10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
byVicki Davis
EducationHow-ToSelf-Improvement
A teacher podcast for busy educators—about 10 minutes, every week. Stay current on artificial intelligence in education (plain English), edtech, and what matters in the classroom: culture, instruction, assessment, digital health and wellness, and more. Simple ideas you can use right away. Hosted by AP Computer Science teacher Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher)—author and longtime edtech blogger—this teaching podcast features best-selling teachers, researchers, and in-the-classroom administrators sharing practical strategies that connect with today's students. Follow the 10 Minute Teacher—the podcast for teachers and school leaders—for weekly, classroom-ready tips. Show notes & resources: https://coolcatteacher.com/podcast
Episodes(40 episodes)
Season 17 - Episode 994
Why Kids Can't Stop Moving: The Neuroscience Behind a Student's Need to Move
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...
Published: Sep 24, 2026Duration: 13m 11s
Season 17 - Episode 993
5 Easy Brain Breaks for Your Classroom
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...
Published: Sep 23, 2026Duration: 8m 13s
Season 17 - Episode 992
5 Ways to Build Reading Stamina in Grades 6-12
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 cann...
Published: Sep 22, 2026Duration: 15m 18s
Season 17 - Episode 991
Rebound: How Schools Accelerate Learning Recovery
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 rese...
Published: Sep 21, 2026Duration: 11m 49s
Season 17 - Episode 990
AI Literacy for Teachers: Free Lessons, No Expertise Needed
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 hum...
Published: Sep 18, 2026Duration: 17m 50s
Season 17 - Episode 989
Blended Learning Best Practices That Still Hold Up (Recorded 2021) - episode #5 of all time
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 o...
Published: Sep 11, 2026Duration: 13m 2s
Season 17 - Episode 988
How to Teach Writing with Digital Media
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 revi...
Published: Sep 10, 2026Duration: 13m 31s
Season 17 - Episode 987
Neuroscience Research: 5 Ways to Superior Teaching
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, yo...
Published: Sep 9, 2026Duration: 15m 0s
Season 17 - Episode 986
What is Mastery Learning and How Do You Implement It Effectively?
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...
Published: Sep 8, 2026Duration: 11m 35s
Season 17 - Episode 985
Engage Every Learner: 8 Timeless Classroom Principles #9 Episode (updated for 2026)
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...
Published: Sep 7, 2026Duration: 50m 10s
Season 17 - Episode 984
Are You an Upset Teacher? How to Understand What Is Wrong (#10 of all time)
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...
Published: Sep 4, 2026Duration: 9m 27s
Season 17 - Episode 983
AI in Schools: Stop AI Detection, Start Learning Detection
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...
Published: Sep 3, 2026Duration: 20m 16s
Season 17 - Episode 982
Academic Integrity: What 22 Confessions Taught a Teacher
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...
Published: Sep 2, 2026Duration: 16m 27s
Season 17 - Episode 981
How to Build Your Own Data Dashboard: No Coding Required
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...
Published: Sep 1, 2026Duration: 15m 58s
Season 17 - Episode 980
Teaching Creativity: 4 Ideas Every Subject Can Use
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...
Published: Aug 31, 2026Duration: 12m 48s
Season 17 - Episode 979
Student Personal Branding Without Social Media
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...
Published: Aug 28, 2026Duration: 11m 16s
Season 17 - Episode 978
AI and Academic Honesty: The Second Crisis in Schools
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...
Published: Aug 27, 2026Duration: 18m 50s
Season 17 - Episode 977
Teaching Autistic Learners: Listen, Believe, Then Act
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...
Published: Aug 26, 2026Duration: 10m 17s
Season 17 - Episode 976
AI Agents Explained: What Teachers Need to Know
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. ...
Published: Aug 25, 2026Duration: 8m 16s
Season 17 - Episode 975
Teacher Burnout: Go 10% Slower and Get Your Joy Back
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...
Published: Aug 24, 2026Duration: 10m 6s