How to Do Gold Standard PBL Without Losing Class Time

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Key Takeaways for Teachers from Lisa Mireles

• Gold standard PBL has two halves, and a great project isn't enough on its own. PBLWorks builds it on two wheels — seven essential project design elements and seven project based teaching practices. You can design a beautiful project and still have it fall apart without the teaching moves that carry it.
• You can hear a gold standard PBL classroom before you can see it. Lisa calls it a productive buzz — kids talking to each other, a project wall with the driving question and the milestones on it, students circling back to their need-to-knows, and the teacher moving around coaching instead of standing at the front.
• Every subject has a project, not just business and computer science. High school science students design a community microgrid. Middle school math students design a custom diamond and hit surface area, volume, and spatial reasoning on the way. Second graders build a gallery of community heroes and read, interview, listen, and write to get there.
• “Coverage is enough” is the belief worth disrupting. Lisa points back to Grant Wiggins and the futility of trying to teach everything of importance. When she had teachers mark what they planned to teach and then revisit what they actually taught deeply after a project, it was always about twice as much as they expected.

Try This Tomorrow

Start a project wall with what you already have. Put your driving question at the top of a bulletin board or a section of whiteboard, and underneath it start a running “need to know” list your students add to. Nothing to buy, nothing to approve — and it turns the question into the thing the room organizes itself around.

One more thing worth sitting with: Lisa's point about literacy. In a PBL project, students aren't just reading. They're writing, speaking, and listening too — which means literacy stops being a block on the schedule and becomes an all-day practice. That reframe alone is worth the ten minutes.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• MyPBLWorks Project Library — more than 100 free project ideas you can filter and search by grade or subject. Lisa notes that most of them scale up or down, and PBLWorks calls them “project snapshots” to get your juices flowing.
• Gold Standard PBL: Essential Project Design Elements — the seven design elements that make up the first wheel of the framework.
• Gold Standard PBL: Project Based Teaching Practices — the seven teaching practices that make up the second wheel, including Engage and Coach.
• PBLWorks Success Skills Rubrics — the evidence-based rubrics Lisa mentions for communication, creativity, and self-directed learning.
• 4 Equity Levers in Project Based Learning — knowledge of students, cognitive demand, literacy, and student agency.
• The Magic of Microgrids — the high school science project on designing a microgrid for community energy resilience.
• Community Heroes — the second grade project behind the gallery of heroes exhibit.
• SEEQS — the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability in Honolulu, founded by Buffy Cushman-Patz, where middle schoolers spend part of every week on an interdisciplinary essential question they chose.
• Project Based Learning for All: A Leader's Guide by Bob Lenz and Lisa Mireles (ASCD).
• The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman — the book behind Vicki's Flat Classroom Project.

About Lisa Mireles

Lisa Mireles, Ed.D., is the Senior Director of Design and Innovation and Special Advisor to the CEO at PBLWorks (formerly Buck Institute for Education), the leading organization supporting teachers, schools, and districts in implementing high-quality Project Based Learning (PBL) in K-12 education.

A seasoned educator and school and district leader, Lisa champions learner-centered ecosystems that honor the identities and strengths of students, teachers, and leaders. Her work emphasizes the powerful intersection of leadership, project based learning, and technology. She helped to found the Hawai'i Society of Technology in Education, organizes and facilitates the annual Leading Schools of the Future conference in Hawai'i, and launched Edcamp Kaua'i and the Kaua'i Educational Leadership Alliance.

Lisa started her career teaching bilingual students at Channel Islands High School in Oxnard, California. These students sparked her commitment to constructivism and PBL as tools for cultural and linguistic democracy. Since then, she has served as a classroom teacher, IB coordinator, principal, assistant superintendent, adjunct professor, and district school improvement specialist in public, charter, independent, and international schools across the U.S., Indonesia, and India.

As principal of Kaua'i Pacific School, Lisa led the school to receive the Arts in Excellence award from the Hawaii Academy of the Arts, and it was selected as a School of the Future by the Hawai'i Association of Independent Schools and Hawai'i Community Foundation. In 2018, Lisa was recognized as the HIDOE Kaua'i Complex Educational Officer of the Year.

Originally from Southern California, and now lives on Kaua'i and enjoys family time, the ocean, and the arts. Lisa holds a B.A. in Political Science/International Relations and an M.Ed. from UCLA, and a doctorate in Learning Technologies from Pepperdine University.

Editor's note: Lisa's bio above is printed as she provided it. Her current title at PBLWorks is Managing Director of Digital Curriculum, which is how she is introduced in this episode. Since the bio was written, she has also co-authored Project Based Learning for All: A Leader's Guide with Bob Lenz for ASCD. There was a lag from the date I interviewed her and when the interview was posted, thus, some great things happened in that time for her.

Other Shows for K-12 Teachers

• Episode 954 with Mark Wagner — the Fab Idea Friday episode on space that pairs well with this one for the thinking modes PBL asks of students.
• Project-Based Social Studies Ideas Students Never Forget — what gold standard PBL looks like when it lands in a social studies classroom.
• Unconventional Project Based Learning That Engages Learners — for teachers who want project ideas outside the usual shapes.

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• All 10 Minute Teacher Episodes

If this episode helped you think differently about fitting projects into your year, share it with a teacher who says they don't have time for PBL.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis: I had somebody argue with me the other day on X how project-based learning doesn't work and we should never use it. Well, I beg to differ. I think that several well-selected projects in a school year can truly make a difference using something called gold standard project-based learning. And that's topic of today's show for Thought Leader Thursday.

Announcer: This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: Today on the show, we're joined by Dr. Lisa Mireles, a longtime educator who has worked in California, Indonesia, India, and helped start the Hawaii Society of Technology and Education and has won so many awards as an educator in Hawaii. She is now the Managing Director of Digital Curriculum at PBLWorks, which is formerly the Buck Institute of Education. They are the leading organization that helps us educators implement high-quality, project-based learning. We call that PBL, in K-12 education. So, Lisa, thanks for coming on the show. So how do you define gold standard project-based learning and what makes it different from just doing a, quote, fun project?

Lisa Mireles: Well, project-based learning, it's a pedagogical approach in which students learn by actively engaging in real world and personally meaningful projects. PBLWorks has developed the gold standard framework, which has two parts to it. We have two wheels and one is related to project design. We call those our seven essential design elements, because you have to have a high quality project in order to be able to implement a written project or developed project, as you would say. The other are project based teaching practices. And there's seven of those. Those are outline techniques — some of the moves teachers have to make in order to do PBL well in the classroom. So there's two parts to our gold standard framework.

Vicki Davis: Let's try to visualize PBL. When you pick your classroom following gold standard PBL, what will you see and hear in a gold standard PBL classroom?

Lisa Mireles: The first thing you're going to experience when you walk into a gold standard PBL classroom is sort of this productive buzz. You're going to hear kids talking to each other. You're going to see the student, the teacher, moving around, facilitating, coaching. We call that Engage and Coach, the teaching practice. I hope you'll see a project wall that has the challenging problem or question they're exploring on the wall, the milestones that students are going to be going through in order to create a product that demonstrates their answer to what I think the heart of the PBL is: a really good driving question. So we have an excellent driving question, challenging problem or question. Students are engaged in inquiry. So they're asking questions, they're researching, they're finding the answers to their own questions, but they're also applying what they're learning to the products that they're going to share with the world, usually an individual major product and then a team major product to sort of help them share and demonstrate their answer to the driving question.

Lisa Mireles: They're always going back to those need-to-knows. I want them to be like, what do we need to know? How are we going to find that out? We learned it. Now, what does that mean for our product and how does that change our answer to the driving question? Sometimes you'll see kids working with experts. You'll see artifacts on the wall. You might see some kind of timeline, a Trello board, a Kanban board showing individual and group project. Students engage in thinking routines. Students using rubrics and exemplars to guide them, students self-assessing, students giving each other feedback using really high-quality critique and revision protocols. And the teacher is constantly assessing, engaging and coaching, scaffolding as needed, building a culture, supporting kids with project management. It's a dynamic, vibrant, exciting place.

Vicki Davis: It's so much fun. In my early days of adopting the method, way back when PBLWorks was called the Buck Institute, it was called the Flat Classroom Project — my big, huge project that we did that was in Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat, which is an eight-week project with all these standards and so many things that we were learning.

Vicki Davis: The classroom does have a buzz and it is loud. This is teaching. It's not standing at the front of the room. And the interesting thing, you mentioned Trello, Kanban board. My son now works with me. And when I hired him and brought him on, we were talking about systems. He said, “Hey, well, can't we use a Kanban board like we did in that project when you taught me in 10th grade?” Like, I didn't know when I was teaching him all of these things in project-based learning that I was preparing him for the project of creating a radio and TV show that hundreds of thousands of people listen to every week. Translated directly to the real world. Isn't that so exciting?

Lisa Mireles: For me, it's everything. That is the magic. I have a similar story. I was in the car with my kids. We're listening to an ad on the radio and she starts naming all the techniques that the company is using. “How do you know all about that?” She goes, “Fifth grade advertising unit.” So that's the thing. We want it to be deep and we want kids to learn skills and transferability. Of course, we want them to have the content level learning goals. That's central to any project. That's at the center of both of our frameworks, actually, is key knowledge, understanding, and what we call success skills — what a lot of people call 21st century skills, graduate profile skills. We've got five sort of defined with evidence-based rubrics that people can find on our website, around communication, around creativity, around self-directed learning, which is a really important one to help students.

Lisa Mireles: And that's a really important part for teachers to understand: that you're developing the set of skills. And the process is just as important as the product of what they're creating. Students are reflecting on that. Reflection is one of our design elements. What am I learning? How am I learning it? How am I shifting as a learner? How's my thinking changing? How am I showing up for my group? How am I growing in that area? Those kinds of reflections are really critical for students to be having about their learning. There's a lot of opportunity for that in PBL.

Vicki Davis: Well, an interesting thing — I do an app building project I've written on Edutopia. Invariably, I'll have students when I kick off that project to say, “But I don't know how to build an app.” And I'm like, that's what the project is about. We're learning as part of the project. It's not “I do all this and then I do a project at the end.” The learning is part of that process. How about the teachers who teach math or science or other subjects? Are there examples you can give me for some other subjects?

Lisa Mireles: One of my favorite high school science projects that is in our project library is a project called The Magic of Microgrids. So it's really, how can we design a microgrid to increase our community's energy resilience? Students are learning about microgrids, what they are, that they're one of many tools used in building energy resilience, and they identify a critical sector in their community and determine what's going to be involved in creating a self-sufficient microgrid that could connect to and disconnect from the larger electrical grid. Learning about power, they're hitting NGSS standards. They're also hitting some of those engineering and design standards that are subsumed within the NGSS, right?

Lisa Mireles: There's so many opportunities in science and in math. One of my favorite math projects is a middle school math project called Diamond in the Rough. Driving question for that is, how can we design a custom diamond that meets the wishes of our client? So students explore the geometry behind dazzling diamonds, explore cuts, angles, proportions. Then they apply the concepts — surface area, volume. They look at durability. They look at sparkle. Use their findings and their research to design a custom piece of jewelry for some client's needs. So they're really hitting spatial reasoning. And they're also hitting: how does math help us shape beauty?

Lisa Mireles: They're hitting some of the more enduring beautiful things about the discipline, that makes the disciplines — like, I was a social studies teacher, there's so much exciting about that. And I know from teaching theory of knowledge in the IB that there's so much beauty in the discipline of science, and science for science's sake and math for math's sake. I think in PBL, we have this opportunity to bring that really alive for students, to see the application of it in a way that relates to how the world works.

Vicki Davis: How about elementary reading?

Lisa Mireles: It's such a big question in literacy development. For me, we call them equity levers in project-based learning: knowledge of students — PBL gives us an opportunity to know our students well. It gives us an opportunity to have cognitive demand. It's what every student deserves, what every student needs. Gives us an opportunity to address literacy, which is like this universal thing that students need to be able to be successful in our world. And it also fosters student agency. But you have to be intentional in the design.

Lisa Mireles: For us, every project that we support people in developing, we ask them to include literacy skills within that. They're reading, they're writing, they're speaking, they're listening. They're doing all of them, not just reading. We think of literacy as this one-dimensional thing. But literacy is actually very multi-dimensional, and you'll see students being able to practice literacy skills that they maybe don't always have the opportunity to do. You'll see them become better speakers. You'll see them become better listeners because they're working collaboratively with each other. You'll see them be better at critical thinking and evaluating resources, detecting bias.

Lisa Mireles: At the elementary level, what we really like teachers to do is to really think about what are the literacy skills. And you can have an ELA project-based learning project. You can have an ELA social studies. You can have interdisciplinary one. One of my favorites is What Makes Someone a Community Hero. It's a second grade project. I love this project. So they learn about well-known, second-grade, historical and present-day heroes. And they identify and discuss heroes in their local community. So they're doing a shared definition. They're understanding the characteristic. And they have to read. They have to interview. They have to come up with interview questions. They have to listen. Then they create an artistic portrait of that person. And then they write a paragraph explaining who the hero is. And they put together a gallery of heroes exhibit. It's really enhancing literacy. It's like saying, so we've got our reading program, whatever literacy program that we're using, but doing PBL allows you to sort of enhance literacy and make that an all-day thing, not just during literacy time in PBL.

Vicki Davis: That's wonderful. So a lot of us teachers feel squeezed for time. And a lot of times when I talk to people about gold standard project-based learning, the first thing they say is, “How am I going to fit it in? And how am I going to still hit all my standards and benchmarks?” What do I do? How do we shift that?

Lisa Mireles: I want to disrupt the notion that coverage is enough. I'm just going back to Grant Wiggins, right? The futility of trying to teach everything of importance. PBL is really about uncoverage, and about going deeper, and about having teachers identify what matters most. Which of my standards can I put together in an interesting unit? Which are the most important? A lot of districts do this for us. They have what we call power standards, or they have focus standards that you have to hit because everybody knows. I think I read somewhere that it would take three years to do all the fifth grade standards if you want to. You need the kids for three years.

Vicki Davis: Why do we even do that to ourselves?

Lisa Mireles: So we can't do that. So we're already always making a lot of choices about what matters most. So when you're trying to decide what's worthy of going deeper and doing deeper learning, you have to do a little bit of trust. You need your leaders on board. We do a lot of work with leaders in creating ecosystems that support teachers to do project-based learning well. And one of them is, can you give a little on the pacing guide? Can you give teachers freedom or permission to spend more time on something?

Lisa Mireles: I used to do curriculum mapping with Heidi Hayes Jacobs. One of the things that I did with my own teachers in my own school at that time, I was principal as well, was after a project-based learning unit. So they'd say, this is what we think we're going to teach. These are the standards. This is what we're designing this unit for. And then after, I'd say, now I want you to go back to your standards and say, what did you actually teach? What did you hit deep? Did you surface what was middle, what was deep? And it was always twice as much as they thought it was going to be. It's just a shift in mindset, and trusting the kids will remember more.

Lisa Mireles: When I was a social studies teacher, I'd be like: lecture Monday, chapter Tuesday, video Wednesday, chapter Thursday, test Friday. I mean, I was early 90s, right? Saturday, they forgot everything, even if they got an A. So it just wasn't good enough for me, right? Like, no, I want you to remember this. I want you to get it in your heart and your soul, important things that matter. But I think PBL lets you do that, allows you more opportunities to do that.

Lisa Mireles: There's a school here in Hawaii that does a really cool approach. It's called SEEQS, the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability. It's run by my really good friend, Buffy Cushman-Patz. And so in hers, students pick what they call EQS time. So they have math, social studies, English, science — middle school. They have advisory. They have PE. They have art. And then I think it's four days a week they have EQS time. They will explore a topic with an interdisciplinary group of teachers with other students who want to study that. They get to do choice time and they started with field work. I might not be explaining it perfectly well — Buffy, forgive me if you're listening — but they share at the end of that trimester what they learned.

Lisa Mireles: We have over 100 project ideas on our teacher resource site, which is actually called my.pblworks.org. And so you can just click on projects and you can filter and search by grade or subject. One thing to know is that a lot of the projects can scale up or down. We call them Project Snapshots, to get you thinking and get your juices flowing.

Vicki Davis: So Lisa Mireles — she is with PBLWorks. We have a lot of great information we'll include in the show notes. They have a lot of great resources. You can go to their website and look at all the ideas they have for you. Gold Standard Project-Based Learning, I think, is more important than ever. Because we live in the world of AI, we need our students to be creating things that aren't already created.

Vicki Davis: Well, Lisa, thank you for coming on the show. This has been very informative, and we will have all this information in the show notes. So thanks for coming on.

Lisa Mireles: It was delightful. Thanks for having me, Vicki.

Vicki Davis: Thanks for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This episode includes some affiliate links. This means that if you choose to buy I will be paid a commission on the affiliate program. However, this is at no additional cost to you. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

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AI in the Classroom: Assignments Students Can’t Fake

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Subscribe to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast and Cool Cat Teacher Talk anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Nancy Frey is an expert on many things and now has taken that expertise and applied it to AI in the classroom.

Watch on YouTube and subscribe for new episodes every week.

Key Takeaways for Teachers from Dr. Nancy Frey

• Collect the dialogue, not just the product. Nancy asks students to turn in the conversation they had with the chatbot — “I’m interested in the questions that you ask.” The questions a student asks tell you more about their thinking than the paper does.
• Verbal assessment works even at scale. Face-to-face is the gold standard, but with 180 students on a roster it isn’t practical — so she points to Google Docs extensions that let you leave a spoken question right on a student’s draft and require a spoken answer back.
• AI literacy is a K-12 progression, not a high school unit. In K-2 she calls them “truth detectives” asking “is this true?” long before a child touches a keyboard. Grades 3-5 grow into “information investigators” watching a teacher interrogate a chatbot’s answer.
• Redesign the task instead of hunting the cheater. When a student says he got it all off QuillBot, Nancy’s question isn’t how to catch him — it’s what was it about that assignment that made QuillBot so easy?

Try This Tomorrow

On the next assignment where students may use AI, require two things instead of one: the finished work, and a link or screenshot of the conversation they had with the chatbot. Tell them you’ll be reading the questions they asked, not just the answer they got. It costs you one line on the assignment sheet and it changes what they pay attention to.

Carol Jago’s reflective questions are the other move worth borrowing from this conversation. At the end of an essay, ask:

• what did you find the most difficult thing to do?
• If you had more time, what would you do with this next?
  
  A student who generated the work can’t answer those without going back and actually reading it.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Teaching Students to Use AI Ethically & Responsibly: Exploring AI With Intentionality, Curiosity, and Care — Nancy’s newest book, co-authored with Salman Khan, Douglas Fisher, James Marshall, and Meghan Hargrave. Also available on the Corwin book page.
• Fisher and Frey — Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher’s site, where you can reach them both and find their professional learning work.
• Sam Wineburg — the Stanford professor emeritus Nancy credits for lateral reading. He founded the Stanford History Education Group, and his research focuses on how people judge the credibility of digital content.
• Carol Jago — past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, 32 years teaching middle and high school English, and the source of the reflective end-of-essay questions Nancy uses.
• Google NotebookLM — the research tool Vicki’s ninth graders use to build source-grounded notebooks and generate audio overviews.
• Perplexity — the AI research tool Vicki has students use before making them go back and calculate its error rate.
• QuillBot — the paraphrasing tool referenced in the conversation about AI-resistant assignment design.

About Dr. Nancy Frey

Nancy Frey is a Professor in Educational Leadership at San Diego State and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College. She is a credentialed special educator, reading specialist, and administrator in California. She is a member of the International Literacy Association’s Literacy Research Panel. Her published titles include How Teams Work, Kids Come in All Languages, The Social-Emotional Learning Playbook, and How Feedback Works. She can be reached at nfrey@sdsu.edu.

Nancy’s bio above is the one she provided us. Her newest book came out after she wrote it: Teaching Students to Use AI Ethically & Responsibly: Exploring AI With Intentionality, Curiosity, and Care (Corwin), co-authored with Salman Khan, Douglas Fisher, James Marshall, and Meghan Hargrave — that’s the book we talk about in this episode.

Blog: fisherandfrey.com

Other Shows for Teachers Navigating AI

• Transform Your School with Ethical AI: Insights from Experts — the full Cool Cat Teacher Talk episode this conversation came from, with Nancy Frey and Vickie Echols.
• Successful Distance Learning for Young Kids — Nancy on the Distance Learning Playbook.
• Rebound: How Do Schools Bounce Back after the Pandemic? — with Nancy’s co-author Douglas Fisher.
• How Does Acceleration Research Help Schools and Kids Rebound?

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• All 10 Minute Teacher Episodes

If this episode gave you one thing to try, share it with the teacher down the hall.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Wonderful Classroom Wednesday. Today, we’re talking with education expert Nancy Frey about AI in the classroom, our struggles, our dilemmas, and some solutions she recommends. Let’s learn.

Announcer (00:14): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:18): Nancy Frey is a professor in educational leadership at San Diego State and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College. She is a member of the International Literacy Association’s Literacy Research Panel. She and her co-author, Douglas Fisher, can both be reached at fisherandfrey.com. She has co-authored with Douglas Fisher and Sal Khan in the book, Teaching Students to Use AI Ethically and Responsibly. Nancy, isn’t that the question of the moment right now?

Nancy Frey (00:53): It sure is, Vicki, as all of us are trying to figure out what are the best ways to be able to utilize this in ways that are practical, ethical, and will assist our students in being able to learn more.

Vicki Davis (01:07): I’ve got a big research project my ninth graders are doing on new technology. I required them to create a Google NotebookLM and to generate a certain number of podcasts and require 20 sources of information, including videos, and I wanted them to demonstrate their knowledge of how to use it. But then after that, the next assignment was, you’re going to sit at my desk and verbally, without notes, explain this particular technology to me.

And the pushback that, as I’ve talked about this on the show before, of the role of verbal assessment has just grown in our classroom. And I have designated at least three to four times per semester to have a one-on-one verbal interaction with my students. And it has required me to shift things. And the pushback is that’s not practical in every classroom. My classroom sizes are a little smaller than some would have. But is it practical that we do have to shift assessments? Because I don’t see any other way forward myself.

Nancy Frey (02:06): I totally agree with you. One of the things I was thinking about is, as you were describing that particular assignment, my guess is that wasn’t an assignment that you were doing 10 years ago.

Vicki Davis (02:17): Well, it was an assignment, but not how they researched. They researched totally differently.

Nancy Frey (02:20): There you go. Being responsive and being able to understand it’s a different landscape where students getting information is really important.

But let me talk about the verbal aspect of that, because I think that dialogue is so essential to understanding what it is that young people know. And one of the methods for doing so is exactly what you offered. Face-to-face, we’re going to have dialogue, we’re going to talk with one another. And you’re right, it’s not necessarily practical if you’ve got 180 students that are on your roster that you see across the day.

But there are other tools that help to accomplish those same kinds of things. I’ll give one example. Google Docs, which of course has been around for quite a while, has extensions that you can add where you get to — perhaps you’re reading something that a student has written, and you get to be able to ask questions verbally and have it posted right on that document. And then students have to respond back to you as well. So it’s not necessarily in real time, but you can foster some dialogue that way.

We can also foster dialogue by requiring students to turn in to us what was the dialogue that you had with the chatbot. I’m interested in the questions that you ask. I want to be able to see that particular transcript. It isn’t always just the final product. I want to see the dialogue that goes along with it. So I’m with you on this.

Vicki Davis (03:56): And coaching on prompts. I mean, you’ve hit on something that’s so important. I really like my students to use Perplexity. I’ve just found that the error rate is a little bit better. A lot of times I’ll have my students, they’ll generate their Perplexity report and they’ll go, “Oh, here it is.” And then I go, “Okay, now go back and calculate the error rate.” They’re not as much a fan of that one.

The depth of knowledge required to evaluate all those sources is just so much more, because then it’s about learning. And they realize they can’t park their brain at the door, that they’re going to be learning. And I find they’re more excited and more engaged. I really don’t think they want classes where they can copy and paste. I think they want to be engaged.

Nancy Frey (04:37): I don’t either. And I think that we’re starting to see some of that turn that is happening. When the internet was first invented, we as a society had to kind of figure out, how do we interact with this tool? And if you think back now to how it was that you performed a search, for example, in 2002, you would look at it now and you’d go, well, that was really simplistic, right? I mean, I’ve developed the skills to be able to do that.

We are, as a society, starting to engage with these tools in more sophisticated kinds of ways. We’re recalling at higher levels how very important it is to keep the human in the loop.

Vicki Davis (05:19): I’ve even seen some talks on the internet about people basically saying ChatGPT is my decision partner. And I think that’s where I balk a little bit, just because there is a randomness, a probability behind the words that are generated. And it doesn’t have a moral framework.

And so I caution my students just because of the young man that took his own life, started off using ChatGPT for homework and it didn’t correct his suicidal ideations. It really became a suicide coach for him. And that’s the part, Nancy, concerns me — is the safety guardrails don’t seem to be there yet with some of the major LLMs that a lot of people are using.

Nancy Frey (06:01): And there certainly are terrible things that are happening and misuses of all of that, which to me suggests even more so that we need to get in front of what these conversations are.

Vicki Davis (06:20): What are some strategies to identify bias in algorithms and to critically evaluate AI-generated information that you recommend?

Nancy Frey (06:29): Isn’t this a skill that has become even more important in an age of AI, but certainly also predates the development of AI? So, for example, the idea of informational literacy, the idea of data literacy are absolutely essential.

I’ll use as one example, and Sam Wineburg’s work with lateral reading is incredibly interesting. In other words, how do you read across documents? And not just inside of a single document. What we’ve done is we’ve taken that idea of lateral reading, which I think is brilliant, and now how do you interrogate that across AI-generated content?

What are those questions that you can pose to that AI chatbot to be able to verify? And that’s another one of those important literacy skills. How do you verify whether this information is correct or not? What are the limitations of what any AI chatbot can generate? For example, do students know that AI is not a good source whenever you’re talking about, like, current events — because the LLMs, they’re not as current, they’re not as up-to-date?

So really being able to think about what it is that you are asking for when it is appropriate to turn to AI. How will you interrogate, analyze what the content is so that you can make decisions about what is the final product? Those are all essential skills that are teaching kids about how to use it ethically.

One of the useful things for us to engage in as education systems is to start thinking about your skill progressions across those grade bands. What does AI usage look like when it comes to K-2?

Nancy Frey (08:28): And AI usage in K-2 is not kids getting on a chatbot and working away at that. But it’s, in fact, when the teacher builds the habits and the dispositions about asking simple questions like, “Is this true?” We call them truth detectives. How do we interrogate materials of any kind? How do we notice when something is true versus when something is pretend? Those are appropriate kinds of questions for the very youngest children to be able to engage in. And it’s building those habits and those dispositions around verification before they’ve ever touched a keyboard.

And then we go into grades three to five, and now we’re growing those information investigators. And so in many cases, it’s the teacher that is the one who is conducting the search with students and letting them see what it is that the chatbot is generating. How do we push back on it? How do we notice whenever something just doesn’t sound right? Where did this information come from?

So in the elementary grades, it’s way less about kids touching a keyboard and engaging with a chatbot and a whole lot more about building the habits and building the dispositions around how it is that you verify information. How do we as adults show young people how it is that we verify information?

And that’s just one example. But I think that that idea of skills progressions and what this looks like in those different grade bands can be a starting point for teachers and for systems to be able to look closely at what’s appropriate AI use and what is not.

Vicki Davis (10:20): How do we help teachers in this time period where I’m having to hold them accountable, but if they’re a good liar or if they’re a really good student, they always spell everything right anyway, they’re not going to get caught?

Nobody likes to feel like they’ve been made a fool out of. Too many teachers who feel that way of, “I can’t catch it. They’re all going to write right in front of me. I’m going to do the blue book. They’re going to write on paper.” And there may be times for that. But how do we grapple with this as teachers where we’re not deceived?

Nancy Frey (10:49): I agree with you. We do a lot of in-class writing, timed writing. You have 20 minutes. This is what the prompt is, and you’re going to do it right in front of us. That is definitely one of the approaches to be able to use, for sure.

But the other is, how do we think closely about how it is that we redesign some of the tasks that we’re asking students to do so that they’re a bit more AI resistant? And use the example of a student who says, “Yeah, I got everything off of QuillBot,” which is definitely not a cool thing to do in any way. But it also causes some wondering: what was it about the assignment, in the way that it was written, that made it easy for that student to use QuillBot?

I’ll use as another example, and this is Carol Jago’s work that she’s been doing for decades now — at the end of an essay, asking some questions about what did you find the most difficult thing to do? If you had more time, what would you do with this next?

Asking some of those reflective questions that are not questions that a chatbot is easily going to be able to fulfill helps to be able to make sure that the young humans in front of us are present in those assignments.

Vicki Davis (12:07): We’ve been talking to Nancy Frey, professor of educational leadership at San Diego State. The book is co-authored with Douglas Fisher and Sal Khan. I like that you say, okay, these are the conditions where you might want to ban it. And that’s okay. But I think even if you have a ban, hopefully you have a plan.

Nancy Frey (12:29): I love that. You can have a ban, but have a plan. I’m going to use that in my own life.

Vicki Davis (12:35): Thank you for coming on the show, Nancy.

Nancy Frey (12:37): Thank you so much.

Vicki Davis (12:39): Thanks for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com/newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This episode includes some affiliate links. This means that if you choose to buy I will be paid a commission on the affiliate program. However, this is at no additional cost to you. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

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How to Teach AI in Any Classroom, Not Just CS Class

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Sometimes we let the AI get it wrong. YES! This is something I do in my classroom where we intentionally analyze what AI does right and wrong. The only difference is these CodeAI activities are super easy for students to use AND free AND have guardrails to protect students. At ISTE 2026 this year, I went to the CodeAI classroom and took a class. I came away very impressed with the lessons CodeAI gives away for free.

Sponsored: Today's show is sponsored by CodeAI. I highly recommend CodeAI and their free AI +CS curriculum and this show is being aired as a result of them sponsoring my time at ISTE 2026. Thank you to CodeAI for making this episode possible.

Now, if you're wondering, Hour of Code, which was “code.org” (we say code dot org) has rebranded as CodeAI. They have so many free resources for teaching both Computer Science and AI in any class (even non-Computer Science classes) and to kids of all ages. They also have unplugged lessons and activities where students learn about AI, bias, and how it works. I highly recommend CodeAI as a great place to start as you bring AI education into your school. Sit down and play with it and find some great lessons you can use in your classroom. We dig into what they have, wisdom on teaching AI, and some nuanced counterintuitive thoughts on teaching AI in the classroom.

“The tool use is not the same as educating students about how these tools work.”

Karim Meghji

President and CEO, CodeAI

Listen to the Show

How to Teach About Space in the Classroom with Mark Wagner

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Watch on YouTube and subscribe for a new episode every weekday.

Key Takeaways for Teachers from Mark Wagner

• Space is the ultimate engagement hook — in any subject. Space isn’t just for science class. Mark calls it “the gateway to all kinds of learning” — a way to engage and motivate any student, no matter their strengths or interests.
• The space economy is everyone’s economy. Projected toward $1 trillion by 2030, space already touches nearly every career — from welders and machinists to marketers, HR, finance, and even fashion designers. As Mark puts it, “whatever your strengths and interests are, they need you.”
• Four mindsets prepare students for space — and for life on Earth. The explorer’s mindset, moonshot thinking, design thinking, and astronaut Cady Coleman’s “operational mindset” (“it’s not all about you, but you are critically important to the mission”) are exactly the mindsets entrepreneurs and problem-solvers need down here.
• Let kids explore — even a map counts. Mark says schools fall short most on giving kids the freedom to explore and think big. Something as simple as bringing a map into the room — or hands-on tools like databot and MaxIQ.space — lets students discover answers on their own.
• The “overview effect” changes how we see our planet. Astronauts who look back at Earth come home more focused on stewardship and diplomacy. Mark’s challenge for students: “We are all crew — or we should be. Don’t be caught being a passenger on spaceship Earth.”

Try This Tomorrow

Bring a map into your classroom — a star map, a map of Mars, or even a world map — and open with a question you don’t answer for them. Mark calls this tapping into the “explorer’s mindset”: you spark discovery without handing over the answer. It costs nothing and works in any subject.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Mark packed this conversation with places to go next. Here’s everything he mentioned, grouped so you can find what fits your classroom.

Mark’s Space Education Programs

• ARES Learning — Mark’s public benefit corporation dedicated to preparing students for humanity’s future in space.
• Space Education Course for Teachers — Mark’s online course for educators.
• Space Education for Everyone — the new version for anyone, not just formal educators.
• Astrogeology Field Experience for Educators — a New Mexico field experience (Spaceport America, White Sands, and more) co-led with planetary geologist Dr. Kirby Runyon.
• Space Education Summit — a free online summit; watch 100+ past sessions on the Space Education Summit YouTube channel.
• Space Prize Foundation — where Mark serves as president, advancing women in STEAM and aerospace.

Books Mentioned

• Space Education: Preparing Students for Humanity’s Multi-Planet Future by Mark Wagner & Frank White — Mark’s book, which introduces the overview effect and the mindsets discussed on the show.
• The Overview Effect by Frank White — the book that coined “the overview effect,” now in its fourth edition.
• The Cosma Hypothesis by Frank White — Mark’s recommended next read on our “moral mandate” to spread consciousness.
• Sharing Space by astronaut Cady Coleman — the source of the “operational mindset.” (Mark refers to her as “Katie” on air; the astronaut-author is Cady Coleman.)
• The Next 500 Years by Christopher Mason — on engineering life to survive deep space (tardigrade DNA, radiation, and the trip to Mars).

Classroom Tools for Hands-On Space Learning

• databot — a pocket-sized multi-sensor device for student-designed experiments.
• MaxIQ Space — sensors, CubeSat kits, and high-altitude balloon payloads that let students send experiments toward space.

People, Places & Organizations Mentioned

• Frank White — space author who coined “the overview effect” and co-authored Space Education.
• Cady Coleman — NASA astronaut and author of Sharing Space.
• Dr. Kirby Runyon — planetary geologist (NASA New Horizons / Pluto), co-leader of the astrogeology field experience.
• Christopher Mason — geneticist and author of The Next 500 Years.
• Chris Betcher — Australian educator and blogger Mark cites on students rejecting AI-generated work.
• Fred Haise — Apollo 13 astronaut who appeared on the Space Education Summit’s astronaut panel.
• Yi So-yeon — the first South Korean astronaut, whose overview-effect perspective Mark mentions.
• Space Exploration Educators Conference (SEEC) — the long-running educator conference at Space Center Houston.
• Challenger Learning Center of Las Cruces — simulated Mars missions for students.
• New Mexico Museum of Space History — near White Sands, a stop on the field experience.
• White Sands National Park and Spaceport America — analog-to-space landscapes and Virgin Galactic’s home.
• NASA Artemis — the Moon-to-Mars program that has reignited public excitement about space.
• Project Loon — Google X’s stratospheric-balloon internet moonshot Mark uses as a “failing forward” story.

About Mark Wagner

Dr. Mark Wagner is CEO and co-founder of ARES Learning, a public benefit corporation dedicated to preparing for humanity’s future in space. In this capacity he leads a space education online course for teachers, co-leads an astrogeology for educators field experience, and co-hosts a free online space education summit.

He has served as President of the Space Prize Foundation, Director of Education Partnerships at the Aldrin Family Foundation, and in a similar role with Slooh: The Cosmic Classroom.

Recently, he launched a new space education course… for everyone! Mark has a Ph.D. in Educational Technology and a master’s degree in Cross-Cultural Education. He also holds graduate certificates in Space Education and Space Philosophy. He is the author of Space Education: Preparing Students for Humanity’s Multi-Planet Future (2022).

Connect with Mark: LinkedIn · Instagram · areslearning.com · mark@areslearning.com

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

John: Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the…

Vicki Davis: John, we are not doing that.

John: Long ago, in the galaxy far, far away.

Vicki Davis: This is not the intro we're supposed to be doing, John.

John: Luke, I am your father.

Vicki Davis: John, I am your mother. This is not going to be our intro.

John: I'm sorry, mother. I can't do that.

Vicki Davis: Okay, so this is what happens when a mom and son work together. Sometimes it goes a little bit off the rails. This episode is about space. This is not sci-fi. Space is actually something that we can teach in every classroom. So, John, don't you think that you're taking this space thing just a little too fast?

John: No.

Vicki Davis: I don't know what that was. But do or do not, there is no try. We are going to talk about space in any classroom. John is my son, and he and I create this show together. We love Star Wars, Star Trek, Guardians of the Galaxy, all these space things. And we just decided to have a little fun because, hey, the 10-minute teacher is back to five days a week and sometimes six. So we're going to talk with my friend Mark Wagner about how to teach about space in any classroom.

Announcer: This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: Today, I'm talking with an old friend, Dr. Mark Wagner. He is CEO and co-founder of ARES Learning, president of the Space Prize Foundation, and author of Space Education, Preparing Students for Humanity's Multi-Planet Future. Mark founded EdTech Team back in 2006 and helped shape how a whole generation of us learned to use technology in the classroom. But now he's turned his attention to preparing students to the growing space economy and for a future that may include the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: When you reached out to me, you were talking about how excited everyone is about the Artemis mission. I am so excited to see it's taken a hold of people's imaginations in a much broader way than even the exciting headlines in the last couple of years.

Vicki Davis: So let's talk about how space took a hold of your imagination. So you spent all this time in Web 2, and then you were like, space is going to be big. Why? What was the story?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: It makes my 20-year education technology career almost a side story. I went to space camp a couple times as a kid in sixth grade and again in 11th grade. I originally went to school to be an astronomical engineer, but I realized at the time that the science fiction stories that inspired me were really important, and I ended up jumping ship and studying literature and teaching high school English, which is what got me into ed tech to begin with. In 2020, right before the pandemic, I had the opportunity to start thinking about what's next, bringing both those worlds full circle so that I could apply my ed tech career to what was happening in space. Between you and me, I saw a lot of parallels of how excited people were in 2006 about Google for Education and how little support there was for teachers. And if you look at 2019, there was starting to be some real excitement around SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and everything that was hitting the headlines in terms of human spaceflight and commercial spaceflight, with very little support for it in schools. So literally right before COVID, some of my partners and I were talking about how to use space as an element to engage and motivate kids and teach just about anything, really.

Vicki Davis: So you talk a lot about the space economy. Interestingly, there's an AP course where they had to talk about the issues of lower orbit satellites and the lack of regulation in that area for an AP lit class. That was one of the things they analyzed this year. And I was thinking, wow, people are starting to talk about space. I mean, is it just Artemis or is it the fact people realize, hey, this is part of who we are on this earth is space?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: Yeah, and it's interesting. It's not necessarily a funding priority for schools just yet, at least not at large scale. But absolutely over the last five, six years, I've seen that interest notching up in a growing community of educators. Some of them have been there for decades. The Space Exploration Educators Conference, or SEEK, hit its 30th year a couple of years ago. So there's some people who have been doing this a really long time, and we're seeing a rise in the number of people that are interested in it. And for me, especially coming out of tech and kids learning socially, no matter who you are, what your strengths are, what your interests are — and this goes for teachers and students — space can be that element of engaging, motivating, hooking, being the gateway to all kinds of learning. And you mentioned, this is kind of the other big hook, especially at a societal or policy level, is the growing space economy. A couple of years ago, we passed a milestone of about $400 billion a year. At the time, they were saying it would reach a trillion dollars by 2040. But those projections now look like a trillion dollars by 2030. And I think we're still on track for that. Aerospace is growing for scientists, engineers, astronauts — there's never been more opportunities to be a part of it. And there's this growing space economy where whatever your strengths and interests are, they need you. A lot of people talk about the barista at Spaceport America where Virgin Galactic flies. But even more so, I play hockey with guys that never got a degree and they're welders and machinists, and their biggest client is SpaceX in Hawthorne. I love telling the story of one of them telling me at hockey one Saturday morning, like, Mark, those guys are the dumbest smart people I know — I've got to teach them the most basic stuff. Whether you're a welder or a barista or you're in marketing — I know space marketers, I know people in HR and space finances. I've interviewed a space fashion designer and an interior designer who works on luxury spacecraft. These are all real jobs today. There's a whole lot of opportunity in this wider space economy. I also like to joke that the opposite is true. Even if you're not interested in space, you'd better understand the opportunities that are coming out of space. So the same way in the 90s we had to convince people that learning about the internet was maybe a good idea, and now it's just a given, I like to joke: if you work for a shoe company, you'd better know the new materials coming out of micro-G environments. You'd better know what your shoe can do if it can talk to GPS and Starlink and be part of the Internet of Things. Already, satellites — particularly GPS, but also communication satellites and Earth observation satellites — impact every industry from agriculture to crime fighting. If you're not up to speed with what's happening with space technology, it's pretty equivalent to not being up to speed with what's happening with the internet. You're missing out on big opportunities and you're not really fully participating in today's economy.

Vicki Davis: You know, folks who look at all this may say, why is everybody rushing to have these lower orbit satellites? But there really is a space race to cover the whole world with the internet, right?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: Over the last couple of years with SpaceX and Starlink, we're already in a world where broadband access can happen regardless of borders and despots. They've used Starlink in emergency situations after hurricanes, after the fires in L.A. They put Starlink base stations out for first responders, behind enemy lines in Ukraine and elsewhere. Now you're in a new position where, like, oh, this big company controls the internet. But we're certainly in a position where you can sidestep borders. You don't need the kind of infrastructure you needed in the past. Never mind copper lines — we don't even need cell towers going forward.

Vicki Davis: What are the experts saying about how long it's going to be to have global internet?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: You and I remember the time of OLPC, one laptop per child. It turns out even putting a billion dollars behind something like that doesn't solve the problem. We've come a long way in narrowing the gap of who's got access to broadband and basic computing, but there's no easy solution. There's still some room to grow. But it's interesting to roll back 13 years or so. We had a guy named Rich Duvall keynote one of the Google for Education summits up in Silicon Valley, and he worked for the X Lab at the time, their moonshot factory. He had this great idea that he pitched to Larry and Sergey, as the story goes, and they said, that's a great idea, but it's going to benefit the next billion people to get online most — fix that problem first. And that's when Project Loon was born. The idea at the time was to put balloons into the stratosphere with basically 5G cell technology on them to beam internet down to the planet. A great success story there, and a great failing-forward story there. But long story short, Project Loon's gone, because somebody thought 10x that and thought even bigger. Now we've got thousands of satellites in orbit doing that job. Amazon's coming in with competition, and last I heard, Rwanda wants to launch 300,000 satellites with a similar capacity. If you've got African countries launching their own constellations, I'd say that barrier to entry is coming down.

Vicki Davis: You talk about the skill sets and the mindsets that students need for the space economy.

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: The sort of mindsets that are good for, say, an astronaut or an engineer or a scientist turn out to also be good for an entrepreneur or a social change agent trying to solve big problems here on Earth. So I start with the explorer's mindset. You're talking about things like comfort with the unknown. It also tends to tap into the idea that people who are explorers develop a greater sense of stewardship for the environment and for the earth. I like to bring in moonshot thinking. That's the idea that when we went to the moon the first time in the 60s, we didn't know how we were going to do it when Kennedy said we're going to do that in this decade. But we did it anyway — this idea that we were going to learn by failing forward. So moonshot thinking encourages kids and educators to think big, to think outside the box, to tackle problems bigger than they might have tackled otherwise. I mean, it was a 19-year-old that solved the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, right? Most people are capable of much more than they think possible. And to me, you've got to hit that moonshot thinking before getting into a system like design thinking, because that threatens to just be iterative and get people what they already think they want. To me, those are almost a trilogy: the explorer's mindset, moonshot thinking, and design thinking. But my favorite one now is what astronaut Katie Coleman calls the operational mindset. In the business world that means something else, but to her it means it's not all about you, but you are critically important to the mission. Like for any given kid, or the teacher for that matter, it's not all about you, but you are critically important to the learning environment. Those are four that I think are really important to start with.

Vicki Davis: Where do you think that schools are falling short out of those four the most?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: You see a lot more project-based learning. You see a ton of design learning in schools — design thinking, design methodology. That was true a decade ago, too. I think moonshot thinking, or thinking big, is really hard, and I think giving kids the freedom to explore is really hard for schools. As a general rule, schools don't allow kids to discover on their own and wander in the wilderness a little bit — metaphorically, or literally — to find their own way. Even something as simple as bringing a map into the classroom, you can tap into that element of exploration without giving a kid the answer, letting them discover the answers on their own. That could be physical problem solving in a maker space, or — I love databot or MaxIQ.space — they make sensors that kids can use to create their own classroom experiments. They can create their own high-altitude balloon payloads. They can even send them to space with various partners. So there's this opportunity to let kids create the experiment, create the hypothesis, and figure out a way to get their hardware up into the stratosphere or up into space even. I think there's very, very little of that happening. And there are opportunities for kids to actually get their experiments up to the ISS or into orbit on other vehicles. They're not necessarily cheap, but there's some great opportunities out there. There's a book I'll recommend, The Next 500 Years by Christopher Mason — he's a microbiologist — and we've already put tardigrade DNA into human tissue to make it radiation resistant. We already know the 247 gene edits or whatever it is, something like that, to cause a human to create their own vitamin C. And if we're going to survive the trip to Mars and back — literally a couple of years ago, we learned that our kidneys won't make it. Just hands down, won't make it. The radiation is going to kill us. So we either need much heavier ships with a lot more shielding, or we're going to need to modify ourselves genetically.

Vicki Davis: Your book, Space Education, was written with Frank White, and he coined the term the overview effect. For teachers who want to dive deeper into this, what is the first chapter you would point them to in your book and why?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: One is he talks about the overview effect. In the book, he coined the term to capture the change in perspective that people tend to experience when they look down on the earth from space. They don't see borders. They don't see tribes. They don't see our conflict. And they see the stark reality that the earth is a relatively small and fragile ball of life hanging in the forbidding black void of space, and that thin, thin blue line of atmosphere. Everybody I've spoken to about it says it's thinner than you think. You can see the pictures of that thin blue line, and it's thinner than you think. And you think about how every living thing, aside from maybe some things in the ocean, is in that blue line. That blue line is what's protecting us. So people look down, they don't see borders typically — although my interview with So-yeon Yi from South Korea was interesting because they see a border from space. But typically people don't see borders, they don't see conflicts, they don't see our tribes. They see that we're all in this together on spaceship Earth. And they tend to come to that realization: we are all crew, or we should be. Don't be caught being a passenger on spaceship Earth. And they tend to come back more interested in diplomacy, more interested in protecting the environment. And that changes the way people interact down here. That's why astronauts have said for years, if only we could pull the politicians up to orbit or up to the moon so that they could look back on the Earth.

Vicki Davis: We've been talking with Dr. Mark Wagner, CEO and co-founder of ARES Learning, president of the Space Prize Foundation, and author of Space Education, Preparing Students for Humanity's Multi-Planet Future.

Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This episode includes some affiliate links. This means that if you choose to buy I will be paid a commission on the affiliate program. However, this is at no additional cost to you. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post How to Teach About Space in the Classroom with Mark Wagner appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

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