10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher

A struggling Title I school built its culture around the 7 Habits — and the academics followed. Principal Muriel Summers tells how.
In 1999, Muriel Summers became principal of A.B. Combs Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina — the fifth person interviewed for a job four others had walked away from. She had just heard Dr. Stephen Covey speak, and she went back to her staff with one question: do you think we can teach these habits to children? There was no framework. There was no money. What they built turned A.B. Combs into the original Leader in Me school and one of the most visited schools in the world.
Muriel is now Global Ambassador for the Leader in Me, co-author of the updated The Leader in Me, and co-author with David K. Hatch of the new book Teacher Believed in Me. This is a Motivational Monday conversation for every educator heading back to school.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why Muriel fixed the school's culture first and let the academics follow — "you don't have to worry about the academics, they just happen"
- The one question she asked parents, students, teachers, and local business leaders before changing anything, and what each group actually said
- The three words posted above the front door that every child read getting off the bus: you are seen, you are known, you are loved
- How children as young as five were taught to interview teacher candidates — and the one time in twenty years Muriel overruled them (she was wrong)
- What "every child has genius" looks like in practice, from 900 pieces of art on the walls to a morning meeting that matters as much as instruction
Full show notes, resources, and Muriel's books: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e965 
If this episode gave you something to use tomorrow, please rate and review the show wherever you're listening — it's the single best way to help another teacher find it. And share it with a colleague who's rebuilding their classroom culture this year.

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 she once wished she had.
In this episode, you'll learn:
Why the BBC Learning Hub holds the only licensed Bluey learning materials — 15 free lessons on friendship, feelings, and reading body language
Where to find leveled reading articles pulled from BBC magazines, written at grades 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 so every reader in the room can access the same content
How the Walking with Dinosaurs virtual field trip works — six dig sites, an interactive map, a paleontologist field journal, and a full teacher guide, in a 45- to 60-minute student exploration you can also break into pieces
How a daily five-minute Newsbite with built-in questions gives you a media literacy warm-up that's ready every school day
How to sign up free, build your own playlist, and assign it straight to Google Classroom
Full show notes, every resource link, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e964
This episode is sponsored by the BBC Learning Hub.

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 assessment OF learning and assessment FOR learning — and why it changes everything
- Why putting a grade on a formative task cancels the formative part
- How the four corners strategy works, plus the Post-it note round that gives quiet students the floor
- The most common assessment mistake teachers make: assessments that don't match what we're actually trying to assess
- Why observational data is just as valid as testing data — and why you don't have to quiz every day
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e963 
If this show helps you, a rating and review wherever you're listening genuinely helps other teachers find it. And if you know a teacher who is drowning in grading right now, send them this one.

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 with her, changed everything. Not everyone has that, so we need to do better!)
In this episode, you'll learn:
Why playing a game to learn basic facts isn't a reward day, it's best practice
The three reasons Bay-Williams says timed tests need to be abandoned
What students do when they're under time pressure (they drop back to counting)
How to play Salute — the card game that started this writing partnership
Better ways to assess fact fluency: game observation, quick interviews, strategy writing
How to coach parents who tell their kids "I was never good at math"
Show notes, the full transcript, and every resource mentioned: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e962
If this episode helped you, leave a review wherever you're listening — it's how other teachers find the show.

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 first session should run, and the one question a teacher has to answer before booking the equipment.
In this episode, you'll learn:
What XR means and how VR, AR, and AI fit together in a classroom
Why the "wow" of an immersive moment has to be secondary to the "why"
The classroom-management controls that make group VR workable — spatial audio, seating, mute, and locking down browsers
Why the first trip in should be a scavenger hunt, not instruction
How long students should actually be in a headset, and why motion sickness matters
How she used VR sprints to reach students working toward a diploma on their second or third try
What happened when her school put human intelligence first and standards second
Show notes, resources, lots of links to VR activities, and the full transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e961
If this episode helped you, please take a moment to rate and review the show wherever you're listening. Reviews are how other teachers find us — and share it with a colleague who's about to get headsets and no plan.