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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...

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...