10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher

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 
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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.