10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher

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% attendance goal did more for her building than another round of test-score analysis.
In this episode, you'll learn:
• Why her first year as principal was spent looking and listening, not changing anything
• The every-two-weeks data review she runs with her assistant principals and resource teacher
• How she identifies teachers above the building failure average — and the questions she sends them
• Why attendance and discipline data drive instructional data, not the other way around
• How her school hit the state's 94% attendance number using community, not consequences
• What she tells teachers who are hurting and tired
Full show notes, free data drive resources, AI prompts, and the transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e960
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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:
How a single teacher's push to "bring more STEM to the school" became an annual seventh grade trip to Boston
Why the trip grew from STEM-only into STEM, history and fun — MIT, Harvard, robotics, the Freedom Trail, Lexington and Concord
What a grade-by-grade travel ladder looks like when each grade builds on the last
What hands-on learning looks like abroad — cooking classes, flamenco lessons, hiking and biking
Karen's honest answer to administrators who ask why she'd take on the headache, and the mindset she says you have to bring
Full show notes, resources and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e959 
Sponsor. Today's show is sponsored by EF Explore America and their STEM Tours. Lead your students on a STEM tour to places on the cutting edge of innovation to show them how STEM thinking often shows up where you least expect it. Imagine your students coding robots with MassRobotics at MIT, exploring marine ecosystems in Florida's coral reefs, or even sitting down to talk with a former spy in Washington DC. If you want to inspire your students and give them a fresh perspective on the power of STEM, visit efexploreamerica.com/STEM.
If this episode gave you something useful, share it with a teacher or administrator who's been thinking about taking students somewhere.

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:
• What the Gold Standard framework actually contains — seven essential project design elements plus seven project based teaching practices — and why a great project still fails without the teaching moves
• What you see and hear in a gold standard PBL classroom: a productive buzz, a project wall with the driving question and milestones, students returning to their need-to-knows, teachers coaching instead of lecturing
• Concrete projects outside business and computer science: designing a community microgrid in high school science, designing a custom diamond in middle school geometry, and a second grade community heroes gallery
• How PBL turns literacy into an all-day practice — reading, writing, speaking, and listening — rather than something that only happens during the literacy block
• Lisa's answer to the time squeeze: coverage isn't enough, and going deeper on power standards teaches more than racing through everything
• The principal move worth stealing — have teachers mark what they planned to teach, then revisit after the project to mark what they actually taught deeply. It's always about twice as much.
• Where to find more than 100 free project ideas, searchable by grade and subject, that scale up or down for your students
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e958 
If this episode gave you something you can use, take a second to leave a rating or review wherever you're listening. It helps other teachers find the show. And if a colleague is on the fence about project based learning, send this one their way.

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 Marshall, and Meghan Hargrave.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- How to build verbal assessment into a classroom that has 180 students — including a Google Docs workaround when face-to-face isn't practical
- Why you should collect the student's dialogue with the chatbot, not just the finished product
- How lateral reading — Sam Wineburg's method — transfers directly to interrogating AI-generated content
- What appropriate AI use looks like by grade band: "truth detectives" in K–2, "information investigators" in grades 3–5
- How to redesign a task so it's AI-resistant, plus Carol Jago's reflective questions a chatbot can't answer for a student
Show notes, the full transcript, and every resource: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e957
★ REVIEW ASK: If this show helps you teach, please rate and review it wherever you're listening. It's the single best way to help another teacher find us — and I read every one.

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 by watching it happen and then discussing it.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why CodeAI rebranded from Code.org — and what "glass box instead of black box" means for how you teach
- Why Karim's teams deliberately build lessons where the AI answers incorrectly
- The question he wants every student asking: who is in control — you or the AI?
- What sits behind free student AI tools — pre-filters, post-filters, and hundreds of jailbreak tests
- The exact first step for a teacher who has never taught a line of code
Karim's answer to "where do I start" is shorter than you'd expect, and it puts the teacher and the students in the same boat on purpose.
Full show notes, every resource, and the transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e956 
If this show helps you teach better, leave a review wherever you're listening — it's how other teachers find us.