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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...

Most principals say “data-driven” and mean test scores. Dr. Deborah Dennie means attendance, discipline, and climate too — and it changed her school. Dr. Deborah Dennie has led Leonardtown Middle School in St. Mary’s County, Maryland for ten years. She’s Maryland’s Middle School Principal of the Year and one of three middle-school finalists for the 2026 NASSP National Principal of the Year. In this episode she walks Vicki through the data routine she runs every two weeks, why she spent her entire first year looking and listening instead of changing things, and how a classic car show and a 94% attendance goal did more for her building than another round of test-score analysis. In this episode, you’ll learn: • Why her first year as principal was spent looking and listening, not changing anything • The every-two-weeks data review she runs with her assistant principals and resource teacher • How she identifies teachers above the building failure average — and the questions she sends t...