Should schools ban AI or teach it? In September 2026, New York City banned student AI tools from pre-K through eighth grade, while the UAE, China, India, and Alabama moved to teach AI instead. Vicki Davis talks with two educators who use AI every day and think what we've all been teaching teachers about AI is already out of date.

Christie Cloud is an instructional technology facilitator in Harnett County, North Carolina, and a founding member of EduGuardians. Dave Hinrichs is Director of Digital Platforms and Pedagogy for Johnston County Public Schools. Together they wrote a chapter in The Educators' AI Guide 2027. They explain why you should stop worrying about prompt engineering and just talk to AI, why you don't always need the most powerful model, how agentic AI works, what tokens are, how to fact-check AI, why they avoid AI detectors, and how to talk with students about integrity when AI can make higher grades than they can.

Vicki closes with three takeaways, a heads-up for teachers who built custom GPTs, and a challenge you can try the next time you open any AI tool.

Show notes, the full transcript, and every resource mentioned: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/nextai

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Teaching is hard, and it keeps changing. Vicki Davis opens with the 200-question test she gave the second week of her first year — a disaster that made her ask what she actually wanted students to be able to do, and set off the chain of changes that led to the internationally recognized Flat Classroom Project. Then, a 2012 study of 242 teachers in the UK and the Netherlands: 93% and 96% of them believed the learning-styles myth, and the teachers who knew more general facts about the brain believed more of the myths, not fewer. So what do we do? We keep learning, and we check the evidence. Today is about encouraging us to learn and grow.

Three educators show what that looks like. Ross McGill of Teacher Toolkit spent 18 months reading MRI research for his new book on the science of learning, and he used to confiscate fidget spinners — "maybe if I had been more evidence-based, I might have been a bit more compassionate." He explains cognitive load in plain English, why learning styles don't hold up while dual coding does, why highlighting and rereading are the least impactful study habits, and his own twist on a classic: Think, Pair, Share, Show Me.

Starr Sackstein, co-author of Actionable Assessment with Michael McDowell, defines formative and summative in a way any teacher can repeat, explains why a grade stops feedback from doing its job, walks through Four Corners and the Post-It trick for equity of voice, and tells on herself about the project whose directions were so unclear that most students missed the point.

Sean Morrisey spent eight years as a school psychologist testing struggling readers before deciding to teach them himself. Eighteen years into fifth grade, he shares the 60-second routine for teaching a word, why morphology unlocks whole word families, why words can't be one-offs, and what he tells teachers carrying guilt about the science of reading: you gotta let it go and get a little better every year.

Then, Vicki (that's me!) closes with ideas you can try tomorrow, a few for parents, and why changing how you teach puts you out on a limb — and why you should go out there anyway.

Show notes, the full transcript, and every resource mentioned: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/bettereveryday - we can all grow, and improve. And sometimes our biggest mistakes lead to the things that set our career up for success.

If this one helped, share it with a teacher who needs the encouragement this week.

Every AI story in the news right now has a human being at the center of it who looked twice. A reporter read the products on Teachers Pay Teachers. A community college chemistry teacher with a full course load read fourteen meta-analyses and found the research was rotten. MIT's own faculty said policing AI was poisoning their relationships with students. In this episode, Vicki Davis and John Davis open with what those stories have in common, and why "the human in the loop" is not a checkbox. It is a teacher.

Then Kathy Nimmer tells her story. She taught high school English for 29 years, totally blind, and it started with a shattered window and a first year she calls "the Rocky Mountains." She is the 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year, a National Teacher of the Year finalist, and this year the American Foundation for the Blind gave her the Helen Keller Achievement Award. She explains what it means to see students from the heart, how she built SEEDS, a program whose whole job is protecting the joy of brand-new teachers, and why her affirmative observations, notes on only the good, never made a single teacher complacent. And she tells us about the second-grade teacher who watched one little girl a little longer than five doctors did.

Show notes, the full transcript, and every resource mentioned: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/notice

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