Episodes

Drama critic George Jean-Nathan once said that "Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote." Although 47% of all young people eligible to cast a ballot in the 2024 presidential election did so, 53% did not. Ho...

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with authors Jenn David-Lang, the Main Idea, and Kim Marshall, the Marshall Memo, about their work in curating the "best of" resources available to educators - particularly leaders wor...

In this latest episode of the Have a Life Teaching Podcast, we chat with education researcher John Hattie - professor at the University of Melbourne. We discuss, despite evidence suggesting it is ineffective, the continued pr...

We waste so much time as educators during the working day. If we are not chatting with colleagues during our prep periods, we are often using many of our precious minutes in our prep periods planning how we will use our prep ...

In an earlier episode, we spoke with Stanford University Professor Robyn Brinks Lockwood on how to better prepare high school students for the rigors of college communication and discourse (making presentations/speeches). In ...

This week on the podcast, I’m joined by journalist Dana Seith, co-creator of the bold new storytelling card game Tell Me a Story — made in collaboration with The Bitter Southerner, We’re not just talking games — we’re talking...

This week on the podcast, we are joined by chief academic officer Samuel Nix who discusses his book - 6 Stepa to a Strong School Culture: A Leadership Cycle for Educational Success. Nix should know - having taken, as principa...

Brak Rosenshine first published his Principles of Instruction in 2010 through the International Academy of Education (IAE) as part of their Educational Practices Series (booklet No. 21). Taking his years of research, Rosenshi...

Per our next guest on the podcast, MLL/STEM specialist Darlyne de Haan, there are over 900K high school MLL students in the USA - a large number of these students living in poverty (2014). While Algebra and other STEM classes...

Do You Know What the Superpower Understandings in Math Are? Recently, I wrote an article for ASCD about modeling Math through a gradual release framework. A common way through which to do this is to teach Math conceptually, r...

In this episode, we speak with Niles North High School Summer Reading Program leads ELA teacher Katie Gillies and librarian Beverly Zbinden. While summer reading may help reduce the potential student summer learning slide, Gi...

Earlier in the second season of this podcast, we had as a guest Bo Stjerne Thomsen of LEGO Education discussing the importance of play in creative learning. In this episode, we continue our look at creativity in learning by d...

When students ask where are they EVER going to use the Math they are learning in middle and high school, there is usually something deeper going on; And that is a disconnect in, disinterest, and lack of curiosity in learning ...

The other day, I was speaking with a colleague with whom I co-moderated a LinkedIn Live event, a year or two ago, on supporting multilingual students. She told me that, recently, someone reached out to her from across the cou...

As one of our next guest on the podcast, Daniel Argentar says, students need to know something to learn something. Students need to be able to read and write to be able to internalize scientific information. In this episode, ...

AI can really help teachers plan more engaging lessons in a time conscious manner. In this episode, we speak about how AI can help teachers to plan engaging lessons with North Carolina based science teacher Paul Cancellieri. ...

How to Teach Using Play Based Learning In this episode, we chat with Bo Stjerne Thomsen - Director of Education for LEGO Education and former VP with the LEGO Foundation - about how teachers can integrate physical objects (ma...

Parents should always have the right to decide what books their student can read. But school system wide book bans are bad for children. So says our next guest on the Have a Life Teaching Podcast, former ALA librarian of the ...

While oral language development is a process that occurs naturally, over time, the written word is a complex human produced system that, therefore, requires a systematic approach to decipher - or read. So says this week's gue...

Effective coteaching has so many benefits for students, particularly in terms of inclusion for students with special needs and for bilingual learners. So say today's guests on the podcast - Belinda Karge and Matt Rhoads - who...

Too often, at best, students are compliant with school directives and, at worst, actively defiant much like inmates in a minimum security prison. So says, today's guest, Aaron Hansen - author of the book "Heroes Within" - on ...

In some schools, curriculum is prescribed. In other places, teachers put together their own learning materials. In either case, how do we know that what we are providing students, in terms of materials and content, will promo...

Too often, we think of early primary learners as empty recepticles to be filled. However, this is when creativity and ingenuity is most unfettered and/or non self-conscious. How then can we draw out what early primary student...

How and Why Still Teach the Holocaust? After all, it has been 80 years since the liberation of the concentration camps and end of WWII. Unfortunately, the answer to this question is very simple. Look at the world around us wh...