The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast

This episode is a goody bag for everyone! My buddy Mark Barnes, publisher of the Hack Learning series, shares some of the best ideas from all nine of the books in his series. If you don't walk away from this episode with something new to try, then I'll refund you the price of the podcast. Just kidding. It's free. But you get what I'm saying, right?

So many regular ed teachers feel inadequately prepared to serve the needs of students with special needs. In this episode, special educator Jam Gamble shares five ways regular ed teachers can make their classrooms more welcoming for special ed students.

Genius Hour has exploded in classrooms over the last few years, and teachers who want to try it have a lot of questions. In this episode I ask A.J. Juliani, creator of the Genius Hour Master Course, the top 10 questions teachers have about Genius Hour, and he gives me some great answers.

I've got a bit of a rant to share with you in this episode, and it has something to do with Grecian Urns. Chances are you have one or more of these in your lesson plans, and in this episode I'm going to help you find them and get rid of them.

If we want to make our content really relevant to students, we need to design our instruction the way a chef orchestrates a good meal. Rather than giving in to the educational equivalent of processed food, we could be putting more thought into preparing our lessons, from the appetizer all the way to dessert. In this episode, I interview John Stevens and Matt Vaudrey, authors of the book The Classroom Chef. They talk about how they evolved from teaching uninspired, by-the-book lessons to preparing learning experiences that truly engage students. If you're starting to feel like you're phoning in your lessons, you won't want to miss this one.

So much of learning depends on whether your students feel comfortable taking risks. In this episode, I share some suggestions for making your classroom an academic safe space.

If you're always looking for short, high-quality informational and literary texts to use in your classroom, you are going to love the free online library at CommonLit. In this episode, I interview CommonLit founder Michelle Brown to talk about why she started the platform and walk through all of the wonderful features that help teachers get the most out of this growing library of texts.

If you're trying to figure out an easy way to manage differentiated instruction, this episode will be a big help. Teacher Tracy Enos explains how she uses student playlists--customized, digital lists of assignments she assigns to students based on their individual needs. A playlist might contain links to videos, online articles, or interactive lessons that live somewhere online. It could also include reading assignments from actual physical books or even written exercises that come from a station or center in the classroom. Playlists could be used for any grade level and any subject area.This is definitely a system worth considering for any classroom!

Dialogue journals are a simple but powerful tool for building trust with your students and sustaining that relationship all year long. In this episode I talk with teacher Liz Galarza about how she uses these journals in her classroom and the research she's doing about how they shift the power dynamic in the classroom. 

An interview with Michael Linsin, creator of the Smart Classroom Management website. Michael shares his insights about how to design and implement an effective classroom behavior plan.