The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast

Although most teachers understand that not all students have the same home life, sometimes we forget how big those differences can really be, and how humiliating it can be for a student to be asked to publicly share details about their lives outside of school. In this EduTip we'll talk about some situations where this comes up, and what you can do to prevent it from happening. 

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Thanks to Studyo for sponsoring th...

Most special education efforts have focused on giving students with disabilities better access to the curriculum — but access alone isn’t enough. In this episode, I talk with Amy Tondreau and Laurie Rabinowitz, authors of the book Sustaining Cultural and Disability Identities in the Literacy Classroom, about disability-sustaining pedagogy, a framework that helps students embrace disability as a cultural identity. We ex...

If you want to have the kind of classroom where students do more than just sit and listen, it's likely that your plans may include activities that require some social risk-taking. One way to help your students get more comfortable taking these small social risks is for you to be the first dork, the first one to do the thing that no one else wants to do because they’re afraid of looking weird or being vulnerable. 

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While the shift to restorative practices should be improving student behavior, that's not happening in every school. Some teachers say the discipline systems at their schools have completely broken down, creating an environment where students do whatever they want with no consequences. This has made teachers feel frustrated, angry, unsupported, and in some cases, unsafe. What has gone wrong? In this episode, I have an ...

If I give my students an exit slip to check their grasp of a particular skill, and a third of them don’t do well, just moving forward with my original teaching plan is a missed opportunity. Ideally, my next steps should involve some kind of targeted response. Let's talk about what that looks like.

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Thanks to Studyo for sponsoring this tip. You can find written and video versions of these at cultofpedagogy.com/edu...

Since ChatGPT's arrival in late 2022, the top concern I’ve heard from teachers is that students will stop doing their own writing and rely entirely on AI. While that worry is real, more teachers are recognizing that AI is here to stay and are looking for ways to work with it rather than against it. My guest today, Tony Frontier, offers one of the most insightful takes I’ve seen on this issue. In his new book 

Retrieval practice is the act of trying to recall something you learned from memory by doing things like taking a test or using flashcards instead of just looking at, rereading, or reviewing the information. When we study with retrieval, we learn and remember things much better than we do by other review methods. So how do we add more to our classrooms? In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Pooja Agarwal, editor of the bo...

We talk a lot about differentiating instruction, measuring growth, and preparing students for the real world, but how do you actually do that in a system still driven by grades? Maybe you need a new model altogether. In this episode, we're exploring an approach to school called competency-based learning. I’m joined by three educators — Susie Bell, Heather Messer, and Beth Blankenship — who show us what this model actua...

Grammar has never been an especially popular area of study, and teaching it has frustrated many English teachers throughout time. It seems like no matter how hard we try, the concepts just don't stick as well as we'd like them to. In this episode, I'm talking to Matthew Johnson, author of the new book Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students, about some truly fresh approaches he t...

Recent executive orders have launched an attack on teaching for diversity, equity, and inclusion. How do you teach at this precarious time in history when so much work has been done to weave these values into so many of our materials and practices? The more I think about it, the more I think you may not have to change as much as it might seem. When I look over the years of articles and podcast episodes I have done in t...

You can create the most spectacular lesson plans, but if all of your students aren't in the room when those plans are executed, catching them up can be kind of a nightmare. And despite the fact that this has been a problem for generations, few teachers have ever figured out a foolproof plan for solving it. My guest today has an approach that can help. Robert Barnett is co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project and th...

One of the best-kept secrets in teaching is that frequent quizzing leads to better learning. If you can incorporate more ungraded or low-stakes quizzes into your instruction, there's a good chance your students will start remembering more of what they're learning. Learn about the research behind this phenomenon in this EduTip.

When we make certain choices, often without even realizing it, we can turn a teaching moment from one that should be clear into one that's confusing. Luckily, these choices are pretty easy to spot and fix once we know what to look for, and cognitive science can help us understand what's going on. In this episode I'm going to talk about three of these with Blake Harvard, who writes the Effortful Educator blog and has ju...