10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher

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.