10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher

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 sp...

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 wor...

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 actu...

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-developed by Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this podcast episode. All opinions are my own and those of the guest. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program with ready-to-teach lessons f...

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...

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.

📌 Ful...

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

Experience AI, a program co-developed by Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this podcast episode. All opinions are my own and those of the guest. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program with ready-to-teach lessons for ages 8 to 16, in any subje...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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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...

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.<...

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 th...

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 th...

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 "ju...

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 sh...

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 conversa...

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 "...

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 ri...

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 d...

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...

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...

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 le...

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...

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 wh...

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% at...

Travel with students changes what a school leader sees. Karen Spencer, principal of Parkview Baptist School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, treats travel as part of her school's mission rather than an add-on — a sixth grade overnight, a seventh grade STEM and history trip to Boston, Washington D.C. in eighth grade, and international travel in high school. In this conversation she walks through how the Boston trip started, what it costs a principal in effort, and what she gets back that nothing inside the building can give her.

In this episode, you'll learn:

Gold standard PBL isn't a fun project with a poster at the end. Lisa Mireles of PBLWorks explains what a real project based learning classroom looks and sounds like — and how to teach it without falling behind on standards.

Lisa Mireles, Ed.D., is Managing Director of Digital Curriculum at PBLWorks (formerly the Buck Institute for Education). She's taught bilingual students in California, led schools in Indonesia and India, served as an IB coordinator, principal, and assistant superintendent, and was named HIDOE Kaua'i Complex Educational Officer of the Year in 2018.

In this episode, you'll learn:

AI in the classroom isn't a tool problem — it's an assignment problem. Dr. Nancy Frey on designing work students can't fake.

Dr. Nancy Frey — professor of educational leadership at San Diego State and teacher leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College — joins Vicki Davis for a practical conversation about what actually changes in a classroom when every student has AI. Not which app to use. What to assign, what to collect, and what to teach kids to verify. Nancy's newest book, Teaching Students to Use AI Ethically & Responsibly, is co-authored with Salman Khan, Douglas Fisher, James Marsha...

Most teachers know AI belongs in their classroom — almost nobody tells them where to start if they don't teach computer science. Karim Meghji, President and CEO of CodeAI (the nonprofit formerly known as Code.org), gives the answer at ISTE 2026.

Vicki took one of Karim's classes on the ISTE show floor before this conversation — including a lesson that asks AI to generate a "healthy meal" and then hands students the cultural bias in the result to talk about. That design choice is the whole episode: students don't learn what AI gets wrong by being told, they learn it b...

You gave the directions. You were clear. You wrote them on the board. Half the class still did it wrong — here's the reason why.

Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk, head of school at Christian Life School in Kenosha, Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in rhetoric and studies media ecology — how our communication technologies shape the way we think, relate, and learn. In this Motivational Monday conversation, he explains the cognitive bias that quietly sabotages teacher-to-student communication, and what one school does about it on purpose.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How do you teach about space in any classroom—not just science? Dr. Mark Wagner says space is the ultimate hook for engagement, and the growing space economy means every student needs to understand it. In this conversation, the CEO of Aries Learning and author of Space Education shares why space belongs in every subject, the mindsets students need, and simple ways to bring exploration into your room this week.

In this episode, you'll learn:

Choosing a dissertation topic? Dr. Maggie Broderick shares "servant scholarship" — how to pick research that helps real teachers and students instead of just checking a box.

In this conversation, Dr. Maggie Broderick — associate professor at National University, dissertation chair, and editor of the International Journal of Online Graduate Education — joins Vicki Davis to explore how doctoral students and classroom teachers alike can choose research with a servant's heart.

In this episode, you'll learn:

Project-based social studies ideas students never forget — from 2026 New Hampshire Teacher of the Year Megan Philbrook, whose students secretly nominated her for the award.

Megan Philbrook teaches social studies to grades 5 through 8 in rural New Hampshire, where her students wrote, directed, and filmed their own play on Ancient Rome, podcast about the American Revolution, and research WWII veterans buried fifteen miles from their school. In this conversation she shares how project-based learning and civic engagement make history unforgettable — and the classroom moves that made her students love her enough to nominate her for Teacher of the Year with...

Can elementary students build their own apps? Two elementary teachers — Erin Keith and Edward Courtney — show how they use MAD-learn for gold-standard project-based learning, and how app-building teaches the soft skills that last long after the code.

In this episode, you'll learn:

What students achieve is tied to whether they feel valued — and the same is true for the teachers who serve them. In this Motivational Monday conversation, coach and author Debbie Simões (founder of Best Questers, co-author of High Five to Thrive) shows teachers how valuing students transforms a classroom, even on the hardest days.

Drawing on years in inner-city classrooms, Debbie shares how to see past a child's behavior to the person of value underneath, how to communicate to connect instead of to correct, and how to be a "hope agent" for yourself and your colleagues in...

Summer reading for teachers — 11 books I've highlighted over 6,800 times and keep coming back to. This Significant Saturday special is my personal summer list for educators and lifelong learners, spanning AI ethics, productivity, faith, and the classroom-management classics I hand every first-year teacher.

In this episode, you'll learn:

Adobe Express and Canva are packed with AI tools that save teachers hours — Amy Storer shares the features her teachers love most.

Innovative learning specialist Amy Storer (Montgomery ISD, TX) walks through the AI-powered tools inside Adobe Express and Canva that teachers and students are getting most excited about — from studio-style student podcasts to interactive games you can build without writing a line of code. She also shares a favorite bonus tool for creating step-by-step how-to guides, and closes with a word of encouragement for any teacher feeling buried by "all the things."

In this epis...

Teacher burnout isn't weakness — it's disconnection. Michelle Singh shares how teachers can reconnect, set boundaries, and feel fulfilled again.

Michelle Singh — National Board Certified Teacher, founder of The Restful Teacher, and CEO of LCT-E Learning Solutions — spent more than 20 years in the classroom and district leadership before her own burnout forced a change. In this honest conversation with Vicki Davis, she offers teachers a path back to the work they love.

In this episode, you'll learn: