Third Rail Classroom

Santha and John are back for a new season to discuss the latest developments in education and their impacts on the classroom; this time with 25% more profanity! This season they will focus on book bans, artificial intelligence, policies affecting trans students and those who are undocumented, as well as grading approaches and college admissions. You can support our show at buymeacoffee.com/thirdrailclassroom and visit our website: ...

In this final episode of the second season, Santha and John reflect on the topics they discussed during this season about improving teaching quality, including building level-PD, incorporating student feedback, and the teacher evaluation process. They also reflect on the teacher strike they went through earlier in the school year and the role that teacher unions might play in the future. Last, they share some goals and excitement t...

Recorded live at the College Board’s annual Advanced Placement conference in Las Vegas, John and Santha host an engaging roundtable of teachers from around the country who represent multiple disciplines and grade-levels about they continue to improve as professionals. The guests are Kate Cordes, an English teacher from Billings, Montana, Matt Ellington, a social studies teacher in Chino Hills, California, Karen Hyers, a math teache...

Throughout this season, Santha and John have been  talking about how to get better at their jobs as teachers, but have missed an invaluable resource for teacher improvement that is right in front of them…literally right in front of them: their students. In the first part of the episode, Santha coaches John on how to develop an effective survey of his students to get actionable feedback from them, and in the second half, they look a...

Nationally, an estimated 26 percent of public school students were considered chronically absent last school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic. While we know that this severely impacts students’ learning, what exactly is the role of the classroom teacher in addressing this issue? John and Santha discuss the need for a systemic response by schools and districts, and then Santha shares interviews with students who were pre...

Throughout this season, Santha and John have been looking at the different tools available to help teachers to get better at their jobs, one of which is the evaluation process that most teachers are required to go through every year. Do they actually help teachers or are they just another hoop for them to jump through? To try to get some answers, John interviews Dr. Josh Bleiberg, an Assistant Professor of Education Policy at the U...

An expectation for most teachers at the beginning of each school year is to write goals for their students’ learning. Too often the goal-setting process is tedious and inauthentic for many teachers. In this episode. Santha helps John to develop a meaningful professional goal for the year by asking four simple, but essential questions. 

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In this bonus episode, recorded over the summer, John describes his history with and feelings about the teacher evaluation process and interviews one of his building administrators, Sean Murray.  

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In this special episode, John and Santha share their thoughts on the unprecedented teacher strike in Portland, OR that lasted for more than three weeks. They recount the reasons for the strike and give first-hand descriptions of their days on the picket line and the first day back with students. John and Santha end by sharing some lessons learned for other educators who might find themselves participating in a similar labor action....

We are seeing an unprecedented amount of labor actions in the past few years with a number of teachers unions around the country deciding to strike for higher pay, better working conditions, and stronger supports for students. There are prevailing ideas among some people that teacher unions fight mainly to protect teachers’ jobs, but in John’s interview with University of Utah economics professor Dr. Eunice Han, she shares her rese...

Few classroom teachers love going to staff meetings at the end of a long teaching day, but they are usually the only times we can get together to learn from each other. John interviews Megan Harowitz, a staff development teacher in Rockville, Maryland, about the benefits and challenges of building-level professional development. Megan offers specific approaches and suggestions to make this time valuable to teachers.

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In this first episode of the second season, John Golden and Santha Cassell, two long-time educators, discuss the need for teachers to continue to get better at their work and the challenges they face in trying to do so. The framework they present for teacher learning will act as the guideposts for the rest of this season of Third Rail Classroom. 

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In the second season of Third Rail Classroom, longtime teacher and instructional coach Santha Cassell joins John Golden to examine the hot-button topic of teacher quality. Lots of people discuss this issue, but rarely from the teacher perspective. John and Santha know first hand about the challenges teachers face in the classroom and will be sharing specific approaches to help teachers to get better at their jobs, despite the syste...

Recorded live at the College Board’s annual Advanced Placement conference in Seattle, John hosts an engaging roundtable of teachers from around the country who represent multiple disciplines and grade-levels about the challenges of grades and grading. The guests are Kate Cordes, an English teacher from Billings, Montana, Matt Ellington, a social studies teacher in Chino Hills, California, and Jim Morris, a professor of Biology at B...

Recorded on the last day of their school year, John and Alex reflect on what they’ve learned through the process of focusing on their grading practices, and then they discuss their hopes for a better future with grading and with the larger education system. Next, John interviews Mike Flanagan, the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, about national trends in education reform with a specific focus on the work he is doing to rei...

With just a few weeks left in the school year, John and Alex reflect on some unanticipated consequences of their grading practices and then quickly move to the main topic of the episode: grading biases. Specifically, they discuss what causes these biases and, most importantly, what teachers can do to limit their impacts. Then, John interviews Dr. Tina Curry, a teacher and literacy coach in Chicago Public Schools about the impact of...

Rapidly approaching the end of the school year, Alex and John turn to a key question: how to calculate final grades for students? It might seem like there’s an obvious answer, which is to take the average of all of the points earned and divide by the number of points possible. For generations of students and teachers, this was the ONLY way to calculate a final grade, and it is still the most common, but is it the most equitable? Jo...

At the halfway point in the school year, Alex and John take some time to reflect on how their new approaches are going and have a discussion on why it might be appropriate to assign an "Incomplete" to a student rather than a "D" or an "F." Next, they talk about some very common grading practices: taking off points for late work, giving a "0" for plagiarism, assigning group grades, and grading...

Nearing the end of the first semester, John and Alex provide an update on how their new grading practices are going with a discussion on the different ways that they approach revision. Then, some students from their classes join the podcast to share their often very frank, thoughtful, and surprising views of grades and grading. After they leave, John and Alex reflect on changes they will make based on what they heard.  

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