Motivation to Thrive Your First Few Years of Teaching
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Release Date: 08/05/2019
950 - Valuing Students and Teachers: Become a Hope Agent
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
What students achieve is tied to whether they feel valued — and the same is true for the teachers who serve them. In this Motivational Monday conversation, coach and author Debbie Simões (founder of Best Questers, co-author of High Five to Thrive) shows teachers how valuing students transforms a classroom, even on the hardest days. Drawing on years in inner-city classrooms, Debbie shares how to see past a child's behavior to the person of value underneath, how to communicate to connect instead of to correct, and how to be a "hope agent" for yourself and your colleagues in a season of...
info_outline
11 Books for Your Teacher Summer: AI, Faith & Focus — Episode 949
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Summer reading for teachers — 11 books I've highlighted over 6,800 times and keep coming back to. This Significant Saturday special is my personal summer list for educators and lifelong learners, spanning AI ethics, productivity, faith, and the classroom-management classics I hand every first-year teacher. In this episode, you'll learn: Why The Age of AI by Jason Thacker belongs at the top of a Christian educator's list The one big-picture idea from The Future Is Faster Than You Think that brings hope about technology Which books to reach for when you're feeling burned out or overwhelmed...
info_outline
AI Tools Inside Adobe Express and Canva for Teachers — Episode 948
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Adobe Express and Canva are packed with AI tools that save teachers hours — Amy Storer shares the features her teachers love most. Innovative learning specialist Amy Storer (Montgomery ISD, TX) walks through the AI-powered tools inside Adobe Express and Canva that teachers and students are getting most excited about — from studio-style student podcasts to interactive games you can build without writing a line of code. She also shares a favorite bonus tool for creating step-by-step how-to guides, and closes with a word of encouragement for any teacher feeling buried by "all the things." In...
info_outline
Teacher Burnout: How to Reconnect and Feel Fulfilled — Episode 947
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Teacher burnout isn't weakness — it's disconnection. Michelle Singh shares how teachers can reconnect, set boundaries, and feel fulfilled again. Michelle Singh — National Board Certified Teacher, founder of The Restful Teacher, and CEO of LCT-E Learning Solutions — spent more than 20 years in the classroom and district leadership before her own burnout forced a change. In this honest conversation with Vicki Davis, she offers teachers a path back to the work they love. In this episode, you'll learn: Why teacher disengagement is an "iceberg" with far more below the surface How to serve...
info_outline
A Real Teacher Sparking Curiosity Makes All the Difference — Episode 946
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Why do we have to prove we're human in the age of AI? STEM educator and AI coach Brandie Wright shares the real story behind her ISTE main-stage talk on sparking curiosity — and why the presence of a teacher still matters. When Vicki first heard Brandie's story on the ISTE main stage, she wasn't sure the student was real — that's how believable AI-generated stories have become. This Wonderful Classroom Wednesday conversation is about curiosity, human connection, and the artisanship of teaching in an age when a kid alone with a screen simply isn't enough. In this episode, you'll learn: How...
info_outline
AI Assisted Grading: A Teacher's 30-Second Checklist — Episode 945
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Steve Swanson built an AI grading tool — and then deleted the feature that would have returned AI-generated grades straight to students. He's a high school engineering teacher who was staring down 150 assignments after a field-trip week, and he built ClassLens because he needed it for his own gradebook. But when he got to the point where he could push one button and have everything graded and sent back automatically, it felt wrong. So he took the button out. In this Tech Tip Tuesday conversation, Steve makes the case for "human in the loop" — not as a buzzword, but as the actual job of...
info_outline
Habits of Hope to Help Educators with Dr. Julia Garcia
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Hope isn't just a feeling — it's a practice you can build. Psychologist and author Dr. Julia Garcia (The 5 Habits of Hope) joins Vicki Davis to redefine hope as something educators can practice, even in the hardest seasons. Recorded shortly after Vicki lost her father, this is an honest, encouraging conversation about hopelessness, grief, and the small habits that help us hold on to hope. In this episode, you'll learn: Why we experience hope as a feeling — and how to practice it instead The habit of reflection: pausing long enough to connect with something real The habit of receiving:...
info_outline
How Students Actually Learn: Memory & Attention
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
How do students actually learn? AP Psychology teacher Blake Harvard — The Effortful Educator — shares the cognitive science of attention and memory that every K-12 teacher can use tomorrow. In this episode of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast, Vicki Davis talks with Blake Harvard about why attention is a necessary component of learning, the simple pre-test that primes the brain, and the mistake of making hard content even harder. Blake breaks down the two strategies with more than a century of research behind them — retrieval practice and spaced practice — and why rereading notes just...
info_outline
Experiential Learning Through Travel That Sticks
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Experiential learning through travel changes students for good — and Denver science and CTE teacher Angela Cannava proves any teacher can lead it. In this episode of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast, Angela shares how curriculum-aligned international trips with EF Explore America transformed her students: a forensics lab in Great Britain where they did real DNA fingerprinting, and a Belize Ridge-to-Reef conservation expedition with a midnight bat workshop. She tells the story of a student who barely spoke in three years coming home changed, and a Belize traveler now headed back to work at the...
info_outline
AI Art in the Classroom with Tim Needles
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Art teacher Tim Needles brings AI art into the classroom without losing the watercolors, clay, and joy of real art. In this Tech Tool Tuesday, Tim shares how he uses Adobe Express and text-to-image to amplify student imagination, why the kids who use AI well are simply more descriptive, and the daily 10-minute creativity habit that helps teachers fight burnout. Plus: the legacy mural project that reaches a whole community, and the student who broke INTO the art room to keep working — and now works at Industrial Light & Magic. In this episode, you'll learn: How to bring AI art into any...
info_outlineToday, let’s make our profession better by focusing on how we can encourage new teachers and each other. Edwin Thomas Minguela reflects upon his first two years of teaching. As you listen to what he has learned and his encouragement for teachers, reflect upon your early years of teaching and how you can help new teachers in the profession.
Along with this episode I’ve released a new blog post “8 Ways to Help New Teachers Thrive” – check the show notes and stay tuned at the end of the show for these research-based ideas. I've also included a PDF of this post as bonus material for this episode.
Today’s challenge – adopt a colleague. But it has to be someone who is not already in your inner circle. If you’ve been teaching longer than three years, I challenge you to adopt someone who is a new teacher either at your school or to teaching altogether. If you’re new to teaching, reach out to someone who has been teaching longer.
Edwin Thomas Minguela - Bio As Submitted
I am an upcoming third-year teacher in Philadelphia. All my 3 of years have been in 3rd grade. I love to bring joy for learning to all of my students. Being an urban student once myself and had spent the majority of my Prek-12 school years in Philadelphia, I know many of the hardships my students may come to my classroom. I want to them to know that our classroom is a safe place and that I will always care for them. During my educational career, I have had multiple rewarding opportunities to conduct research and present at a conference on different topics. A goal of mine is to not become an educator, but a researcher as well. One particular opportunity was conducting research on a Native American reservation for about 12 days. The research I conducted was an autoethnography dealing with my experiences as a Latino going into another minority's culture. I was able to present my research a year later at an undergraduate research conference held at Millersville University. I have also had a lesson publication and professional development session related to STEM education.