to-be list before you make your to-do list. Character before tactics. Identity before activity. In this episode, you'll learn: • Why "time" — not training, not tools, not money — is what principals say they need most right now, and what a leader can ac...

Free, ad-free BBC videos with ready-to-teach lesson plans — Bluey, leveled reading articles, dinosaur field trips, and a daily newsroom, all free for K-12. Kimmie Fink spent 13 years in the classroom and was named Puget Sound Teacher of the Year before becoming Senior Editor of the BBC Learning Hub. At her ISTE 2026 booth, teachers kept asking what the premium version costs. The answer: there isn't one. Everything is free. In this Fab Idea Friday episode, Kimmie walks through what a teacher can download and use tomorrow — and how a former teacher decides what belongs in a resource library she once wished she had. In this episode, you'll learn: Why the BBC Learning Hub holds the only licensed Bluey learning materials — 15 free lessons on friendship, feelings, and reading body language Where to find leveled reading articles pulled from BBC magazines, written at grades 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 so every reader in the room can access the same content How the Walking with Dinosaurs v...

The moment you put a grade on something, it stops being formative. Starr Sackstein returns for her fourth 10 Minute Teacher appearance to make assessment practical — what formative really means, what to do with the data you're already collecting, and the strategies that work at the start, middle, and end of a lesson. Starr has spent more than two decades helping teachers move from traditional grading toward feedback that actually drives learning. Her newest book, Actionable Assessment, is co-authored with Michael McDowell. In this episode, you'll learn: - The one-word difference between assessment OF learning and assessment FOR learning — and why it changes everything - Why putting a grade on a formative task cancels the formative part - How the four corners strategy works, plus the Post-it note round that gives quiet students the floor - The most common assessment mistake teachers make: assessments that don't match what we're actually trying to assess - Why obse...

Timed tests don't make kids faster! These experts say timed tests make kids anxious and don't tell you what a child actually knows. Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams and Dr. Gina Kling, co-authors of Math Fact Fluency: 60+ Games and Assessment Tools to Support Learning and Retention, explain what to do instead: low-stress card and dice games where nobody races anybody, and where watching kids play gives you better assessment data than any speed drill. Vicki shares why math facts in first grade were harder for her than calculus at Georgia Tech. (She also shares why her mom, who sat at the kitchen table with her, changed everything. Not everyone has that, so we need to do better!) In this episode, you'll learn: Why playing a game to learn basic facts isn't a reward day, it's best practice The three reasons Bay-Williams says timed tests need to be abandoned What students do when they're under time pressure (they drop back to counting) How to play Salute — the card ga...

The wow has to be secondary to the why. Meghan Freeman spent a year letting her staff play in VR before a single student put on a headset — and what they found changed how she designs immersive learning. Meghan Freeman, M.Ed., is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of IlluminateXR. Before that she founded and led Elite Academic Academy, where she bought 46 headsets for her staff and gave them an entire school year to explore, argue, and write the policy themselves. In this conversation she gets specific about what actually works: how to manage a room full of students who can't see the room, how long a first session should run, and the one question a teacher has to answer before booking the equipment. In this episode, you'll learn: What XR means and how VR, AR, and AI fit together in a classroom Why the "wow" of an immersive moment has to be secondary to the "why" The classroom-management controls that make group VR workable — spatial audio, seating, mute, and lockin...