10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath has lectured at Harvard, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and has worked with more than 150 schools around the world. In this episode he gives five findings from brain science that change what you do Monday — starting with the one most of us have backwards. Memory isn't built by how you put information in. It's built by how often your students pull it back out.
This episode originally aired in 2019 and comes in at number seven in our countdown of the top 10 episodes of the first 1,000.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why rereading notes doesn't build memory, and what to do instead
- Why students can't read your slides and listen to you at the same time
- The attention threshold, and how to reset it every 10 to 15 minutes
- How to find the story behind a fact so the fact sticks
- Why facts have to come before skills, demonstrated with a cricket match you won't understand a word of
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e987 
If this one made you rethink something you've been doing for years, share it with a teacher who needs it.

Mastery learning is the driver's-test rule applied to school: if a student fails the test, they take it again until they pass. Jon Bergmann teaches that way, full time, in chemistry and physics.
This is #8 in the Top 10 of the First 1,000, a two-week countdown of the most-downloaded episodes of the 10 Minute Teacher leading up to episode 1,000 on September 28, 2026. Jon Bergmann is one of the two teachers who started the flipped classroom movement — and he has spent the years since making the case that flipping was never the destination. Mastery was. He came back to the classroom in 2019 specifically to teach this way, and he wrote the how-to manual he wished he'd had.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why mastery learning is a simple idea most schools already accept everywhere except the gradebook
- How an exchange student who arrived in January, with no chemistry background, accidentally proved flipped mastery could work
- What a mastery unit looks like in physics — five or six lessons, then a test where students get one shot at hitting the target
- The number one reason teachers abandon mastery learning in the first year, and the strategy Jon and Aaron Sams built to fix it
- How tiered tests work: a deep-understanding test, a clear test, and a basic test — and how you decide what every student must know versus what is nice to know
- Why the research says mastery learning helps lower-achieving students most, and which courses are the easiest place to begin
- Where to go next if you want to keep learning: Teach Better's Grid Method, the Mastery Transcript Consortium, and the wider competency-based learning world
Show notes, resources, and the full transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e986 
We are eight episodes away from number 1,000. If you've been listening along, subscribe and stay with me for the next thousand — and if a colleague came to mind while you listened, send this one to them.

Eight ways to engage every learner — recorded in 2021, and every principle still works. This was #9 in our all-time top 10 countdown, and it isn't a ten-minute episode: it's a full session of classroom principles and tools for re-engaging students.
I've edited this one lightly to remove a few apps that no longer exist and to fix my numbering. But I left the AI ethics segment in on purpose. Back in 2021 — well before ChatGPT — educators were already teaching students to think about whether we should, not just whether we could. Those students got a head start, and that history is worth hearing.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why slow, steady progress ("innovate like a turtle") beats a total overhaul
- How to relate before you educate — and the research behind why it works
- Four ways to give students a safe channel to tell you how they're doing
- How to bring students into evaluating your own teaching practices
- What teaching AI ethics looked like before ChatGPT existed
The story of Sue and Mrs. Scruggs is the center of this episode — a five-minute conversation with one teacher that changed the entire direction of a life.
Full show notes, every link from the original slides, and updated 2026 tools:
https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e985
If this one helped you, please leave a review wherever you're listening — it's how other teachers find the show.

This is #10 in the Top 10 of the First 1,000 — a countdown of the ten most-downloaded episodes in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher, running weekdays through September 18. Ranked on total downloads including re-airs, this conversation with Michelle Blanchet has been heard 23,379 times.

It originally aired on September 27, 2021 as episode 764. I am re-airing it unchanged because the problem it solves did not go away.

Michelle Blanchet, co-author of The Startup Teacher Playbook, teaches a method for figuring out the specific thing that is wrong — not the vague heavy feeling, but the actual named problem — so that you can make an improvement and feel forward progress. Social emotional learning is not just for students. This one is about you.
Show notes: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/are-you-an-upset-teacher-how-to-understand-what-is-wrong/

AI with intention. AI with integrity. Is it possible? Tony Frontier, author of AI with Intention, is talking about how we value learning in the age of AI. He shares the language we can use to evaluate what we're doing, how we're talking about AI, and how we're measuring learning, and ultimately, why education needs to change more than ever.
Experience AI, a program co-developed by Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this podcast episode. All opinions are my own and those of the guest. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program with ready-to-teach lessons for ages 8 to 16, in any subject. http://experience-ai.org
I also open this show with some highlights from the Report of MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training and what it means for learning, and they use a term I think we should all be discussing: cognitive surrender. We cannot let our kids cognitively surrender and let AI do the work for them. They also talk about helping students understand that their learning, integrity, and judgment are the product of college, not the grades. So many challenges we have now, but this week has been about sharing the conversations and thought leaders to help you improve the AI conversation in your school. I hope this Thursday helps you be a thought leader in your school!