The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast

This year, Starr Sackstein made a drastic change in her high school English and journalism classes: After years of feeling as if students cared more about their grades than they did about learning, she decided to stop giving grades altogether. In this interview, Starr talks to me about how she runs a no-grades classroom in a school that still requires traditional grading. She shares her strategies for helping students learn to self-reflect, describes how her teaching workload has changed, and talks about how throwing out grades has improved students' learning.

How important are nonverbals when it comes to your effectiveness as a teacher? In this episode, I talk with Teaching for Success CEO Jack Shrawder about the specific non-verbal behaviors that make teachers less effective and how you can adjust your voice, posture and other non-verbals to give yourself more presence and confidence in the classroom.

For some teachers, it has become a habit to send the majority of discipline problems elsewhere: Either we write up an office referral, threaten to call parents, or even enlist a more intimidating colleague to deal with a problematic student. When we do this, we are giving our power away, limiting the respect our students have for us and missing an opportunity to model assertive, skillful problem solving. In this episode, I'll share some ideas for breaking this habit and reclaiming control of your classroom management.

Sometimes the simplest techniques are the most effective. Think-Pair-Share is a humble but powerful teaching strategy that's due for some attention. In this episode, I talk about the benefits of Think-Pair-Share, plus some tips for making it work better for you.

How important is the relationship you build with your students, and how can you make that relationship better? James Sturtevant, author of the book You've Gotta Connect, joins me to talk about why the teacher-student relationship is more significant to student learning than even socioeconomic status, the specific things teachers can do to build a strong, trusting relationship with students, and why sarcasm will always bite you in the butt. A must-listen for teachers interested in improving classroom management.

What are the most productive ways for teachers to talk to their students about the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the incidents that have occured in its aftermath? In this episode, I talk to José Vilson, a teacher and writer whose work focuses on issues of race, culture, privilege, and education, about how teachers can approach this topic in their classrooms -- and the inner work they'll need to do beforehand.

When she gives her son timed math tests, a homeschooling mom notices his anxiety and wonders if she's taking the right approach. I pull together some research and some real teacher responses to answer her question.

Welcome to our very first installment of "Ask the Cult," our call-in advice show for teachers and anyone else with questions about teaching, learning, and education. In this episode, we hear from a science teacher who wants advice on making his class more challenging for gifted and advanced students, a graduate student who needs help keeping her online bookmarks organized, and a teacher who doesn't know what to do about a co-worker who mistreats students right in front of her.

Whether it's called 20 percent time or genius hour, more teachers are starting to carve out instructional time to allow students to pursue their own interests and passions. A.J. Juliani tells us how he did it, what problems he encountered, and what other teachers who want to try it should do.

In the 10 years she's been raising a daughter with autism, Leigh has had good and bad experiences with teachers and schools. In this honest, funny, and moving interview, she talks about how she communicates with teachers, the steps she's taken to improve her daughter's social life, and the three things all teachers should know about giving students with autism a much richer school experience.