Cult of Pedagogy

Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Brilliant and Notability Welcome to part three in our four-part Back to Basics series on unit planning. In week 1 we completed the first step of the process, which was to write a set of measurable objectives for a sample unit on food safety. In week 2 we designed a unit assessment plan that included diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments. Today we’ll build the individual daily lesson plans. And in part four, I’ll share my

Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Brilliant and Notability We’re in the middle of a four-post series where I’m going back to basics, giving you a practical overview of the planning process behind effective instruction. Last week we started with the big picture: an overview of the process I use for planning a full unit of instruction. Using a sample topic — food safety — we completed the first step of the process, which was to write a set of measurable objecti

Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Alpaca and iCivics For the next four posts, I’m going back to basics, giving you a practical overview of the planning process behind effective instruction. Planning a unit of instruction can be a daunting task, and what I want to do here is offer a step-by-step process that you can follow every time you need to build a unit. You could also use it if you have a unit that never quite worked for you and you want to re-do it from scrat

Listen to the interview with Marcus Luther: Sponsored by Alpaca and Notability “Mr. Luther, wait!” a student says, just as I’m about to thank their parents for attending the annual fall conferences at our school. “Can you tell my parents about the octopus?” I smile wide hearing this. You see, a considerable portion of one of our classroom walls is taken up by “the octopus,” a collection of posters I assemble to begin each school year, with each of its appendages represent

Listen to the interview with Jenn White and Josh Kurzweil (transcript): Sponsored by Alpaca and Notability This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? Schools and districts allocate a lot of time and money to professional development for their teachers. Sometimes that investment pays off; other t

Image by Anna Khromova on Unsplash Listen to the interview with Pernille Ripp (transcript): Sponsored by Alpaca and iCivics This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? I have known Pernille Ripp for over ten years now. Through her blog and her books, she writes about learning and literacy

Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Renaissance and Erikson Institute This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? We talk a lot about all the things that make teaching a challenging job 一 insufficient funding, lack of support staff, student behavior, meeting parent demands, and the eve

Listen to the interview with Nathan Maynard: Sponsored by Erikson Institute and Listenwise This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? Discipline has quietly become one of the most misunderstood parts of school. In a lot of buildings, it’s the thing most educators dread messing with. And yet, dis

Listen to the interview with Cindy Lopez (transcript): Sponsored by Ellis Even the most well-prepared, experienced teacher can run into situations with students that leave them stumped. Students are coming to school with more needs than ever, and a lot of those needs aren’t strictly academic: anxiety, withdrawal, behavior issues, and learning differences that don’t always have quick or obvious solutions. These are problems that often send us to the internet in search of answers

Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan and Maggie Roberts (transcript): Sponsored by Renaissance and Erikson Institute This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? Literacy has always been a hot topic in education, and the intensity surrounding it has really ramped up in the last few years. B

Listen to the interview with Chris Luzniak: Sponsored by Erikson Institute and Listenwise This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? “Why aren’t students talking?” was my constant gripe my first years of teaching. I was young, energetic, and passionate about math, but my students didn’t seem to

Image: Victor Delgado Listen to the interview with Wendy Amato and Marcee Harris: Sponsored by Renaissance and SchoolAI This article was co-authored by Marcee Harris. A student stares at a challenging assignment, pencil down. “I don’t get it,” they mutter, already sliding the paper aside. The teacher notices — and intervenes. Instead of accepting defeat or quietly moving on, she sits beside the student. “You’re right. This is hard,” she says. “And I know you can d

Listen to the interview with Nashwa Elkoshairi: Sponsored by Renaissance and SchoolAI Teaching writing has always been a challenge for me. Standardized testing, scripted programs, tight timelines, and pressure to meet state report card expectations had left me at a loss. I leaned into formulaic structures and strict rubrics to help students grow as writers. Unfortunately, these strategies left students’ writing lifeless and generic — a transactional activity that is meant to ch

Listen to the interview with Marnie Diem: Sponsored by foundry10 and SchoolAI It’s that time again ~ the annual round-up of tech tools we think are worth a look this year. This year I really feel like there’s something for everyone: history teachers, math and science teachers, people who run makerspaces, teachers interested in music or podcasting, writing teachers, special ed teachers, and anyone whose course content could be made clearer through graphic organizers.

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash Listen to the interview with Noah Bopp (transcript): Sponsored by foundry10 and SchoolAI We’re living in a time when having a difference of opinion about anything other than pizza toppings is a potential minefield of hurt feelings, emotional outbursts, and severed relationships. This is a problem that has occupied my thoughts quite a bit over the past ten years, and I’ve found very few solutions. So when I learned about

Listen to the interview with Emily Kircher-Morris (transcript): Sponsored by foundry10 and SchoolAI I didn’t realize how much executive functioning teaching required until I ran out of it. The lesson plans, remembering when to send kids to their individual support programs, and trying to keep up with the never-ending pile of graded papers seemed like it wouldn’t be a big deal when I was a new teacher. But underneath, I was constantly juggling, improvising, and frantically tryin

Listen to the interview with Zaretta Hammond: Sponsored by foundry10 and SchoolAI This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? Recently, I was with a team of teachers doing instructional rounds. We’d finished up a 15-minute observation in a classroom and were trying to leave the room quietly. The

Listen to the interview with Brian Sztabnik and Susan Barber (transcript): Sponsored by Listenwise and Solution Tree This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? So much of the work we do in school involves reading and interacting with texts: books, stories, articles, poems, and textbooks make up

Listen to the interview with Dr. Kripa Sundar and Dr. Pooja Agarwal (transcript): Sponsored by Listenwise and Solution Tree This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? Representing ideas visually is something many humans do by instinct; when we go to explain something to someone else, it’s

Listen to the interview with Shane Safir, Marlo Bagsik, Crystal Watson, and Sawsan Jaber (transcript): Sponsored by Listenwise and Solution Tree In our efforts to improve school, especially in the United States, student voice has really gotten lost. We focus on test scores, top-down curriculum, and measures of success that never quite get to the humanity of our students. Not only have these efforts not succeeded in raising test scores (Schwartz, 2025), they haven’t given