Getting the Brain Ready to Learn Math
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Release Date: 08/02/2021
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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:...
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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...
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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...
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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_outlineWhen students come into your math class, are they ready to learn? Is their brain in a ready state? In today's show, Liesl McConchie shares how to help students get their brains ready to learn from the moment they walk into the classroom.
https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e750
In this show, I also share some updates at the end of the show about what's next for this podcast. We're starting season 10 of the 10-minute teacher that I'm dedicating to my precious Mom. Learn more about what is going on with the show after you listen to Liesl McConchie talk about how the brain learns math.
Liesl McConchie - Bio as Submitted
Liesl McConchie is an international expert on how the brain learns, and co-author of best-selling book Brain-Based Learning with Dr. Eric Jensen. She has been published in ASCD's Educational Leadership journal. With over 20 years of experience in education, Liesl bridges her knowledge of how the brain best learns with her experience of teaching secondary math to create tangible strategies to support teachers and schools across the globe. She has a rich background in education that includes creating new schools, leading whole-school reforms, delivering workshops to educators, and speaking at conferences. Learn more about Liesl and her contributions to education at lieslmcconchie.com.