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New teacher advice from a three-time Teacher of the Year. Retired fifth-grade teacher Eric Hall spent 27 years in the classroom, and he says it starts with relationships before rigor. Build trust first, and the curriculum comes easier. On this Wonderful Classroom Wednesday, Eric, author of Controlled Chaos: Lessons They Didn't Teach You in Teacher School, shares how he got to know students and families before the first day of school, why his first call home is always a positive one, and how he let students help write the classroom agreements. He also tells how a weekend plane ride brought a chapter of Hatchet to life, and how a French chef with a falling-off mustache finally taught his class adjectives. In this episode, you'll learn: Why relationships come before rigor, and how trust makes the curriculum easier to teach How to connect with students and parents before the first day of school The "first call home is positive" habit, and how to find one good thing about every student in week one Why fair doesn't always mean the same, with breaks, pedal bikes, and wobble stools as tools How to reach a struggling student through their interests, and why taking teaching risks pays off Eric Hall is a retired fifth-grade teacher from Cheboygan, Michigan, a three-time Teacher of the Year, and the author of Controlled Chaos. Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e998

Frustrated with AI? Make it interview you first. Dr. Jie Tao of Fairfield University explains why "prompt and pray" gives you brilliant answers one day and useless ones the next, and how a few simple habits get you consistent, reliable results. On this Tech Tool Tuesday, Jie shares the interview pattern he calls the most powerful prompting technique he teaches, how a "scratch pad" keeps AI working only from your information, and what agentic AI means for teachers. He also explains how his research team used a language model to help clinicians spot signs of suicidal ideation on social media. In this episode, you'll learn: Why "prompt and pray" frustrates teachers, and why consistent answers beat brilliant ones The interview pattern: tell AI "do not assume anything" and to ask you questions first How to use a scratch pad so AI works only from the information you give it Agentic AI vs. fully autonomous agents like OpenClaw, explained simply Why AI is an "overconfident intern," and how to test a tool before students ever see it Dr. Jie Tao is an associate professor of business analytics and director of the AI & Tech Institute at Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business, and hosts the AI4U podcast. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (US). Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e997

Teacher expectations shape what students believe they can do. Edward DeShazer was suspended more than 30 times and expelled three times. Today he leads a school that went from one star to four stars in six years. On this Motivational Monday, Edward explains the "believement gap": the distance between what a student believes about himself and what he can actually do. He shares the teacher who changed his path, and what his school does to help teachers and students feel like they belong. In this episode, you'll learn: What the believement gap is and how teacher expectations shape student success Why culture comes first and achievement follows: coffee every morning, a staff workout room, and Walking Wednesdays How relationships trickle down from school leaders to teachers to students "One Has Got to Go," a two-minute turn-and-talk for the end of class Why students (and teachers) need to feel both safe and seen Edward DeShazer is Executive Director of Greater Holy Temple Christian Academy in Milwaukee, a keynote speaker, and the author of Closing the Believe'ment Gap. Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e996 If this show helps you, would you take 30 seconds to rate and review the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast? It helps other teachers find it.

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. In this episode, you'll learn: The one question to ask a struggling student: "What am I missing?" What a rapid reset is and how to use one with the whole class Why noticing your own patterns comes before helping students What to do when a student puts their head down Why a referral system teachers trust matters for student mental health Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e995 If this episode gave you an idea, share it with a teacher who could use it this week.

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" may be a strategy to stay engaged • The vestibular and proprioceptive senses, explained for teachers • Why planks and movement breaks can calm a busy child • Seating that lets students move without disrupting others • Why there's nothing wrong with the child who can't stop moving 👤 ABOUT SUZANNE CRESSWELL Suzanne Cresswell is an occupational and physical therapist who works with unique learners and the parents and teachers who support them. She is the author of Unique Learner Solutions: Discover the Ability in Learning Disability.

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're just playing? When his school moved from 42-minute to 68-minute class periods, his administration encouraged brain breaks to help teachers chunk instruction. And the students noticed. "If I don't do this, Vicki, they're begging me," he says. In this episode, you'll learn: - What a brain break is and why students need one - The backward race: a whole-class reset that gets everyone moving - 60-second pitches: a brain break that builds public speaking - Name Three Things: a fast head-to-head for quick processing - Cell phone ping pong and the penny arm flip — two games students will ask for - What to say to an observer who thinks you're playing - Why novelty and breaking routine make a classroom remarkable Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e993  If this episode is useful to you, leave a rating wherever you're listening — it's how other teachers find the show.

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 and talking about books, advertise great reads so they can see themselves and see past themselves, and then challenge them to stretch — longer books, harder books, new genres. And she is blunt about frustration. "I think sometimes as teachers, especially with older kids, especially older, struggling readers, we want to avoid frustration at all costs. And I don't know that that's doing them any favors." Her alternative is not to remove the hard thing. It is to teach a student to notice they are frustrated and to keep going anyway — because reading stamina, as she puts it, is brain stamina. It is the same muscle they need in science and social studies. In this episode, you'll learn: - What reading stamina actually is — NCTE defines it as sustaining mental effort without scaffolds or adult support - Fake reading: why it is so hard to catch, and what it costs - The five moves — time, choice, conferencing, vision, challenge - Why self-selected reading drives engagement and vocabulary at the same time - How to let a student stretch past their "level" when motivation is doing the work - The exact language to use with a frustrated reader, and why removing frustration backfires - Why a reading specialist calls herself the reading coach, not the reading teacher Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e992

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 actually are. You keep the pace brisk. You make the relevance obvious. You rebuild confidence in learners who have stopped believing their own effort matters. And you build knowledge in advance: a ninety-second video on the LMS, two concepts and two vocabulary words, so the time you have together live can move. He is also blunt about the language we use. "This learning loss narrative is really dangerous," he says. "That's what's killing my morale right now… I'm not convinced that the ninth graders all of a sudden started reading like fourth graders." There is unfinished learning. That's a different thing, and knowing exactly where a student is and teaching them what they need next is, in his words, our superpower. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why acceleration beats remediation — and where that research actually comes from - The 40% finding: how much class time goes to content students already know - The four moves of acceleration: know where they are, keep the pace, build relevance, rebuild confidence - Preview and review — a better way to think about asynchronous work than "homework" - Why tutoring should teach students HOW to learn, not just what they missed - "Water, water everywhere": the student data we store and never use - Why "learning loss" is the wrong phrase, and "unfinished learning" is the right one Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e990  If this episode is useful to you, leave a rating wherever you're listening — it's how other teachers find the show.

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 stop trying to be one and start small. In this episode, you'll learn: • Why you are likely already teaching AI literacy in your subject without naming it • How to weave AI into what you already teach without going off track • What this looks like at age eight versus age fifteen, including the unplugged advertisement-detective lesson for younger students • Why anthropomorphizing AI is riskier for children than adults assume • "Discernment instead of skepticism," and why she chose that word on purpose • The crutch test — am I reaching for this because I don't know how? — and what students lose when the answer is yes • Where to start in the free curriculum, and how the lessons are edited and localized by the teachers using them Laura Gray is a Senior Learning Manager at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, where she manages Experience AI across North America. Experience AI is free, available in 20+ languages, has been downloaded more than a million times across over 195 countries, and won the 2025 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICT in Education. Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e990

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 moved through at their own pace, and spent class time checking in with individual kids. Those are the teachers who reported knowing their students better than they usually do. And when the Institute compared tool use before and after, the biggest jumps in adoption were in exactly those tools — lesson creation and screen recording. There's a second finding in here that has nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with your building. Asked how well things were going, administrators clustered between sixty and a hundred. Teachers split into two clusters — one around seventy or eighty, and another around thirty to forty. Same schools. Two different realities. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why concurrent instruction — teaching the room and the screen at once — failed for almost everyone who tried it - What the small minority of teachers who said "this worked" actually did instead - The tools whose adoption jumped the most, and why that tells you which teachers changed their methodology - The optimism gap between what administrators reported and what teachers reported - Three recommendations for school leaders, including what NOT to cancel when the emergency ends - Vicki's question that outlives the pandemic entirely: teachers are going back to what worked for them — but did it ever work? Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e989  If this episode is useful to you, leave a rating wherever you're listening — it's how other teachers find the show.

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?" is the real writing problem - How an audience of one produces the same revision effort as an audience of thousands - The three-to-four week unit: listen, build criteria, draft, cut cliches, record - Why writing for audio quietly enforces every rule of good writing - Where to find free student-made audio stories to use as models Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e988  If you've got a student who writes nothing for you and everything for their friends, send them this idea — and send this episode to the English teacher down the hall.

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, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e987  If this one made you rethink something you've been doing for years, share it with a teacher who needs it.

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 — five or six lessons, then a test where students get one shot at hitting the target - The number one reason teachers abandon mastery learning in the first year, and the strategy Jon and Aaron Sams built to fix it - How tiered tests work: a deep-understanding test, a clear test, and a basic test — and how you decide what every student must know versus what is nice to know - Why the research says mastery learning helps lower-achieving students most, and which courses are the easiest place to begin - Where to go next if you want to keep learning: Teach Better's Grid Method, the Mastery Transcript Consortium, and the wider competency-based learning world Show notes, resources, and the full transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e986  We are eight episodes away from number 1,000. If you've been listening along, subscribe and stay with me for the next thousand — and if a colleague came to mind while you listened, send this one to them.

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 before ChatGPT existed The story of Sue and Mrs. Scruggs is the center of this episode — a five-minute conversation with one teacher that changed the entire direction of a life. Full show notes, every link from the original slides, and updated 2026 tools: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e985 If this one helped you, please leave a review wherever you're listening — it's how other teachers find the show.

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/