10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher

When a student puts their head down, the question you ask next matters. Therapist and former high school teacher Charle Peck shares the one question to ask instead of "What's wrong with you?" and simple ways to support student mental health without becoming a therapist.
Charle spent years teaching high school before becoming a clinical therapist, and she is the co-author of The Language of Behavior and Improving School Mental Health. On this Fab Idea Friday, she explains why your own well-being is part of the job, not one more thing on your to-do list, and why noticing is the first skill every teacher needs.
She demonstrates a rapid reset, a 10- to 30-second activity that resets your energy and the whole room's. She also explains why she runs a reset with the whole class instead of singling out the one student who is struggling. And she shares a point every principal needs to hear: teachers won't refer a student unless they trust the referral system will help.
In this episode, you'll learn:
The one question to ask a struggling student: "What am I missing?"
What a rapid reset is and how to use one with the whole class
Why noticing your own patterns comes before helping students
What to do when a student puts their head down
Why a referral system teachers trust matters for student mental health
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e995
If this episode gave you an idea, share it with a teacher who could use it this week.

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) and the proprioceptive sense (feeling your muscles and joints), and why classroom planks, movement breaks, therapy balls, inflatable seat cushions, and flexible seating can help a busy child stay ready to learn.
🎯 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN • What a unique learner is, and why every classroom has one • Why "acting out" may be a strategy to stay engaged • The vestibular and proprioceptive senses, explained for teachers • Why planks and movement breaks can calm a busy child • Seating that lets students move without disrupting others • Why there's nothing wrong with the child who can't stop moving
👤 ABOUT SUZANNE CRESSWELL Suzanne Cresswell is an occupational and physical therapist who works with unique learners and the parents and teachers who support them. She is the author of Unique Learner Solutions: Discover the Ability in Learning Disability.

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 learning at their highest potential.
The five: a backward race through the room, 60-second pitches, Name Three Things, cell phone ping pong, and the penny arm flip. Each takes a few minutes. Several of them build the soft skills students rarely get to practice — talking, pitching, and thinking on their feet.
Rob also answers the question every teacher has: what happens when someone walks in to observe and thinks you're just playing? When his school moved from 42-minute to 68-minute class periods, his administration encouraged brain breaks to help teachers chunk instruction. And the students noticed. "If I don't do this, Vicki, they're begging me," he says.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- What a brain break is and why students need one
- The backward race: a whole-class reset that gets everyone moving
- 60-second pitches: a brain break that builds public speaking
- Name Three Things: a fast head-to-head for quick processing
- Cell phone ping pong and the penny arm flip — two games students will ask for
- What to say to an observer who thinks you're playing
- Why novelty and breaking routine make a classroom remarkable
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e993 
If this episode is useful to you, leave a rating wherever you're listening — it's how other teachers find the show.

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 cannot sustain attention on a page. So they fake read. They look at the book, the eyes move, and nothing happens, and because it all goes on inside their heads it is almost impossible to catch during independent reading time.
She gives five moves, drawn from her own classroom and from the work of Penny Kittle, Laura Robb, and NCTE: give them protected time, give them choice, get them conferencing and talking about books, advertise great reads so they can see themselves and see past themselves, and then challenge them to stretch — longer books, harder books, new genres.
And she is blunt about frustration. "I think sometimes as teachers, especially with older kids, especially older, struggling readers, we want to avoid frustration at all costs. And I don't know that that's doing them any favors." Her alternative is not to remove the hard thing. It is to teach a student to notice they are frustrated and to keep going anyway — because reading stamina, as she puts it, is brain stamina. It is the same muscle they need in science and social studies.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- What reading stamina actually is — NCTE defines it as sustaining mental effort without scaffolds or adult support
- Fake reading: why it is so hard to catch, and what it costs
- The five moves — time, choice, conferencing, vision, challenge
- Why self-selected reading drives engagement and vocabulary at the same time
- How to let a student stretch past their "level" when motivation is doing the work
- The exact language to use with a frustrated reader, and why removing frustration backfires
- Why a reading specialist calls herself the reading coach, not the reading teacher
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e992

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.