How to Promote Deeper Learning with the Four Shifts
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Release Date: 05/21/2019
Free BBC Resources for Your Classroom: Dinosaurs, Bluey, Planet Earth and News — Episode 964
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Free, ad-free BBC videos with ready-to-teach lesson plans — Bluey, leveled reading articles, dinosaur field trips, and a daily newsroom, all free for K-12. Kimmie Fink spent 13 years in the classroom and was named Puget Sound Teacher of the Year before becoming Senior Editor of the BBC Learning Hub. At her ISTE 2026 booth, teachers kept asking what the premium version costs. The answer: there isn't one. Everything is free. In this Fab Idea Friday episode, Kimmie walks through what a teacher can download and use tomorrow — and how a former teacher decides what belongs in a resource library...
info_outline
Assessment and Feedback That Move Learning Forward — Episode 963
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
The moment you put a grade on something, it stops being formative. Starr Sackstein returns for her fourth 10 Minute Teacher appearance to make assessment practical — what formative really means, what to do with the data you're already collecting, and the strategies that work at the start, middle, and end of a lesson. Starr has spent more than two decades helping teachers move from traditional grading toward feedback that actually drives learning. Her newest book, Actionable Assessment, is co-authored with Michael McDowell. In this episode, you'll learn: - The one-word difference between...
info_outline
Math Games That Build Fluency While Kids Have Fun — Episode 962
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Timed tests don't make kids faster! These experts say timed tests make kids anxious and don't tell you what a child actually knows. Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams and Dr. Gina Kling, co-authors of Math Fact Fluency: 60+ Games and Assessment Tools to Support Learning and Retention, explain what to do instead: low-stress card and dice games where nobody races anybody, and where watching kids play gives you better assessment data than any speed drill. Vicki shares why math facts in first grade were harder for her than calculus at Georgia Tech. (She also shares why her mom, who sat at the kitchen table...
info_outline
How to Make VR Actually Work in Your Classroom — Episode 961
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
The wow has to be secondary to the why. Meghan Freeman spent a year letting her staff play in VR before a single student put on a headset — and what they found changed how she designs immersive learning. Meghan Freeman, M.Ed., is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of IlluminateXR. Before that she founded and led Elite Academic Academy, where she bought 46 headsets for her staff and gave them an entire school year to explore, argue, and write the policy themselves. In this conversation she gets specific about what actually works: how to manage a room full of students who can't see the room, how long a...
info_outline
Data-Driven Leadership That Changes School Culture — Episode 960
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...
info_outline
Travel With Students: A Principal's Grade-by-Grade Plan — Episode 959
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
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...
info_outline
Gold Standard PBL vs. Just Doing a Fun Project
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
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,...
info_outline
AI in the Classroom: Assignments Students Can't Fake
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
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,...
info_outline
How to Teach AI in Any Classroom, Not Just CS Class — Episode 956
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
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...
info_outline
How to Teach Confident Communicators with Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
You gave the directions. You were clear. You wrote them on the board. Half the class still did it wrong — here's the reason why. Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk, head of school at Christian Life School in Kenosha, Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in rhetoric and studies media ecology — how our communication technologies shape the way we think, relate, and learn. In this Motivational Monday conversation, he explains the cognitive bias that quietly sabotages teacher-to-student communication, and what one school does about it on purpose. In this episode, you'll learn: The curse of knowledge: a 1990 Stanford study...
info_outlineThe four shifts is a new education technology paradigm shared in the book Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning by Scott McLeod and Julie Graber. On today's show, Julie discusses these four shifts and how it compares to other models such as SAMR. She gives examples of effective design using technology and where many programs are falling short.
Julie Graber's Bio as Submitted
Julie Graber is an instructional technology consultant
on a technology innovation team for Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency in Iowa where she supports educators with effective teaching, learning, leading, and technology practices. She is a passionate educator who is most interested in seeing teachers and administrators improve authentic learning experiences for students. Her many areas of expertise include deeper
thinking with technology, authentic learning, curriculum design, and performance tasks and assessments. She spent thirteen years as a technology coordinator and business and computer
teacher. Julie is an Authentic Intellectual Work (AIW) coach and has coached elementary, middle, and high school teams of teachers on how to use the framework in order to increase the level of intellectual demand as well as the authenticity of the work that students are asked to do. She has
served on several state leadership teams, including the North Central Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Hub Advisory Board and the Design Team for the Iowa Competency-Based Education Collaborative, and has provided guidance for schools to increase STEM education in their classrooms and move them toward competency-based and personalized
learning. Julie is a Defined STEM, a K–12 curriculum resource curriculum with engaging project-based lessons that are based on real-world scenarios. She is also a consultant for Jay McTighe's consulting group, McTighe and Associates, where she conducts workshops for educators using the Understanding by Design curriculum framework. Julie is the co-creator of the 4 Shifts discussion protocol and a regular local, state, and national presenter focusing on authentic work and student-centered, personalized and project-based learning.