As you move through your career, you'll discover new ways of doing things that you're excited about — so excited that you want to share them with colleagues and convince them to try them, too. But trained professionals aren't always open to changing the way they work, and we don't want to come off as the know-it-all telling everyone what to do. So the most effective way to share a new idea is to talk about it in terms of "I."

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Thanks to Grouper for sponsoring this EduTip!

You can find full written versions of these tips at cultofpedagogy.com/edutips.

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To become skilled readers, our students need reading instruction in all of their classes, not just English language arts. But if other subject-area teachers don't know how to support readers, how can they do this? In this episode, literacy expert Jen Serravallo walks us through the steps of a close reading lesson, one of nine re-usable lesson structures she offers in her new book, Teaching Reading Across the Day. By the time you're done with this episode, you'll be able to teach a close reading lesson yourself.

Thanks to Wix Tomorrow and Brisk Teaching for sponsoring this episode.

To read a transcript of this episode, links to Jen's book, and a video of Jen teaching a close reading lesson, visit cultofpedagogy.com/pod and choose episode 242.

When student behavior starts driving you bananas, and you feel like you're going to yell, this simple notebook technique can regulate your nervous system and calm your class down fast.

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Thanks to Grouper for sponsoring this EduTip!

You can find full written versions of these tips at cultofpedagogy.com/edutips.

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It's our annual round-up of tools for educators, and this time along with it, we're announcing the launch of the online version of our Teacher's Guide to Tech! This year we're talking about three new AI tools, a platform for creating interactive lessons, a video editor, and a tool that makes text more accessible to everyone, plus a replacement for any teacher who really misses Flip! My lead technology specialist, Marnie Diem, joins me to talk about them.

Thanks to Alpaca and Brisk Teaching for sponsoring this episode.

To see videos of these tools in action, visit cultofpedagogy.com/6-ed-tech-tools-2025.

It can happen to the best of us — classroom management deteriorating over time. Don't despair! By figuring out where the problems are, you can turn things back around. My guest is Claire English, who runs an incredible platform called The Unteachables, where she shows teachers how to manage their classrooms with confidence and calm. We talk about three reasons why classroom management can fall apart midway through a school year and what teachers can do to get things heading back in the right direction.

Thanks to Scholastic Magazines+ and Alpaca for sponsoring this episode.

For a full transcript of this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com/pod and choose episode 240.

Learn more from Claire through her courses*, That'll Teach 'Em and The Low Level Behaviour Bootcamp. and her membership site, The Behaviour Club,.

*I am an affiliate of the Unteachables Academy. This means Cult of Pedagogy receives a commission on every purchase made through these links.

Multitasking isn't great for our brains, it compromises our mental health, and ultimately it doesn't even work, but that doesn't stop many of us from trying to do it all the time. What we may not realize is that it also sneaks into our classrooms and interferes with learning, and it's happening in ways you may not even notice. In today's episode, I'm talking with cognitive scientist Megan Sumeracki about the pitfalls multitasking creates in schools, and what we can do to avoid them.

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Thanks to The Gilder Lehrman Institute and Alpaca for sponsoring this episode.

For a full transcript of this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com/pod and choose episode 239.

For many this week, the discomfort and pain of living side by side with people who see the world so differently from us has hit hard. But this is where we are right now, and we can either succumb to our current divide and let it get bigger, or keep trying to figure out how to close it. Though I didn't plan it this way, this week's podcast just happens to address one of the ways we might start to do that in our classrooms. I'm talking with Peter Johnston, author of Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning, about the prompts and phrases teachers can use to equip students not to avoid or be afraid of differences, but to approach them as opportunities to learn.

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Thanks to The Gilder Lehrman Institute and Listenwise for sponsoring this episode.

For a full transcript of this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com/democratic-classroom.

Books are one of the most powerful ways to learn about others and about ourselves. But for that learning to happen, we need a wide range of stories that represent a whole spectrum of people and lives. In many schools and classrooms, however, the offerings are far too narrow. Curating the kind of library that truly reflects the diversity of human experience takes time, intention, money, and good tools. This episode will help you make that happen. Joining me are three exceptional librarians — Cicely Lewis, Julia Torres, and Julie Stivers — who share their advice for building more inclusive collections. They also recommend a handful of outstanding titles to add to your shelves.

Thanks to Scholastic Magazines+ and Alpaca for sponsoring this episode.

For a full transcript of this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com/pod and choose episode 237.