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Hello Reader,
Ten shows have posted since I last wrote you, and they kept circling the same question from different doors. Not “is the student cheating.” The better question underneath it: do I actually know what this child can do on their own, and am I teaching them to want to know that too?
So this issue is sorted by the kind of week you are walking into, and under every show you will find the free thing you can use, linked straight to the thing itself.
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In this issue
The honesty problem in your room right now — three shows and the new MIT report
Teaching about AI when you are not the expert — free lessons, and a creativity argument
The prompt of the week — stop writing prompts, make it interview you
Every kid in your room — autistic learners, and branding without social media
Ten percent slower — the burnout fix you can start tonight
For the parents — what iOS 27 actually changes, and what it does not
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“If I don’t know what you can and can’t do independently, I can’t teach you.”
Dr. Tony Frontier
Author, AI with Intention · Director, the AI Center for Effective Teaching and Learning
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The Top 10 of the First 1,000
On September 28, 2026, the 10 Minute Teacher reaches 1,000 episodes. I am so grateful to my family, because this has been a family project since it kicked off on February 1, 2017.
For the next two weeks I am counting down the top 10 episodes of the 10 Minute Teacher. I have looked at them, and there are some really awesome episodes in here. It starts today.
Come count down with me:
YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Pandora • Audible
Or find every way to listen on the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast page.
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Episode 984 · Today · Countdown #10
Are You an Upset Teacher? How to Understand What Is Wrong
Michelle Blanchet — founder, The Educators’ Lab; co-author of The Startup Teacher Playbook
Number 10 in the countdown, with 23,379 downloads since it first aired in September 2021. Burnout usually shows up as a vague, heavy feeling, and you cannot fix a feeling. Michelle gives you a way to name the actual problem.
She watches five traits in every workshop she runs: heart, optimism, curiosity, confidence, and vulnerability. Take two minutes and ask which one of the five is being neglected in you right now, and which one is being neglected in your building. That is the diagnosis. Most advice for a struggling teacher starts at the solution instead.
She also has an answer for the teacher who has been writing a resignation letter in her head on the drive home, and it begins with putting yourself on your own to-do list.
Listen and read the show notes →
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Here is what I said at the top of Thursday’s show, because it belongs here too.
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Research Note
On August 13, 2026, MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training released a forty-page report that is worth reading — and it relates to much of what Tony Frontier, author of AI with Intention, and I discuss in this episode. So I want to pull a few highlights for you to think about as you listen.
First, the report says to be humble, and then be bold — but to put humanity front and center. I love that. It also says there is no one-size-fits-all approach to AI in their classrooms.
And then this. Quote: “All of us who teach at MIT will need to be prepared to help students understand both that the process of education is necessarily a productive struggle, and that the most important product of their education is not a GPA or a diploma but themselves: their personal growth and intellectual maturity and the development of their own imagination, insight, and judgment.”
They go on to say the final product can no longer measure learning. They’re encouraging their instructors to consider forms of assessment less vulnerable to AI and more valuable for learning — oral exams, semester portfolios, and out-of-class assignments paired with in-class conversations.
They say courses have to be redesigned in an AI-aware way, and that structured social learning with classmates should be part of building community around learning.
And then they use this phrase: “cognitive surrender.” That’s when students fall back on AI at the first hint of struggle — and it creates the illusion of learning.
What they’re after is AI that is pro-learner. Not AI that replaces — and this is their phrase, not mine — the “hard fun” of thinking, learning, creating, and problem solving. The same hard fun we talked about Monday with Susan Riley.
So I’m fully aware this makes today’s episode longer than ten minutes. But this is an important development, and as always, I want you to be the most up to date on what is happening in classrooms around the world.
This study is worth reading yourself. Don’t use AI to summarize it. Read it.
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Episode 982 · Wednesday
He Found Two AI Papers. Then Twenty-Two Students Confessed.
Tim Plaehn — American Studies teacher, Asheville School; ten years as faculty chair of its honor council
Tim Plaehn has a new book. Tim was grading an eight-page research paper on a Sunday night. He knew his students’ writing and believed that two of his 45 students had used AI. So, instead of confronting just the two students, he sent an email to the whole class for a chance to “come clean.” And they did. Twenty-two of them! He said he felt betrayed. And that is what so many feel.
Conduct versus honor. Tim says that conduct would be a student in another dorm room after lights out. That will get a student detention. But he has students who cheat as an honor issue and that will have time with the chair of the honor council. He talks about being restorative.
He does have a warning: if we’re talking about AI “without the attendant discussions of integrity” we’re making a mistake.
Listen and read the show notes →
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Episode 978
AI and Academic Honesty: The Second Crisis in Schools
Christian B. Miller — A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University
He has run the largest funded honesty research projects in the country, and he says this crisis runs on both sides of the desk — students hiding AI use, and teachers handing back AI-written feedback students assume is theirs.
Do this in a planning period
Before you accuse anyone, have the conversation instead of the detector scan. His opening moves, as un-confrontationally as you can manage: tell me about this paper. How did you write it? Walk me through your steps. Can you explain this idea — this wasn’t in the class material, where did it come from? He says students often admit it right there. And then he stays lenient: a grade hit, no hearing, rewrite it, second chance.
Free resources from this show
• The Honesty Project — the research base, free to read
• All about false positives in AI detectors — read before you trust any detector
• Jabarian & Imas, NBER Working Paper 34223 — free, independent detector comparison, not peer-reviewed
Listen and read the show notes →
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Episode 983 · Thursday
Stop AI Detection. Start Learning Detection.
Dr. Tony Frontier — author of AI with Intention (ASCD, foreword by Jay McTighe); Director, the AI Center for Effective Teaching and Learning
Tony has run AI focus groups with students in urban, suburban, rural, public, private and parochial high schools, and he says the transcripts are almost indistinguishable. Kids are using it. And they report getting almost no actual instruction about it — just vague permission, or a ban.
Try this tomorrow: the quarter sheet
Students upload the homework the night before. Next day, hand each one a quarter sheet of paper with one important word from last night’s reading. Write your definition of it. What was the main idea? What was your biggest takeaway? He is the first to admit you cannot grade 140 of those — you are not trying to. You are changing what the room expects. And for a policy, he says you can write it in a sentence each: what effective AI use looks like, what ineffective looks like, what inappropriate looks like.
Resources from this show
• The AI Center for Effective Teaching and Learning — the toolkit he names on air
• Tony’s ASCD page · tonyfrontier.com
• Tony at ISTE 2026 — the AI and EdTech SuperSeries, part 3
Listen and read the show notes →
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Teaching about AI when you are not the expert
Nobody is. That is the good news. Two shows for the part of this you actually have to teach, whatever subject is on your door.
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Episode 976
AI Agents Explained: What Teachers Need to Know
Zach Kinzler — Head of Academic Sales Strategies, BoodleBox
Zach was in college the week ChatGPT launched and used it openly from the start. He is useful precisely because he is close enough in age to your students to describe the line between using AI to learn and using it to skip learning — from the inside.
Free tools named in this show
• Gemini Notebook — free, load your own PDFs and study from them (Google renamed this from NotebookLM)
• BoodleBox (free tier) · Perplexity
Listen and read the show notes →
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The prompt of the week: make it interview you
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Paste this in, fill in the two brackets, and let it ask you the questions:
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I want to build a dashboard for my [district, school, classroom] that focuses on [X]. Help me walk through this process and ask me questions to tailor specifically what this data dashboard should look like.
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Before you upload one single file: de-identify it. Replace student names with labels. Delete the address and phone columns. And his rule for every vendor who tells you your data is locked in — “If you can’t give me a CSV, it’s not a vendor I should work with, because everybody can read a CSV.”
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Every kid in your room
Two shows about seeing the individual student, from two very different angles.
And one for you
Because September is long, and you are important.
For the parents on your list — what iOS 27 does (and doesn’t do) for student safety
I put this on Facebook and it traveled, so I am putting it here too. Forward it to a parent. Read the last section before you decide you are covered.
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If your child has an iOS device, iOS 27 is coming this fall, and Apple is FINALLY implementing some real child safety features. Apple previewed these on June 8 and says they arrive “with software updates this fall” — no date published yet, and the features are subject to change. I recommend watching for this and digging into them when you can upgrade. What Apple has announced:
Approval of new contacts. Parents have to approve any new contact before the child can connect with them over Messages, FaceTime or Phone. Let’s note here this may not extend to WhatsApp or DMs on social media and such, so you still need to be picking up your child’s phone and looking — I’m not sure it is going to stop DMs.
Ask to Browse. That is Apple’s actual name for it. The child has to get permission to visit a new site in Safari, and the request comes to you in Messages. It is on by default for under-13 and optional for teens. Now this could feasibly cause some issues at schools, and this is why I think student boot camps where they go to the websites they’ll use in class during the first day or so of school and let parents approve. For now, teachers and parents need to communicate when parents implement this feature, or the parents may get frustrated at work when this is first implemented.
Blocking violence and gore (in addition to blurring nudity). This is the Communication Safety feature, on by default for under-18. If you’ve properly set up your child’s account, photos sent to them already have nudity blurred. Apple says it will now step in and block gore and violent content. Again, you have to set up your child’s account as just that, a child’s account, which may mean some tinkering if you haven’t done this before.
Apps that “undress” real people in photos have been a problem — and it is not limited to shady standalone apps. In January, X’s own AI, Grok, was used at enormous scale to turn photos of real people into sexualized images. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated millions of such images in under two weeks, some of which appeared to depict children. X says it has since blocked those edits and added safeguards, and the volume did drop, but NBC News found in April that users were still working around them. UK regulator Ofcom, California’s attorney general, and 35 state attorneys general all opened investigations that are still open. This is a problem I wrote about in the last newsletter, as CSAM is an issue we must aggressively start dealing with. I’m still not convinced this is being solved in a real way, although apps are being removed.
Privacy advocates don’t say any of these are groundbreaking, but they are a step in the right direction. As always, devices are powerful tools and many of the risks are truly dangerous. If you’re getting your child a phone “for safety,” then the safest thing is to closely monitor what they are doing, and that starts with putting the child features in place.
I will add that Apple’s announcement says nothing about keeping kids from turning off VPNs, which lets them go around any filter anyone can put in place. Until we have that, we can do all we want, but web browsers — perhaps except with “ask to browse,” which is a new feature — are a doorway to the worst content.
I hope this helps those of you who have kids with iOS devices. And if nothing else, know your child’s lock code and randomly ask to take a look at their phone. It is part of what we do as parents. We pay, so we have the say. Keep your kids safe out there. The Internet has some really scary things and we want to protect our kids. AI is not the scariest thing out there.
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Cool Cat Teacher Talk airs on 22 FM radio stations and 16 television markets across three countries and all four US time zones. Several of these launch this fall, including our first markets in Canada and two 100,000-watt stations, KPFT in Houston and KEDM in Monroe, Louisiana.
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Launching this fall
Radio: KPFT 90.1 Houston · KEDM 90.3 Monroe, Louisiana · WPPM 106.5 Philadelphia · KCNP 89.5 Ada, Oklahoma · KOOP 91.7 Austin · KSSZ 93.9 Columbia, Missouri · KTAL-LP 101.5 Las Cruces · WTAQ Green Bay · AccessNow Radio 91.3 Regina, Saskatchewan
Television: PhillyCAM in Philadelphia · MetroEast in Portland, Oregon · AccessNow TV, reaching more than 110 communities across Saskatchewan
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You can also watch or listen anytime on the Cool Cat Teacher Talk page, on YouTube, or in your favorite podcast app.
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See you later, educator. Until next time!
Vicki Davis
Cool Cat Teacher
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P.S. For the next two weeks I’ll be counting down the top 10 episodes of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast as we are approaching episode 1000. Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter and thank you for listening! I’ll have more to share later about what is going on, but in the meantime I’ve been working on expanding the Cool Cat Teacher Talk show!
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