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Response 4: Calley Anderson

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Podcasts/audio files can promote higher order thinking skills in the classroom by analyzing a concept and creating ways to relay that information to others. The students will conduct their own research and use higher thinking skills to produce a podcast that is engaging and informational.

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This podcast discusses mistake analysis and how to turn mistakes into opportunities. Mistakes are a natural part of learning, but students will not be able to learn from their mistakes if they are fearful of making them. This podcast provides different methods on how best to embrace mistakes in the classroom and how to learn from them through critical thinking.

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Sponsored by Hapara and TGR EDU: Explore

My son Oliver is enrolled in virtual school this year. He has an amazing teacher who kicked off the year with her kindergarten students by going through the alphabet. As they went through each letter, students had to suggest words that started with that letter.

When they got to the letter after H and before J, one student yelled out, "Iguana."

"Great work!" the teacher said. "Who else has a word that starts with our letter?"

Crickets. No one said anything. As an eavesdropping dad, I was thankful this wasn't a drinking game, because I had nothing! Suddenly, Oliver unmuted, huge smile on his face, and joyfully shared his answer:

"Lizard!"

His teacher looked at him, smiled, and said, "I'm sorry, that's not right. Does anyone else have a word that works?"

I looked at him and saw the joy stripped from his eyes. I started to think about the wonder he and just about every child comes out of the womb with. I began to worry about what happens when we stifle that wonder because of our rigid practice of creating such a narrow window of what we consider to be helpful contributions. And I fully understood how it comes to be that previously engaged learners learn to check out of school.

A Missed Opportunity

There are serious pedagogical issues with what happened here. For formative assessment purposes, how does this teacher's answer help her understand, diagnose, and correct what Oliver's potential misunderstanding is? For the purposes of developing student agency, how does her decision to not allow Oliver to explain his thinking limit his ability to sharpen his reasoning skills and disposition towards supporting his claims with evidence? It turns out that although his mistake could have been an association between lizards and iguanas or a mistake about what constitutes an "i" word (look at the second letter in lizard), it really came down to what happens when you start school in Zoom using the Arial font where a lowercase L and uppercase i are the same character: "l." But because the teacher moved on without stopping to investigate Oliver's response, that reason was not uncovered in class.

Mistakes are a natural part of learning, but students cannot develop into critical thinkers if they regularly freeze out of the fear of making a mistake. As educators, we can shift the culture of our classrooms to embrace mistakes, and one way to do this is through mistake analysis, one of several powerful but practical strategies I share in my book, Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Practical Framework to Teach Critical Thinking to All Students. ( Bookshop.org | Amazon). As a math-teacher-turned-attorney, I wrote this book and started my organization, thinkLaw, to help educators seamlessly incorporate critical thinking into their curriculum.

Critical Thinking as a Pathway to Equity

I have a confession: I'm in this for the rule-breakers. Our profession attracts many people who became educators because the compliance-based, rule-following system worked well for them. But I was not one of those people. As a young student, I had a lot of behavior challenges, but it turned out these were the result of not being challenged. It was only later in life, when I attended law school, that I was taught the kind of critical thinking I needed when I was younger, the kind of thinking that would have kept me challenged.

Critical thinking should not be luxury good. But our current system often treats it that way, setting aside this kind of challenging work for only the most advanced students. In conversations about equity in education, one question I always ask is How do we make equity real at the classroom level? We can talk about implicit bias all day, but what about the explicit bias of saying "These kids can't"? What "These kids can't" often means is "As an educator, I have no idea how to create learning conditions such that all kids can."

So I decided to create spaces that rewarded disruption and divergent thinking-spaces I longed for when I was going through the K-12 system. I view access to critical thinking as THE pathway for making equity real at the classroom level by giving students the opportunity to lead, innovate, and break the things that must be broken as a core part of their educational experience. This is not possible in a world where students are afraid of getting the wrong answer.

Four Ways to Implement Mistake Analysis in Your Classroom

The magic of mistakes is not a belief system. It is a practical set of tools you can apply in almost any classroom context, regardless of grade level or subject area. Here are four strategies you can use to leverage mistake analysis as a seamless way to incorporate critical thinking into your instruction:

1. Anticipate "good" mistakes in advance.

When planning for instruction, think ahead about the kinds of mistakes students are most likely to make. You already know how students will get confused when adding fractions with unlike denominators. You can predict that some students might confuse fact with opinion when the statement is "pizza is the best food ever" (because it is).

But don't stop at identifying WHAT students may do incorrectly. Make sure you think about WHY the mistake may happen so you can do a better job in your instruction to show them HOW to prevent that mistake. For instance, if a student tells you that 5 + 2 = 6, you should anticipate this to be a common mistake that occurs when students start their counting with an addend, which sounds like, "Okay, starting with 5, I'm adding 2, so 5, 6. The answer is 6."

2. Use probing questions to grapple with "good" mistakes in real time.

Teacher: Who would you argue is most responsible for the assassination of Malcolm X?

Student: John F. Kennedy.

This real-life classroom exchange shows why it is hard to prepare for the infinite universe of potential mistakes. But do not be so quick to dismiss a student's answer as totally off-base. They offer a lot of opportunities for learning and some of them have the potential to be "magic." Instead of moving on so quickly, try some of the following probing questions:

JFK? Interesting. What makes you say that?

Why might some of your classmates disagree with you?

JFK was assassinated before Malcolm X was. Help me understand why you believe he is responsible for the assassination of Malcolm X. (Ask clarifying questions if the student's timeline, scientific theory, mathematical concept, grammatical rule, etc., does not appear to be accurate, even after probing.)

If you simply dismissed this student's answer as nonsense, you would have missed out on the clever connection this student made between JFK's assassination, Malcolm X's controversial quote stating that this tragedy was an example of "chickens coming home to roost," and inevitably, a turning point in the growing tension between Malcolm X and the leadership of the Nation of Islam.

3. Ask students to create their own "good" mistakes.

"How might someone get this question wrong?" When we have students anticipate the most predictable mistakes that might be made on a task, we're moving well beyond that lower level of test-taking skills and instead, getting students to think like test- makers, coming up with viable (but incorrect) options on a multiple-choice test.

Suppose your students struggle to identify the main idea of a passage. Instead of asking students to define the main idea of this post, for example, what if we asked them to create three wrong but "good" incorrect responses to what the main idea is?

"Students get upset when they get an answer wrong" works well because we know how tempting it is to just read the opening of a piece and guess a main idea from that.

"Mistakes can be magical" would be an answer a student might pick who only read the title.

"Educators should anticipate likely mistakes in advance" is the first practical recommendation, so a student might mistakenly choose this response as the main idea.

It's important that when students do this, they come up with logical possibilities. I have my students follow what I call the "Joe Schmo" rule: What kind of answer would trip up Joe Schmo, the average person who always falls for the trick answer? Instead of letting students come up with crazy, nonsensical options, this rule keeps the exercise at a challenging metacognitive level.

4. Which wrong is more "right"?

Mistake analysis can also be an opportunity to introduce conflict, drama, and meaningful opportunities to write and debate across content areas. As an attorney representing clients in business disputes, I rarely had a case where one side was pristine and the other was pure evil. They were usually both wrong, to some extent. But the core question was, which one is more "right"?

Bring this framework into your classroom by analyzing two equations that are both done incorrectly, but one has a computational error and the other has a conceptual answer. Two paragraphs or essays where one has structural errors and the other is riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes. Two science experiments with flawed procedures because one has problems with omitted variable bias and the other struggles with selection bias. Asking which wrong is more "right" helps learners shift from asking "what" and "how to" to asking "why" and "what if" - a necessary shift for giving students the tools to not just analyze the world as it is, but imagine it as it ought to be.

I am a true believer in the magic of mistakes. To be clear, I am not advocating for a world with no wrong answers. I am advocating for a world where children (and adults) are less obsessed with being right and much more focused on the process of understanding what it means to do right. Care about social-emotional learning? There is tremendous empathy to be gained from learning why someone sees something differently than you do. Worried about how you can motivate students to engage in critical thinking? There are amazing instructional implications for planning for mistakes in a way that sets up a classroom culture where traits like compliance and risk-taking outweigh the default culture of compliance and rule-following.

When we don't give our students opportunities to engage in critical thinking at all levels, we are systemically leaving brilliance on the table. By adding strategies like mistake analysis to our regular classroom practice, we're tapping into that brilliance and making it more likely that all of our students will thrive.

Mistake analysis is just one of the many powerful but practical strategies I break down in more detail in Thinking Like a Lawyer and in the work we lead with school systems across the country to ensure critical thinking is no longer a luxury good. Learn more about what we do at ThinkLaw.us.

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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The Magic of Mistakes: 4 Ways to Boost Critical Thinking with Mistake Analysis

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Wrong answers can be an incredible tool for learning. Discover how easy it is to add mistake analysis to your classroom.

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In this podcast, the host answers kids' questions that are sent in. She always has kids on her set pitching as well. In this podcast the child asked "how do mosquitos drink our blood." The host does a great job interacting and informing the kids. These podcasts are also more fun and engaging to listen to since they are student-centered.

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Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

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Why do mosquitoes bite? Scratching that itch

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Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

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This podcast by Lindsay Patterson describes multiple uses and reasons to use Podcasts in your classroom. She describes how it benefits students reading skills by requiring them to focus on listening, helping them to hear new words, grammar, and more.

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Listen to the interview with Lindsay Patterson, Monica Brady-Myerov,
and Marshall Escamilla (transcript):
Sponsored by Listenwise and Scholastic Scope

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Imagine this scene in your classroom: Students are at their desks, completely engaged and attentive. But no one's talking. You're also quiet. Your students are not doing a worksheet. They're not watching a video. They're listening.

A podcast is playing from speakers at the front of the room. You can see how your students are caught up in the story. Every so often they laugh at a joke or gasp with surprise at a twist in the story. Their imaginations are alive. The words are turning into movies in their minds. Physically, they're in the classroom, but really, they're in another world.

That's the power of audio. And the best part? Just the act of listening to a good narrative helps your students become better learners. Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Whether you are in-person, remote, hybrid, flipped or blended, podcasts can enhance your teaching in meaningful ways.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about the benefits of podcasts for education. In 2015, I created Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, one of the first educational podcasts for kids. The following year, I helped put together a list of 8 Great Educational Podcasts for Kids for Cult of Pedagogy. I also co-founded Kids Listen, a non-profit organization advocating for podcasts for kids. And now, I'm the CEO of Tumble Media, a production company dedicated to creating children's educational audio. Through the years, I've interacted with teachers who have brought podcasts into their classrooms in incredibly innovative ways. I've done in-class demos and have seen students fall in love with podcasts. I wanted to share why using podcasts is so powerful in education. But there hasn't been a roadmap for how to bring audio into the classroom.

To build that roadmap, I teamed up with Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder and CEO of Listenwise, a platform for improving listening skills through podcasts and public radio stories. She's one of the pioneers of educational audio and author of the new book, Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners. Monica is an expert on the science of audio, the research behind it, and ultimately, how to use audio to enhance listening and learning.

In this blog post, we share what we've learned over years of immersion in educational audio-land, explore why podcasts are so great for education, and provide a roadmap for how to get started. Let's start with the science.

On the podcast, we talk with three leaders in educational podcasts (L to R): Lindsay Patterson, Marshall Escamilla, and Monica Brady-Myerov.

The Science of Listening

We are always listening. And yet a lifetime of hearing doesn't make us good listeners. We have to work at it. Years of research have proven the benefits of listening in education.

Listening Is a Critical Factor in Learning How to Read

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. The Simple View of Reading formula developed by Gough & Tunmer shows that reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the science of reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening and reading together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words. Research shows listening while reading improves text reading rates and leads to higher comprehension.

As students get older, the importance of listening to reading doesn't disappear; it increases. Researchers found that, over time, the relative importance of listening comprehension increases as a child becomes a more proficient reader. Decoding is still important to reading comprehension, but it's less of a potential roadblock once kids have mastered it. In fact, by 8 th grade, literacy researcher Tiffany Hogan says " all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension could be explained by the listening comprehension factor."

In other words, introducing more listen-only content will benefit reading comprehension for years to come.

Listening Shapes Your Brain and Memory

Our brains make a mental imagery -the "movie in our minds"-of what we hear. When we listen, our ears aren't just passive absorbers of information. We are activating systems in the brains that are responsible for sight, sound, motor control and olfaction. "We imagine sounds using the same brain regions that allow us to hear real sounds," says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen.

Listening improves social-emotional wellbeing. Researchers found that when someone is engaged in a story, it's positively associated with psychological safety and negatively associated with social anxiety. And that connection actually improves your listening.

Listening Supports Multilingual Learning

For the English learners in classrooms, listening provides an equal opportunity to access content and hear authentically spoken language. While listening can occur at different speeds to improve comprehension, everyone is listening to the same text. Unlike reading exercises in which the text is leveled down to the reader's ability, listening-with the right scaffolding-has the same high level of academic language and content vocabulary.

In addition to learning about the world, listening is an excellent way to build background knowledge of the subject, a key element of listening comprehension, especially in learning a second language.

Why Podcasts Make a Great Addition to Your Classroom

Let's be honest: Audio has been lifting its weight in the classroom for decades in various forms. But podcasts have unique advantages. They feature authentic language, real conversations, and diverse voices. You can choose from a wide variety of topics-everything from stories, to history, to mindfulness, science, music, literature, and more-and some podcasters even make special episodes designed for the classroom. They're designed to catch the ear and hold attention in a way that feels almost magical. Best of all, podcasts fit any classroom budget: They're free.

Kids Love Podcasts

Podcasts aren't a tough sell for kids. They're a dedicated audience. One in 4 kids already listen to podcasts, according to Ipsos, a global market research firm. At Kids Listen, we found a variety of reasons behind this in our most recent survey of listening families. The top reason was that they are fun and entertaining (49 percent), followed by their educational appeal (33 percent). A host of other reasons included that podcasts build skills, calm kids, prompt family discussion, allow for multitasking, and provide regular new content. In one notable response, a teacher from Texas said, "One of the new TEKS for 4th and 5th graders is LISTENING. We listen most mornings in the classroom. The kids LOVE it."

When you introduce podcasts to your classroom, ask students if they have listened to podcasts, and which are their favorites. It may give you some ideas of podcasts to check out!

Podcasts are Portable and Mobile

A primary benefit of audio is that it doesn't tie students to a screen. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for creative educational experiences. This is highlighted by the most recent Kids Listen survey. We asked parents what activities children engage in while listening to podcasts. The majority of respondents (78 percent) responded that kids "just actively listen," they also did a variety of other things: Playing, working with art materials, getting ready for bed, doing chores, and other elements of their daily routine.

That flexibility at home translates to educational settings as well. Play a podcast while your students do classroom chores or creative activities that don't require mental focus. Cue up podcasts on their devices while they walk around the school, getting exercise while practicing their listening skills. Or combine podcast time with drawing-students can sketch scenes from the podcast as they listen. The list of things to do while listening is endless.

These ideas work for any podcast. But some podcasts are built around activity.

Mindfulness podcasts like Peace Out and Like You guide kids through meditation and movement.

Music education shows like Noodle Loaf and The Music Box encourage making music and moving around.

On Tumble, we've leaned into these audio advantages by designing episodes and audio courses that encourage active exploration. For example, our interactive episode "Solve the Case of The Sleeping Trees" leads students through making observations, asking questions, and making conclusions. The ideal setting to listen is outdoors, in nature.

Podcasts Are a Great Way to Explore Current Events

Most podcasts are designed to be evergreen; you can return to the same episodes year after year, and they'll still be relevant. But others are designed for the moment.

News podcasts are a great way to approach current events. Typically short, you can play episodes as a warmup for the day, or as a lead-in to larger discussions.

KidzNuz is designed for the classroom, with a quiz at the end of each daily episode to practice comprehension.

Published twice weekly, The Ten News clocks in at ten minutes: Each episode tackles the biggest headlines, followed by fun segments and trivia questions.

Newsy Jacuzzi is an international take on the news, hosted by a mother and daughter in India.

Listenwise curates daily current events for the classroom and gives you a bank of questions to spark conversation.

It's not just news podcasts that can help kids process current events and realities. At Your Level, hosted by an 11-year-old kid, did an episode on pandemic birthdays during the coronavirus lockdowns. Even fictional stories can take on elements of real life. For example, in the Stoopkid Stories episode "The BB Twins," the characters deal with the effects of their dance going viral on social media. Stories can also take on hot topics like The Imagine Neighborhood's 6-part series on Race, Identity, and Making Things Right.

Podcasts Come in a Variety of Lengths

Not only do podcasts provide a variety of content, they come in a variety of lengths. You can choose whether to make listening your main meal, or simply a side of your lesson.

Many educationally-minded podcast creators have consulted with teachers in order to develop special episodes that fit into classroom time.

Pamela Rogers, a school librarian and creator of the literature podcast Buttons & Figs, developed playlists of 5 minute interactive wordplay challenges for the classroom.

What Will She Do Next, a women's history podcast, creates 10 minute episodes in addition to their usual 20 minute episodes.

Timestorm, a serialized audio podcast for tweens and teens, creates 10 minute stand-alone minisodes.

Love Learning, which offers everything from poems to mediations for elementary students, clocks in episodes from one minute to 11 minutes.

Other short podcasts include the serialized fiction podcast Six Minutes, a personal growth podcast Five Minutes with Dad, African Folktales, and Two Whats and A Wow.

Other podcasters have found that 20 minutes is a great length for the classroom. Kitty Felde edits her episodes of Book Club for Kids and her series, The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, to that length based on teacher input. Eat Your Spanish, a language learning podcast, can serve as a full lesson at 20-25 minutes. From personal experience, Tumble's 15 minute episodes are frequently used in the classroom as well.

Listenwise offers a happy medium by editing longer podcasts and NPR stories into shorter versions. The audio stories are 5 minutes long and come with listening discussion questions, interactive transcripts and quizzes across a wide variety of subjects in ELA, social studies and science.

Podcasts Help You Meet Academic Standards

Aside from the fun benefits, there's a very practical one too. Listening now is an anchor standard of the Common Core. Even states that are not using Common Core standards include listening in their curriculum standards. Twenty-two states include listening in their high-stakes exam. If you are in California, Wisconsin or Indiana, a portion of your ELA exam is listening.

Practicing students' listening "muscle" for these tests makes sense, and you can build their listening stamina with a podcast. When they enjoy listening to podcasts, they'll be strong for the assessment audio. Following listening, asking kids to identify the main idea, make an inference or recall a specific detail from the story also addresses many other ELA standards. And if you listen to a podcast aligned with your curriculum such as an Earth Rangers episode on frogs and metamorphosis, you can also knock off some NGSS science standards.

Top 4 Places to Find Audio for Kids

Now that we've convinced you that adding audio to your instruction is an easy, fun way to build skills and knowledge, you're probably wondering where you find all this great audio? We've already mentioned a few shows and platforms, but here's a list of platforms for you to discover your favorite podcasts.

Kids Listen is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality audio content especially made for kids, with over 130 member podcasts. The Kids Listen App (for iOs, Android, and web browser) organizes these podcasts by age, interest, and curated playlists. The Kids Listen Activity Podcast brings you episodes from different podcasts, paired with suggested activities for further learning. Kids Listen University is a place to find podcast-based lessons and curriculum.

This online platform brings NPR and podcasts to the classroom with easy-to-use podcast lessons and listening comprehension quizzes. The collection of 2500+ curriculum-aligned podcasts for grades 2-12 keep teaching connected to the real world. Free for teachers, a Premium subscription available for schools.

Librarians Pamela Rogers and Anne Bensfield write a regular column about "Kidcasts," exploring recommended episodes by themes like "Black Changemakers," "Podcasts to Encourage Mindfulness," and "Poetry." They created this handy poster with their top "classroom-ready" podcasts.

A paid subscription for teachers or parents who want ad-free streaming services for kids podcasts ages 3-13. PINNA is quickly producing new podcasts for kids so there is a lot to explore on this platform.

Additionally, I've written two kidcast recommendation articles for The New York Times: A Big List of Podcasts for Little Kids and A Big List of Podcasts for Bigger Kids.

More kids' podcasts are coming out all the time, so keep your ears open. With all these resources, all you need to do is go forth and listen!

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

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Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Learn the benefits and where to find great ones.

# data[].attributes.body
In this podcast, Lindsey Patterson and two other educational podcasters explain the benefits of incorporating the use of podcasts in the education system. At the beginning of the podcast, she uses the sense of imagery to provide educators the ability to see their own classroom blend the practice of listening to podcasts. She informs her audience about the science of listening, she gives examples to why podcasts would add value to the classroom, and she provides examples of podcasts that explore current events that students can understand.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to the interview with Lindsay Patterson, Monica Brady-Myerov,
and Marshall Escamilla (transcript):
Sponsored by Listenwise and Scholastic Scope

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Imagine this scene in your classroom: Students are at their desks, completely engaged and attentive. But no one's talking. You're also quiet. Your students are not doing a worksheet. They're not watching a video. They're listening.

A podcast is playing from speakers at the front of the room. You can see how your students are caught up in the story. Every so often they laugh at a joke or gasp with surprise at a twist in the story. Their imaginations are alive. The words are turning into movies in their minds. Physically, they're in the classroom, but really, they're in another world.

That's the power of audio. And the best part? Just the act of listening to a good narrative helps your students become better learners. Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Whether you are in-person, remote, hybrid, flipped or blended, podcasts can enhance your teaching in meaningful ways.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about the benefits of podcasts for education. In 2015, I created Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, one of the first educational podcasts for kids. The following year, I helped put together a list of 8 Great Educational Podcasts for Kids for Cult of Pedagogy. I also co-founded Kids Listen, a non-profit organization advocating for podcasts for kids. And now, I'm the CEO of Tumble Media, a production company dedicated to creating children's educational audio. Through the years, I've interacted with teachers who have brought podcasts into their classrooms in incredibly innovative ways. I've done in-class demos and have seen students fall in love with podcasts. I wanted to share why using podcasts is so powerful in education. But there hasn't been a roadmap for how to bring audio into the classroom.

To build that roadmap, I teamed up with Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder and CEO of Listenwise, a platform for improving listening skills through podcasts and public radio stories. She's one of the pioneers of educational audio and author of the new book, Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners. Monica is an expert on the science of audio, the research behind it, and ultimately, how to use audio to enhance listening and learning.

In this blog post, we share what we've learned over years of immersion in educational audio-land, explore why podcasts are so great for education, and provide a roadmap for how to get started. Let's start with the science.

On the podcast, we talk with three leaders in educational podcasts (L to R): Lindsay Patterson, Marshall Escamilla, and Monica Brady-Myerov.

The Science of Listening

We are always listening. And yet a lifetime of hearing doesn't make us good listeners. We have to work at it. Years of research have proven the benefits of listening in education.

Listening Is a Critical Factor in Learning How to Read

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. The Simple View of Reading formula developed by Gough & Tunmer shows that reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the science of reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening and reading together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words. Research shows listening while reading improves text reading rates and leads to higher comprehension.

As students get older, the importance of listening to reading doesn't disappear; it increases. Researchers found that, over time, the relative importance of listening comprehension increases as a child becomes a more proficient reader. Decoding is still important to reading comprehension, but it's less of a potential roadblock once kids have mastered it. In fact, by 8 th grade, literacy researcher Tiffany Hogan says " all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension could be explained by the listening comprehension factor."

In other words, introducing more listen-only content will benefit reading comprehension for years to come.

Listening Shapes Your Brain and Memory

Our brains make a mental imagery -the "movie in our minds"-of what we hear. When we listen, our ears aren't just passive absorbers of information. We are activating systems in the brains that are responsible for sight, sound, motor control and olfaction. "We imagine sounds using the same brain regions that allow us to hear real sounds," says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen.

Listening improves social-emotional wellbeing. Researchers found that when someone is engaged in a story, it's positively associated with psychological safety and negatively associated with social anxiety. And that connection actually improves your listening.

Listening Supports Multilingual Learning

For the English learners in classrooms, listening provides an equal opportunity to access content and hear authentically spoken language. While listening can occur at different speeds to improve comprehension, everyone is listening to the same text. Unlike reading exercises in which the text is leveled down to the reader's ability, listening-with the right scaffolding-has the same high level of academic language and content vocabulary.

In addition to learning about the world, listening is an excellent way to build background knowledge of the subject, a key element of listening comprehension, especially in learning a second language.

Why Podcasts Make a Great Addition to Your Classroom

Let's be honest: Audio has been lifting its weight in the classroom for decades in various forms. But podcasts have unique advantages. They feature authentic language, real conversations, and diverse voices. You can choose from a wide variety of topics-everything from stories, to history, to mindfulness, science, music, literature, and more-and some podcasters even make special episodes designed for the classroom. They're designed to catch the ear and hold attention in a way that feels almost magical. Best of all, podcasts fit any classroom budget: They're free.

Kids Love Podcasts

Podcasts aren't a tough sell for kids. They're a dedicated audience. One in 4 kids already listen to podcasts, according to Ipsos, a global market research firm. At Kids Listen, we found a variety of reasons behind this in our most recent survey of listening families. The top reason was that they are fun and entertaining (49 percent), followed by their educational appeal (33 percent). A host of other reasons included that podcasts build skills, calm kids, prompt family discussion, allow for multitasking, and provide regular new content. In one notable response, a teacher from Texas said, "One of the new TEKS for 4th and 5th graders is LISTENING. We listen most mornings in the classroom. The kids LOVE it."

When you introduce podcasts to your classroom, ask students if they have listened to podcasts, and which are their favorites. It may give you some ideas of podcasts to check out!

Podcasts are Portable and Mobile

A primary benefit of audio is that it doesn't tie students to a screen. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for creative educational experiences. This is highlighted by the most recent Kids Listen survey. We asked parents what activities children engage in while listening to podcasts. The majority of respondents (78 percent) responded that kids "just actively listen," they also did a variety of other things: Playing, working with art materials, getting ready for bed, doing chores, and other elements of their daily routine.

That flexibility at home translates to educational settings as well. Play a podcast while your students do classroom chores or creative activities that don't require mental focus. Cue up podcasts on their devices while they walk around the school, getting exercise while practicing their listening skills. Or combine podcast time with drawing-students can sketch scenes from the podcast as they listen. The list of things to do while listening is endless.

These ideas work for any podcast. But some podcasts are built around activity.

Mindfulness podcasts like Peace Out and Like You guide kids through meditation and movement.

Music education shows like Noodle Loaf and The Music Box encourage making music and moving around.

On Tumble, we've leaned into these audio advantages by designing episodes and audio courses that encourage active exploration. For example, our interactive episode "Solve the Case of The Sleeping Trees" leads students through making observations, asking questions, and making conclusions. The ideal setting to listen is outdoors, in nature.

Podcasts Are a Great Way to Explore Current Events

Most podcasts are designed to be evergreen; you can return to the same episodes year after year, and they'll still be relevant. But others are designed for the moment.

News podcasts are a great way to approach current events. Typically short, you can play episodes as a warmup for the day, or as a lead-in to larger discussions.

KidzNuz is designed for the classroom, with a quiz at the end of each daily episode to practice comprehension.

Published twice weekly, The Ten News clocks in at ten minutes: Each episode tackles the biggest headlines, followed by fun segments and trivia questions.

Newsy Jacuzzi is an international take on the news, hosted by a mother and daughter in India.

Listenwise curates daily current events for the classroom and gives you a bank of questions to spark conversation.

It's not just news podcasts that can help kids process current events and realities. At Your Level, hosted by an 11-year-old kid, did an episode on pandemic birthdays during the coronavirus lockdowns. Even fictional stories can take on elements of real life. For example, in the Stoopkid Stories episode "The BB Twins," the characters deal with the effects of their dance going viral on social media. Stories can also take on hot topics like The Imagine Neighborhood's 6-part series on Race, Identity, and Making Things Right.

Podcasts Come in a Variety of Lengths

Not only do podcasts provide a variety of content, they come in a variety of lengths. You can choose whether to make listening your main meal, or simply a side of your lesson.

Many educationally-minded podcast creators have consulted with teachers in order to develop special episodes that fit into classroom time.

Pamela Rogers, a school librarian and creator of the literature podcast Buttons & Figs, developed playlists of 5 minute interactive wordplay challenges for the classroom.

What Will She Do Next, a women's history podcast, creates 10 minute episodes in addition to their usual 20 minute episodes.

Timestorm, a serialized audio podcast for tweens and teens, creates 10 minute stand-alone minisodes.

Love Learning, which offers everything from poems to mediations for elementary students, clocks in episodes from one minute to 11 minutes.

Other short podcasts include the serialized fiction podcast Six Minutes, a personal growth podcast Five Minutes with Dad, African Folktales, and Two Whats and A Wow.

Other podcasters have found that 20 minutes is a great length for the classroom. Kitty Felde edits her episodes of Book Club for Kids and her series, The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, to that length based on teacher input. Eat Your Spanish, a language learning podcast, can serve as a full lesson at 20-25 minutes. From personal experience, Tumble's 15 minute episodes are frequently used in the classroom as well.

Listenwise offers a happy medium by editing longer podcasts and NPR stories into shorter versions. The audio stories are 5 minutes long and come with listening discussion questions, interactive transcripts and quizzes across a wide variety of subjects in ELA, social studies and science.

Podcasts Help You Meet Academic Standards

Aside from the fun benefits, there's a very practical one too. Listening now is an anchor standard of the Common Core. Even states that are not using Common Core standards include listening in their curriculum standards. Twenty-two states include listening in their high-stakes exam. If you are in California, Wisconsin or Indiana, a portion of your ELA exam is listening.

Practicing students' listening "muscle" for these tests makes sense, and you can build their listening stamina with a podcast. When they enjoy listening to podcasts, they'll be strong for the assessment audio. Following listening, asking kids to identify the main idea, make an inference or recall a specific detail from the story also addresses many other ELA standards. And if you listen to a podcast aligned with your curriculum such as an Earth Rangers episode on frogs and metamorphosis, you can also knock off some NGSS science standards.

Top 4 Places to Find Audio for Kids

Now that we've convinced you that adding audio to your instruction is an easy, fun way to build skills and knowledge, you're probably wondering where you find all this great audio? We've already mentioned a few shows and platforms, but here's a list of platforms for you to discover your favorite podcasts.

Kids Listen is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality audio content especially made for kids, with over 130 member podcasts. The Kids Listen App (for iOs, Android, and web browser) organizes these podcasts by age, interest, and curated playlists. The Kids Listen Activity Podcast brings you episodes from different podcasts, paired with suggested activities for further learning. Kids Listen University is a place to find podcast-based lessons and curriculum.

This online platform brings NPR and podcasts to the classroom with easy-to-use podcast lessons and listening comprehension quizzes. The collection of 2500+ curriculum-aligned podcasts for grades 2-12 keep teaching connected to the real world. Free for teachers, a Premium subscription available for schools.

Librarians Pamela Rogers and Anne Bensfield write a regular column about "Kidcasts," exploring recommended episodes by themes like "Black Changemakers," "Podcasts to Encourage Mindfulness," and "Poetry." They created this handy poster with their top "classroom-ready" podcasts.

A paid subscription for teachers or parents who want ad-free streaming services for kids podcasts ages 3-13. PINNA is quickly producing new podcasts for kids so there is a lot to explore on this platform.

Additionally, I've written two kidcast recommendation articles for The New York Times: A Big List of Podcasts for Little Kids and A Big List of Podcasts for Bigger Kids.

More kids' podcasts are coming out all the time, so keep your ears open. With all these resources, all you need to do is go forth and listen!

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Learn the benefits and where to find great ones.

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast, Every Classroom Matters, is hosted by Vicki Davis. This specific episode is titled "Teaching Students Who Struggle with Self-Control" and has guest speaker Dr. Melrose join Vicki to discuss students who may be struggling with emotional regulation. Dr. Melrose explains that teachers need to be aware of their own state of being in the classroom and make sure you are modeling behaviors that display emotional regulation when interacting with their students. She also talks about the stress that both teachers and students experience. She covers tools that can help to decrease these stress levels for both the students and teachers in the classroom community. She works through an example grounding activity with Vicki Davis to show how this may be able to work in a classroom.

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‎Every Classroom Matters With Cool Cat Teacher: Teaching Students Who Struggle with Self-Control on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show Every Classroom Matters With Cool Cat Teacher, Ep Teaching Students Who Struggle with Self-Control - Apr 30, 2017

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This podcast was very sweet and engaging. This podcast discusses the process of losing our baby teeth and growing new ones. It starts of with silly different characters called the wondering teeth and the adventures they go on once they have fallen out. The podcast continues with the tooth travel agent answering questions asked by kids. I thought this podcast was a very fun way for kids to learn about their different teeth and how best to take care of them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

# data[].attributes.body
Josy

# data[].attributes.body
Students begin the podcast by asking questions that they want to learn more about, for instance about weather. An adult then answers the students questions. She uses accurate information and credible references in her podcast. She also incorporates specialists that are knowledgeable about the topic within her audio. She uses examples, and provides higher order thinking questions that students can understand.

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Thunder, lightning and tornadoes: Where do they come from?

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There are some basic ingredients to make thunderstorms and tornadoes. We’ll find out what they are – and how to observe these powerful and amazing storms safely.

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast is about a few reasons why podcasts should be brought into the classroom. It includes major figures of educational podcasts as guests to discuss the reasons. It covers research behind listening as a learning modality, why podcasts make outstanding curriculum resources, and the top four places where podcasts can be found for classroom use.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to the interview with Lindsay Patterson, Monica Brady-Myerov,
and Marshall Escamilla (transcript):
Sponsored by Listenwise and Scholastic Scope

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Imagine this scene in your classroom: Students are at their desks, completely engaged and attentive. But no one's talking. You're also quiet. Your students are not doing a worksheet. They're not watching a video. They're listening.

A podcast is playing from speakers at the front of the room. You can see how your students are caught up in the story. Every so often they laugh at a joke or gasp with surprise at a twist in the story. Their imaginations are alive. The words are turning into movies in their minds. Physically, they're in the classroom, but really, they're in another world.

That's the power of audio. And the best part? Just the act of listening to a good narrative helps your students become better learners. Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Whether you are in-person, remote, hybrid, flipped or blended, podcasts can enhance your teaching in meaningful ways.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about the benefits of podcasts for education. In 2015, I created Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, one of the first educational podcasts for kids. The following year, I helped put together a list of 8 Great Educational Podcasts for Kids for Cult of Pedagogy. I also co-founded Kids Listen, a non-profit organization advocating for podcasts for kids. And now, I'm the CEO of Tumble Media, a production company dedicated to creating children's educational audio. Through the years, I've interacted with teachers who have brought podcasts into their classrooms in incredibly innovative ways. I've done in-class demos and have seen students fall in love with podcasts. I wanted to share why using podcasts is so powerful in education. But there hasn't been a roadmap for how to bring audio into the classroom.

To build that roadmap, I teamed up with Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder and CEO of Listenwise, a platform for improving listening skills through podcasts and public radio stories. She's one of the pioneers of educational audio and author of the new book, Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners. Monica is an expert on the science of audio, the research behind it, and ultimately, how to use audio to enhance listening and learning.

In this blog post, we share what we've learned over years of immersion in educational audio-land, explore why podcasts are so great for education, and provide a roadmap for how to get started. Let's start with the science.

On the podcast, we talk with three leaders in educational podcasts (L to R): Lindsay Patterson, Marshall Escamilla, and Monica Brady-Myerov.

The Science of Listening

We are always listening. And yet a lifetime of hearing doesn't make us good listeners. We have to work at it. Years of research have proven the benefits of listening in education.

Listening Is a Critical Factor in Learning How to Read

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. The Simple View of Reading formula developed by Gough & Tunmer shows that reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the science of reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening and reading together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words. Research shows listening while reading improves text reading rates and leads to higher comprehension.

As students get older, the importance of listening to reading doesn't disappear; it increases. Researchers found that, over time, the relative importance of listening comprehension increases as a child becomes a more proficient reader. Decoding is still important to reading comprehension, but it's less of a potential roadblock once kids have mastered it. In fact, by 8 th grade, literacy researcher Tiffany Hogan says " all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension could be explained by the listening comprehension factor."

In other words, introducing more listen-only content will benefit reading comprehension for years to come.

Listening Shapes Your Brain and Memory

Our brains make a mental imagery -the "movie in our minds"-of what we hear. When we listen, our ears aren't just passive absorbers of information. We are activating systems in the brains that are responsible for sight, sound, motor control and olfaction. "We imagine sounds using the same brain regions that allow us to hear real sounds," says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen.

Listening improves social-emotional wellbeing. Researchers found that when someone is engaged in a story, it's positively associated with psychological safety and negatively associated with social anxiety. And that connection actually improves your listening.

Listening Supports Multilingual Learning

For the English learners in classrooms, listening provides an equal opportunity to access content and hear authentically spoken language. While listening can occur at different speeds to improve comprehension, everyone is listening to the same text. Unlike reading exercises in which the text is leveled down to the reader's ability, listening-with the right scaffolding-has the same high level of academic language and content vocabulary.

In addition to learning about the world, listening is an excellent way to build background knowledge of the subject, a key element of listening comprehension, especially in learning a second language.

Why Podcasts Make a Great Addition to Your Classroom

Let's be honest: Audio has been lifting its weight in the classroom for decades in various forms. But podcasts have unique advantages. They feature authentic language, real conversations, and diverse voices. You can choose from a wide variety of topics-everything from stories, to history, to mindfulness, science, music, literature, and more-and some podcasters even make special episodes designed for the classroom. They're designed to catch the ear and hold attention in a way that feels almost magical. Best of all, podcasts fit any classroom budget: They're free.

Kids Love Podcasts

Podcasts aren't a tough sell for kids. They're a dedicated audience. One in 4 kids already listen to podcasts, according to Ipsos, a global market research firm. At Kids Listen, we found a variety of reasons behind this in our most recent survey of listening families. The top reason was that they are fun and entertaining (49 percent), followed by their educational appeal (33 percent). A host of other reasons included that podcasts build skills, calm kids, prompt family discussion, allow for multitasking, and provide regular new content. In one notable response, a teacher from Texas said, "One of the new TEKS for 4th and 5th graders is LISTENING. We listen most mornings in the classroom. The kids LOVE it."

When you introduce podcasts to your classroom, ask students if they have listened to podcasts, and which are their favorites. It may give you some ideas of podcasts to check out!

Podcasts are Portable and Mobile

A primary benefit of audio is that it doesn't tie students to a screen. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for creative educational experiences. This is highlighted by the most recent Kids Listen survey. We asked parents what activities children engage in while listening to podcasts. The majority of respondents (78 percent) responded that kids "just actively listen," they also did a variety of other things: Playing, working with art materials, getting ready for bed, doing chores, and other elements of their daily routine.

That flexibility at home translates to educational settings as well. Play a podcast while your students do classroom chores or creative activities that don't require mental focus. Cue up podcasts on their devices while they walk around the school, getting exercise while practicing their listening skills. Or combine podcast time with drawing-students can sketch scenes from the podcast as they listen. The list of things to do while listening is endless.

These ideas work for any podcast. But some podcasts are built around activity.

Mindfulness podcasts like Peace Out and Like You guide kids through meditation and movement.

Music education shows like Noodle Loaf and The Music Box encourage making music and moving around.

On Tumble, we've leaned into these audio advantages by designing episodes and audio courses that encourage active exploration. For example, our interactive episode "Solve the Case of The Sleeping Trees" leads students through making observations, asking questions, and making conclusions. The ideal setting to listen is outdoors, in nature.

Podcasts Are a Great Way to Explore Current Events

Most podcasts are designed to be evergreen; you can return to the same episodes year after year, and they'll still be relevant. But others are designed for the moment.

News podcasts are a great way to approach current events. Typically short, you can play episodes as a warmup for the day, or as a lead-in to larger discussions.

KidzNuz is designed for the classroom, with a quiz at the end of each daily episode to practice comprehension.

Published twice weekly, The Ten News clocks in at ten minutes: Each episode tackles the biggest headlines, followed by fun segments and trivia questions.

Newsy Jacuzzi is an international take on the news, hosted by a mother and daughter in India.

Listenwise curates daily current events for the classroom and gives you a bank of questions to spark conversation.

It's not just news podcasts that can help kids process current events and realities. At Your Level, hosted by an 11-year-old kid, did an episode on pandemic birthdays during the coronavirus lockdowns. Even fictional stories can take on elements of real life. For example, in the Stoopkid Stories episode "The BB Twins," the characters deal with the effects of their dance going viral on social media. Stories can also take on hot topics like The Imagine Neighborhood's 6-part series on Race, Identity, and Making Things Right.

Podcasts Come in a Variety of Lengths

Not only do podcasts provide a variety of content, they come in a variety of lengths. You can choose whether to make listening your main meal, or simply a side of your lesson.

Many educationally-minded podcast creators have consulted with teachers in order to develop special episodes that fit into classroom time.

Pamela Rogers, a school librarian and creator of the literature podcast Buttons & Figs, developed playlists of 5 minute interactive wordplay challenges for the classroom.

What Will She Do Next, a women's history podcast, creates 10 minute episodes in addition to their usual 20 minute episodes.

Timestorm, a serialized audio podcast for tweens and teens, creates 10 minute stand-alone minisodes.

Love Learning, which offers everything from poems to mediations for elementary students, clocks in episodes from one minute to 11 minutes.

Other short podcasts include the serialized fiction podcast Six Minutes, a personal growth podcast Five Minutes with Dad, African Folktales, and Two Whats and A Wow.

Other podcasters have found that 20 minutes is a great length for the classroom. Kitty Felde edits her episodes of Book Club for Kids and her series, The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, to that length based on teacher input. Eat Your Spanish, a language learning podcast, can serve as a full lesson at 20-25 minutes. From personal experience, Tumble's 15 minute episodes are frequently used in the classroom as well.

Listenwise offers a happy medium by editing longer podcasts and NPR stories into shorter versions. The audio stories are 5 minutes long and come with listening discussion questions, interactive transcripts and quizzes across a wide variety of subjects in ELA, social studies and science.

Podcasts Help You Meet Academic Standards

Aside from the fun benefits, there's a very practical one too. Listening now is an anchor standard of the Common Core. Even states that are not using Common Core standards include listening in their curriculum standards. Twenty-two states include listening in their high-stakes exam. If you are in California, Wisconsin or Indiana, a portion of your ELA exam is listening.

Practicing students' listening "muscle" for these tests makes sense, and you can build their listening stamina with a podcast. When they enjoy listening to podcasts, they'll be strong for the assessment audio. Following listening, asking kids to identify the main idea, make an inference or recall a specific detail from the story also addresses many other ELA standards. And if you listen to a podcast aligned with your curriculum such as an Earth Rangers episode on frogs and metamorphosis, you can also knock off some NGSS science standards.

Top 4 Places to Find Audio for Kids

Now that we've convinced you that adding audio to your instruction is an easy, fun way to build skills and knowledge, you're probably wondering where you find all this great audio? We've already mentioned a few shows and platforms, but here's a list of platforms for you to discover your favorite podcasts.

Kids Listen is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality audio content especially made for kids, with over 130 member podcasts. The Kids Listen App (for iOs, Android, and web browser) organizes these podcasts by age, interest, and curated playlists. The Kids Listen Activity Podcast brings you episodes from different podcasts, paired with suggested activities for further learning. Kids Listen University is a place to find podcast-based lessons and curriculum.

This online platform brings NPR and podcasts to the classroom with easy-to-use podcast lessons and listening comprehension quizzes. The collection of 2500+ curriculum-aligned podcasts for grades 2-12 keep teaching connected to the real world. Free for teachers, a Premium subscription available for schools.

Librarians Pamela Rogers and Anne Bensfield write a regular column about "Kidcasts," exploring recommended episodes by themes like "Black Changemakers," "Podcasts to Encourage Mindfulness," and "Poetry." They created this handy poster with their top "classroom-ready" podcasts.

A paid subscription for teachers or parents who want ad-free streaming services for kids podcasts ages 3-13. PINNA is quickly producing new podcasts for kids so there is a lot to explore on this platform.

Additionally, I've written two kidcast recommendation articles for The New York Times: A Big List of Podcasts for Little Kids and A Big List of Podcasts for Bigger Kids.

More kids' podcasts are coming out all the time, so keep your ears open. With all these resources, all you need to do is go forth and listen!

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Learn the benefits and where to find great ones.

# data[].attributes.body
I decided to choose this podcast titled "Why do we like getting scared?" because it is something students may be wondering about especially this time of year, with Halloween coming up. It begins with silly characters talking to introduce the topic. It might get the students interested to hear more after laughing along to what the characters' conversations. Next, an adult begins interviewing a child about how they feel about getting scared. There is music and sound affects included during this podcast as well, keeping it interesting throughout. This podcast could be useful for having students learn more about their own emotions and why they may feel the ways they do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast is hosted by Vicki Davis and has a guest named Tom Daccord. This episode discusses the educational benefits of podcasting in the classroom. They state that you can use podcasting for storytelling, interviews, language proficiency, and more. Because it involves listening to content, Daccord says that podcasts are a great tool for language acquisition. Daccord also describes the specifics of why podcasts are a great method to do story time, because when we are listening to audio on a podcast we are less focused on the appearance of things and instead create the images, characters, and scene in our own mind.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Join us as we discuss the connection between listening and learning and how to improve both.

Follow: @coolcatteacher @thomasdaccord @listenwiselearn

#edtechchat #edchat #edtech

Tom Daccord is Director of EdTechTeacher and has worked with schools, colleges and educational organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

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using podcasting to improve the listening skills of your students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
every classroom matters with cool cat teacher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
‎Every Classroom Matters With Cool Cat Teacher: Using Podcasting to Improve the Listening Skills of Your Students on Apple Podcasts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join us as we discuss the connection between listening and learning and how to improve both. Follow: @coolcatteacher @thomasdaccord @listenwiselearn #edtechchat #edchat #edtech Tom Daccord is Director of EdTechTeacher and has worked with schools, colleges and educational organizations in...

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast has students teaching us about crystals and the various crystals and minerals that are everywhere, from food we eat to the ground we walk on. These crystals come in a wide variety of colors and have many different uses as well.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brains On Universe is an independent media company for kids and curious adults. We make podcasts, books, videos and more. Our goal is to fill the world with stuff that is smart and funny, silly and serious, all at once -- just like the people in our audience.

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast was very informational. They discussed how using podcasts can improve listening skills in the classroom and the different ways you can use it. Listening to a podcast can cause the students to also use their imagination. They can invent characters and add their own visual and personality to the characters as they are listening. It definitely promotes creativity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Join us as we discuss the connection between listening and learning and how to improve both.

Follow: @coolcatteacher @thomasdaccord @listenwiselearn

#edtechchat #edchat #edtech

Tom Daccord is Director of EdTechTeacher and has worked with schools, colleges and educational organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
using podcasting to improve the listening skills of your students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
every classroom matters with cool cat teacher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
‎Every Classroom Matters With Cool Cat Teacher: Using Podcasting to Improve the Listening Skills of Your Students on Apple Podcasts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join us as we discuss the connection between listening and learning and how to improve both. Follow: @coolcatteacher @thomasdaccord @listenwiselearn #edtechchat #edchat #edtech Tom Daccord is Director of EdTechTeacher and has worked with schools, colleges and educational organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast was fun and engaging for students. It begins with a cheer that is kind of silly about how breathing works. It then goes into answering the question: How does breathing work? This is explained with student-friendly vocabulary and is detailed to where students can create a visual image of what happens when we breath.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Take a deep breath: How does breathing work?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

# data[].attributes.body
I learned that I didn't think you could incorporate podcasts into your classroom. I think that using podcasts in your class has many benefits for the students such as activating certain parts of the brain that is responsible for sound, sight, motor control, etc. Also podcasts helps improve reading through listening comprehension. These are just a couple of many and how beneficial podcasts are in the classroom.

# data[].attributes.body
After listening parts of this podcast, I learned that podcasts are great in the classroom because it improves students reading through listening comprehension. Something else I learned is that it allows English learners access to content an hear authentically spoken language.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to the interview with Lindsay Patterson, Monica Brady-Myerov,
and Marshall Escamilla (transcript):
Sponsored by Listenwise and Scholastic Scope

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Imagine this scene in your classroom: Students are at their desks, completely engaged and attentive. But no one's talking. You're also quiet. Your students are not doing a worksheet. They're not watching a video. They're listening.

A podcast is playing from speakers at the front of the room. You can see how your students are caught up in the story. Every so often they laugh at a joke or gasp with surprise at a twist in the story. Their imaginations are alive. The words are turning into movies in their minds. Physically, they're in the classroom, but really, they're in another world.

That's the power of audio. And the best part? Just the act of listening to a good narrative helps your students become better learners. Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Whether you are in-person, remote, hybrid, flipped or blended, podcasts can enhance your teaching in meaningful ways.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about the benefits of podcasts for education. In 2015, I created Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, one of the first educational podcasts for kids. The following year, I helped put together a list of 8 Great Educational Podcasts for Kids for Cult of Pedagogy. I also co-founded Kids Listen, a non-profit organization advocating for podcasts for kids. And now, I'm the CEO of Tumble Media, a production company dedicated to creating children's educational audio. Through the years, I've interacted with teachers who have brought podcasts into their classrooms in incredibly innovative ways. I've done in-class demos and have seen students fall in love with podcasts. I wanted to share why using podcasts is so powerful in education. But there hasn't been a roadmap for how to bring audio into the classroom.

To build that roadmap, I teamed up with Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder and CEO of Listenwise, a platform for improving listening skills through podcasts and public radio stories. She's one of the pioneers of educational audio and author of the new book, Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners. Monica is an expert on the science of audio, the research behind it, and ultimately, how to use audio to enhance listening and learning.

In this blog post, we share what we've learned over years of immersion in educational audio-land, explore why podcasts are so great for education, and provide a roadmap for how to get started. Let's start with the science.

On the podcast, we talk with three leaders in educational podcasts (L to R): Lindsay Patterson, Marshall Escamilla, and Monica Brady-Myerov.

The Science of Listening

We are always listening. And yet a lifetime of hearing doesn't make us good listeners. We have to work at it. Years of research have proven the benefits of listening in education.

Listening Is a Critical Factor in Learning How to Read

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. The Simple View of Reading formula developed by Gough & Tunmer shows that reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the science of reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening and reading together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words. Research shows listening while reading improves text reading rates and leads to higher comprehension.

As students get older, the importance of listening to reading doesn't disappear; it increases. Researchers found that, over time, the relative importance of listening comprehension increases as a child becomes a more proficient reader. Decoding is still important to reading comprehension, but it's less of a potential roadblock once kids have mastered it. In fact, by 8 th grade, literacy researcher Tiffany Hogan says " all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension could be explained by the listening comprehension factor."

In other words, introducing more listen-only content will benefit reading comprehension for years to come.

Listening Shapes Your Brain and Memory

Our brains make a mental imagery -the "movie in our minds"-of what we hear. When we listen, our ears aren't just passive absorbers of information. We are activating systems in the brains that are responsible for sight, sound, motor control and olfaction. "We imagine sounds using the same brain regions that allow us to hear real sounds," says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen.

Listening improves social-emotional wellbeing. Researchers found that when someone is engaged in a story, it's positively associated with psychological safety and negatively associated with social anxiety. And that connection actually improves your listening.

Listening Supports Multilingual Learning

For the English learners in classrooms, listening provides an equal opportunity to access content and hear authentically spoken language. While listening can occur at different speeds to improve comprehension, everyone is listening to the same text. Unlike reading exercises in which the text is leveled down to the reader's ability, listening-with the right scaffolding-has the same high level of academic language and content vocabulary.

In addition to learning about the world, listening is an excellent way to build background knowledge of the subject, a key element of listening comprehension, especially in learning a second language.

Why Podcasts Make a Great Addition to Your Classroom

Let's be honest: Audio has been lifting its weight in the classroom for decades in various forms. But podcasts have unique advantages. They feature authentic language, real conversations, and diverse voices. You can choose from a wide variety of topics-everything from stories, to history, to mindfulness, science, music, literature, and more-and some podcasters even make special episodes designed for the classroom. They're designed to catch the ear and hold attention in a way that feels almost magical. Best of all, podcasts fit any classroom budget: They're free.

Kids Love Podcasts

Podcasts aren't a tough sell for kids. They're a dedicated audience. One in 4 kids already listen to podcasts, according to Ipsos, a global market research firm. At Kids Listen, we found a variety of reasons behind this in our most recent survey of listening families. The top reason was that they are fun and entertaining (49 percent), followed by their educational appeal (33 percent). A host of other reasons included that podcasts build skills, calm kids, prompt family discussion, allow for multitasking, and provide regular new content. In one notable response, a teacher from Texas said, "One of the new TEKS for 4th and 5th graders is LISTENING. We listen most mornings in the classroom. The kids LOVE it."

When you introduce podcasts to your classroom, ask students if they have listened to podcasts, and which are their favorites. It may give you some ideas of podcasts to check out!

Podcasts are Portable and Mobile

A primary benefit of audio is that it doesn't tie students to a screen. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for creative educational experiences. This is highlighted by the most recent Kids Listen survey. We asked parents what activities children engage in while listening to podcasts. The majority of respondents (78 percent) responded that kids "just actively listen," they also did a variety of other things: Playing, working with art materials, getting ready for bed, doing chores, and other elements of their daily routine.

That flexibility at home translates to educational settings as well. Play a podcast while your students do classroom chores or creative activities that don't require mental focus. Cue up podcasts on their devices while they walk around the school, getting exercise while practicing their listening skills. Or combine podcast time with drawing-students can sketch scenes from the podcast as they listen. The list of things to do while listening is endless.

These ideas work for any podcast. But some podcasts are built around activity.

Mindfulness podcasts like Peace Out and Like You guide kids through meditation and movement.

Music education shows like Noodle Loaf and The Music Box encourage making music and moving around.

On Tumble, we've leaned into these audio advantages by designing episodes and audio courses that encourage active exploration. For example, our interactive episode "Solve the Case of The Sleeping Trees" leads students through making observations, asking questions, and making conclusions. The ideal setting to listen is outdoors, in nature.

Podcasts Are a Great Way to Explore Current Events

Most podcasts are designed to be evergreen; you can return to the same episodes year after year, and they'll still be relevant. But others are designed for the moment.

News podcasts are a great way to approach current events. Typically short, you can play episodes as a warmup for the day, or as a lead-in to larger discussions.

KidzNuz is designed for the classroom, with a quiz at the end of each daily episode to practice comprehension.

Published twice weekly, The Ten News clocks in at ten minutes: Each episode tackles the biggest headlines, followed by fun segments and trivia questions.

Newsy Jacuzzi is an international take on the news, hosted by a mother and daughter in India.

Listenwise curates daily current events for the classroom and gives you a bank of questions to spark conversation.

It's not just news podcasts that can help kids process current events and realities. At Your Level, hosted by an 11-year-old kid, did an episode on pandemic birthdays during the coronavirus lockdowns. Even fictional stories can take on elements of real life. For example, in the Stoopkid Stories episode "The BB Twins," the characters deal with the effects of their dance going viral on social media. Stories can also take on hot topics like The Imagine Neighborhood's 6-part series on Race, Identity, and Making Things Right.

Podcasts Come in a Variety of Lengths

Not only do podcasts provide a variety of content, they come in a variety of lengths. You can choose whether to make listening your main meal, or simply a side of your lesson.

Many educationally-minded podcast creators have consulted with teachers in order to develop special episodes that fit into classroom time.

Pamela Rogers, a school librarian and creator of the literature podcast Buttons & Figs, developed playlists of 5 minute interactive wordplay challenges for the classroom.

What Will She Do Next, a women's history podcast, creates 10 minute episodes in addition to their usual 20 minute episodes.

Timestorm, a serialized audio podcast for tweens and teens, creates 10 minute stand-alone minisodes.

Love Learning, which offers everything from poems to mediations for elementary students, clocks in episodes from one minute to 11 minutes.

Other short podcasts include the serialized fiction podcast Six Minutes, a personal growth podcast Five Minutes with Dad, African Folktales, and Two Whats and A Wow.

Other podcasters have found that 20 minutes is a great length for the classroom. Kitty Felde edits her episodes of Book Club for Kids and her series, The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, to that length based on teacher input. Eat Your Spanish, a language learning podcast, can serve as a full lesson at 20-25 minutes. From personal experience, Tumble's 15 minute episodes are frequently used in the classroom as well.

Listenwise offers a happy medium by editing longer podcasts and NPR stories into shorter versions. The audio stories are 5 minutes long and come with listening discussion questions, interactive transcripts and quizzes across a wide variety of subjects in ELA, social studies and science.

Podcasts Help You Meet Academic Standards

Aside from the fun benefits, there's a very practical one too. Listening now is an anchor standard of the Common Core. Even states that are not using Common Core standards include listening in their curriculum standards. Twenty-two states include listening in their high-stakes exam. If you are in California, Wisconsin or Indiana, a portion of your ELA exam is listening.

Practicing students' listening "muscle" for these tests makes sense, and you can build their listening stamina with a podcast. When they enjoy listening to podcasts, they'll be strong for the assessment audio. Following listening, asking kids to identify the main idea, make an inference or recall a specific detail from the story also addresses many other ELA standards. And if you listen to a podcast aligned with your curriculum such as an Earth Rangers episode on frogs and metamorphosis, you can also knock off some NGSS science standards.

Top 4 Places to Find Audio for Kids

Now that we've convinced you that adding audio to your instruction is an easy, fun way to build skills and knowledge, you're probably wondering where you find all this great audio? We've already mentioned a few shows and platforms, but here's a list of platforms for you to discover your favorite podcasts.

Kids Listen is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality audio content especially made for kids, with over 130 member podcasts. The Kids Listen App (for iOs, Android, and web browser) organizes these podcasts by age, interest, and curated playlists. The Kids Listen Activity Podcast brings you episodes from different podcasts, paired with suggested activities for further learning. Kids Listen University is a place to find podcast-based lessons and curriculum.

This online platform brings NPR and podcasts to the classroom with easy-to-use podcast lessons and listening comprehension quizzes. The collection of 2500+ curriculum-aligned podcasts for grades 2-12 keep teaching connected to the real world. Free for teachers, a Premium subscription available for schools.

Librarians Pamela Rogers and Anne Bensfield write a regular column about "Kidcasts," exploring recommended episodes by themes like "Black Changemakers," "Podcasts to Encourage Mindfulness," and "Poetry." They created this handy poster with their top "classroom-ready" podcasts.

A paid subscription for teachers or parents who want ad-free streaming services for kids podcasts ages 3-13. PINNA is quickly producing new podcasts for kids so there is a lot to explore on this platform.

Additionally, I've written two kidcast recommendation articles for The New York Times: A Big List of Podcasts for Little Kids and A Big List of Podcasts for Bigger Kids.

More kids' podcasts are coming out all the time, so keep your ears open. With all these resources, all you need to do is go forth and listen!

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

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Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Learn the benefits and where to find great ones.

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This podcast was very interesting to listen to. It was about Coronavirus and it was amazing to hear a kid's perspective about it and how they are adjusting. Gus was being interviewed by an adult about life during the coronavirus. I think we can overlook how this virus is impacting kids because we know it can be much worse for adults. So it was nice hearing how this kid was doing and adjusting during this time. It was also very informational and the sounds effect used made it more fun to listen to.

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Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

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The heroes we need to defeat the coronavirus

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Eighteen months into our fight with this coronavirus, it may feel frustrating that we're still in this battle, but there are many reasons to feel hopeful. One reason is that we know a lot about this virus now and have plenty of tools to fight it.

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Podcasts/audio files can promote creativity in the classroom by allowing the opportunity for students to apply their learning knowledge to create an artifact. These tools can incorporate higher Bloom's taxonomy skills by providing students with the necessary materials to construct a work that grants them the convenience of presenting what they know in a different format other than the usual written assessment. This will not only enhance overall learning in the classroom, but also advocate the use of creativity in schools.

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Podcasts/Audio Files can promote creativity in the classroom by allowing students to show their personalities and creative side through the product they create. Students can practice their creativity as they design and produce their podcast or audio. Their personalities will show more through the use of audio than a traditional text submission as they can control the emphasis and emotion of their words as they speak.

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When students are designing podcasts, they are having to use skills they did not know they have. They have to adapt to using a new tool. When they are listening to podcasts, they are having to recall the information they just heard, understand what they just learned, analyze the information, apply it to their own lives, evaluate the information they just heard, and create new scenarios that relate to the material. They will also have to use what they learned in order to create their own podcasts.

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Squirrelsperience: Trying out squirrel skills | Brains On

In this podcast it takes students into squirrelsperience a squirrel themed adventure course where students will learn all about skills that squirrels do while also answering a question a about how squirrels evolved.

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Squirrelsperience: Trying out squirrel skills

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We’re heading to a squirrel-themed adventure course and practicing a few of the skills they use to survive: gathering nuts, traveling in trees, and speaking like a squirrel.

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The ghosts of Molly’s shoes that she threw away visit her to teach her about garbage in the past, present, and future. The host, Molly, answers questions about trash sent in by children and has a co-host that is a child named Krisha. Molly and Krisha talk about recycling and trash. This episode specifically talks about what happens to our trash and discusses ways to make less of it.

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Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too!

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A pair of ghost shoes visit Molly with a message: it's time to think about garbage. They predict that Molly will be visited by three visions of garbage, one from the past, one from the present and one from the future.

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This podcast was really cool! It is a student centered and the 11 year old, Holiday lost her memory and develops incredible abilities. It is a mystery adventure and great for families to listen to. I like how this podcast was more of a fiction-story telling and great to listen to when you need a brain break.

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Discover the most downloaded family audio drama in history. Eleven-year-old Holiday is pulled from the icy waters of Alaska with no memory of who she is or where she comes from. And when she begins to develop incredible abilities, she'll soon learn she's not alone in the world.
From Peabody Award-winning Gen-Z Media, creators of The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel and The Big Fib, Six Minutes is a thrilling adventure for the whole family. New episodes of Season 3, Six Minutes: Out of Time release every Tuesday and Thursday.
Produced by Gen-Z Media. For more great Gen-Z shows visit http://gzmshows.com

Discover the most downloaded family audio drama in history. Eleven-year-old Holiday is pulled from the icy waters of Alaska with no memory of who she is or where she comes from. And when she begins to develop incredible abilities, she'll soon learn she's not alone in the world.
From Peabody Award-winning Gen-Z Media, creators of The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel and The Big Fib, Six Minutes is a thrilling adventure for the whole family. New episodes of Season 3, Six Minutes: Out of Time release every Tuesday and Thursday.
Produced by Gen-Z Media. For more great Gen-Z shows visit http://gzmshows.com

Animal

Is the "animal" going to show up again in the show?

Mailbag

No spoilers, but what was the decision making of of deciding that Brinley would go to elixir Academy?

Goat

BEST PODCAST EVER!!!!!!!!!❤️❤️🤩🤩😎 love it all.

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Discover the most downloaded family audio drama in history. Eleven-year-old Holiday is pulled from the icy waters of Alaska with no memory of who she is or where she comes from. And when she begins to develop incredible abilities, she'll soon learn she's not alone in the world. From Peabody Award-wi...

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Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom | Cult of Pedagogy
This podcast discusses why teachers should incorporate podcasts into their classrooms. Podcasts can help you improve your teaching in a variety of ways, whether you teach in person, remotely, hybrid, flipped, or blended.

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Listen to the interview with Lindsay Patterson, Monica Brady-Myerov,
and Marshall Escamilla (transcript):
Sponsored by Listenwise and Scholastic Scope

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Imagine this scene in your classroom: Students are at their desks, completely engaged and attentive. But no one's talking. You're also quiet. Your students are not doing a worksheet. They're not watching a video. They're listening.

A podcast is playing from speakers at the front of the room. You can see how your students are caught up in the story. Every so often they laugh at a joke or gasp with surprise at a twist in the story. Their imaginations are alive. The words are turning into movies in their minds. Physically, they're in the classroom, but really, they're in another world.

That's the power of audio. And the best part? Just the act of listening to a good narrative helps your students become better learners. Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Whether you are in-person, remote, hybrid, flipped or blended, podcasts can enhance your teaching in meaningful ways.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about the benefits of podcasts for education. In 2015, I created Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, one of the first educational podcasts for kids. The following year, I helped put together a list of 8 Great Educational Podcasts for Kids for Cult of Pedagogy. I also co-founded Kids Listen, a non-profit organization advocating for podcasts for kids. And now, I'm the CEO of Tumble Media, a production company dedicated to creating children's educational audio. Through the years, I've interacted with teachers who have brought podcasts into their classrooms in incredibly innovative ways. I've done in-class demos and have seen students fall in love with podcasts. I wanted to share why using podcasts is so powerful in education. But there hasn't been a roadmap for how to bring audio into the classroom.

To build that roadmap, I teamed up with Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder and CEO of Listenwise, a platform for improving listening skills through podcasts and public radio stories. She's one of the pioneers of educational audio and author of the new book, Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners. Monica is an expert on the science of audio, the research behind it, and ultimately, how to use audio to enhance listening and learning.

In this blog post, we share what we've learned over years of immersion in educational audio-land, explore why podcasts are so great for education, and provide a roadmap for how to get started. Let's start with the science.

On the podcast, we talk with three leaders in educational podcasts (L to R): Lindsay Patterson, Marshall Escamilla, and Monica Brady-Myerov.

The Science of Listening

We are always listening. And yet a lifetime of hearing doesn't make us good listeners. We have to work at it. Years of research have proven the benefits of listening in education.

Listening Is a Critical Factor in Learning How to Read

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. The Simple View of Reading formula developed by Gough & Tunmer shows that reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the science of reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening and reading together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words. Research shows listening while reading improves text reading rates and leads to higher comprehension.

As students get older, the importance of listening to reading doesn't disappear; it increases. Researchers found that, over time, the relative importance of listening comprehension increases as a child becomes a more proficient reader. Decoding is still important to reading comprehension, but it's less of a potential roadblock once kids have mastered it. In fact, by 8 th grade, literacy researcher Tiffany Hogan says " all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension could be explained by the listening comprehension factor."

In other words, introducing more listen-only content will benefit reading comprehension for years to come.

Listening Shapes Your Brain and Memory

Our brains make a mental imagery -the "movie in our minds"-of what we hear. When we listen, our ears aren't just passive absorbers of information. We are activating systems in the brains that are responsible for sight, sound, motor control and olfaction. "We imagine sounds using the same brain regions that allow us to hear real sounds," says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen.

Listening improves social-emotional wellbeing. Researchers found that when someone is engaged in a story, it's positively associated with psychological safety and negatively associated with social anxiety. And that connection actually improves your listening.

Listening Supports Multilingual Learning

For the English learners in classrooms, listening provides an equal opportunity to access content and hear authentically spoken language. While listening can occur at different speeds to improve comprehension, everyone is listening to the same text. Unlike reading exercises in which the text is leveled down to the reader's ability, listening-with the right scaffolding-has the same high level of academic language and content vocabulary.

In addition to learning about the world, listening is an excellent way to build background knowledge of the subject, a key element of listening comprehension, especially in learning a second language.

Why Podcasts Make a Great Addition to Your Classroom

Let's be honest: Audio has been lifting its weight in the classroom for decades in various forms. But podcasts have unique advantages. They feature authentic language, real conversations, and diverse voices. You can choose from a wide variety of topics-everything from stories, to history, to mindfulness, science, music, literature, and more-and some podcasters even make special episodes designed for the classroom. They're designed to catch the ear and hold attention in a way that feels almost magical. Best of all, podcasts fit any classroom budget: They're free.

Kids Love Podcasts

Podcasts aren't a tough sell for kids. They're a dedicated audience. One in 4 kids already listen to podcasts, according to Ipsos, a global market research firm. At Kids Listen, we found a variety of reasons behind this in our most recent survey of listening families. The top reason was that they are fun and entertaining (49 percent), followed by their educational appeal (33 percent). A host of other reasons included that podcasts build skills, calm kids, prompt family discussion, allow for multitasking, and provide regular new content. In one notable response, a teacher from Texas said, "One of the new TEKS for 4th and 5th graders is LISTENING. We listen most mornings in the classroom. The kids LOVE it."

When you introduce podcasts to your classroom, ask students if they have listened to podcasts, and which are their favorites. It may give you some ideas of podcasts to check out!

Podcasts are Portable and Mobile

A primary benefit of audio is that it doesn't tie students to a screen. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for creative educational experiences. This is highlighted by the most recent Kids Listen survey. We asked parents what activities children engage in while listening to podcasts. The majority of respondents (78 percent) responded that kids "just actively listen," they also did a variety of other things: Playing, working with art materials, getting ready for bed, doing chores, and other elements of their daily routine.

That flexibility at home translates to educational settings as well. Play a podcast while your students do classroom chores or creative activities that don't require mental focus. Cue up podcasts on their devices while they walk around the school, getting exercise while practicing their listening skills. Or combine podcast time with drawing-students can sketch scenes from the podcast as they listen. The list of things to do while listening is endless.

These ideas work for any podcast. But some podcasts are built around activity.

Mindfulness podcasts like Peace Out and Like You guide kids through meditation and movement.

Music education shows like Noodle Loaf and The Music Box encourage making music and moving around.

On Tumble, we've leaned into these audio advantages by designing episodes and audio courses that encourage active exploration. For example, our interactive episode "Solve the Case of The Sleeping Trees" leads students through making observations, asking questions, and making conclusions. The ideal setting to listen is outdoors, in nature.

Podcasts Are a Great Way to Explore Current Events

Most podcasts are designed to be evergreen; you can return to the same episodes year after year, and they'll still be relevant. But others are designed for the moment.

News podcasts are a great way to approach current events. Typically short, you can play episodes as a warmup for the day, or as a lead-in to larger discussions.

KidzNuz is designed for the classroom, with a quiz at the end of each daily episode to practice comprehension.

Published twice weekly, The Ten News clocks in at ten minutes: Each episode tackles the biggest headlines, followed by fun segments and trivia questions.

Newsy Jacuzzi is an international take on the news, hosted by a mother and daughter in India.

Listenwise curates daily current events for the classroom and gives you a bank of questions to spark conversation.

It's not just news podcasts that can help kids process current events and realities. At Your Level, hosted by an 11-year-old kid, did an episode on pandemic birthdays during the coronavirus lockdowns. Even fictional stories can take on elements of real life. For example, in the Stoopkid Stories episode "The BB Twins," the characters deal with the effects of their dance going viral on social media. Stories can also take on hot topics like The Imagine Neighborhood's 6-part series on Race, Identity, and Making Things Right.

Podcasts Come in a Variety of Lengths

Not only do podcasts provide a variety of content, they come in a variety of lengths. You can choose whether to make listening your main meal, or simply a side of your lesson.

Many educationally-minded podcast creators have consulted with teachers in order to develop special episodes that fit into classroom time.

Pamela Rogers, a school librarian and creator of the literature podcast Buttons & Figs, developed playlists of 5 minute interactive wordplay challenges for the classroom.

What Will She Do Next, a women's history podcast, creates 10 minute episodes in addition to their usual 20 minute episodes.

Timestorm, a serialized audio podcast for tweens and teens, creates 10 minute stand-alone minisodes.

Love Learning, which offers everything from poems to mediations for elementary students, clocks in episodes from one minute to 11 minutes.

Other short podcasts include the serialized fiction podcast Six Minutes, a personal growth podcast Five Minutes with Dad, African Folktales, and Two Whats and A Wow.

Other podcasters have found that 20 minutes is a great length for the classroom. Kitty Felde edits her episodes of Book Club for Kids and her series, The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, to that length based on teacher input. Eat Your Spanish, a language learning podcast, can serve as a full lesson at 20-25 minutes. From personal experience, Tumble's 15 minute episodes are frequently used in the classroom as well.

Listenwise offers a happy medium by editing longer podcasts and NPR stories into shorter versions. The audio stories are 5 minutes long and come with listening discussion questions, interactive transcripts and quizzes across a wide variety of subjects in ELA, social studies and science.

Podcasts Help You Meet Academic Standards

Aside from the fun benefits, there's a very practical one too. Listening now is an anchor standard of the Common Core. Even states that are not using Common Core standards include listening in their curriculum standards. Twenty-two states include listening in their high-stakes exam. If you are in California, Wisconsin or Indiana, a portion of your ELA exam is listening.

Practicing students' listening "muscle" for these tests makes sense, and you can build their listening stamina with a podcast. When they enjoy listening to podcasts, they'll be strong for the assessment audio. Following listening, asking kids to identify the main idea, make an inference or recall a specific detail from the story also addresses many other ELA standards. And if you listen to a podcast aligned with your curriculum such as an Earth Rangers episode on frogs and metamorphosis, you can also knock off some NGSS science standards.

Top 4 Places to Find Audio for Kids

Now that we've convinced you that adding audio to your instruction is an easy, fun way to build skills and knowledge, you're probably wondering where you find all this great audio? We've already mentioned a few shows and platforms, but here's a list of platforms for you to discover your favorite podcasts.

Kids Listen is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality audio content especially made for kids, with over 130 member podcasts. The Kids Listen App (for iOs, Android, and web browser) organizes these podcasts by age, interest, and curated playlists. The Kids Listen Activity Podcast brings you episodes from different podcasts, paired with suggested activities for further learning. Kids Listen University is a place to find podcast-based lessons and curriculum.

This online platform brings NPR and podcasts to the classroom with easy-to-use podcast lessons and listening comprehension quizzes. The collection of 2500+ curriculum-aligned podcasts for grades 2-12 keep teaching connected to the real world. Free for teachers, a Premium subscription available for schools.

Librarians Pamela Rogers and Anne Bensfield write a regular column about "Kidcasts," exploring recommended episodes by themes like "Black Changemakers," "Podcasts to Encourage Mindfulness," and "Poetry." They created this handy poster with their top "classroom-ready" podcasts.

A paid subscription for teachers or parents who want ad-free streaming services for kids podcasts ages 3-13. PINNA is quickly producing new podcasts for kids so there is a lot to explore on this platform.

Additionally, I've written two kidcast recommendation articles for The New York Times: A Big List of Podcasts for Little Kids and A Big List of Podcasts for Bigger Kids.

More kids' podcasts are coming out all the time, so keep your ears open. With all these resources, all you need to do is go forth and listen!

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Learn the benefits and where to find great ones.

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts/audio files can promote collaboration in the classroom by having the opportunity to complete projects individually, in small groups, and full class activities.

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Student Centered Podcast: Calley Anderson

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Student Centered Podcast: Calley Anderson

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-far-can-a-cloud-travel/id703720228?i=1000524686205
This Student Centered-Podcast, Brains On, is a wonderful tool to use in the classroom. Exploring various topics to engage students, this podcast assists higher order thinking skills and promotes accessibility as well. This specific episode, "How Far Can A Cloud Travel?", touches on weather content which is a part of the Georgia Science Standards for 1st grade. Likewise, student questions are featured, making the podcast relatable and engaging for students.

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We've all played the "what does that cloud look like" game. Maybe you saw a bunny... or an airplane... or a unicorn. What if that same cloud could also be seen by someone in a far off continent? That's what a listener in Minnesota wondered. He wanted to know if the same cloud he saw in a park near his house could also be seen in Africa.

We talk to Deanna Hence, one of our favorite weather experts, and she tells us about how clouds travel. We also dust off the Zoom Ray to learn about what is inside of a cloud. And have you ever noticed the similarities between cloud types, like cumulonimbus, and magic spells from Harry Potter? Well, we have, and we made a game out of it!

We also have a brand new Mystery Sound for your guessing pleasure and a Moment of Um that answers the question: Why do pugs have such scrunchy faces?

This episode was sponsored by:

Indeed.com (indeed.com/brainson)

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‎Brains On! Science podcast for kids: How far can a cloud travel? on Apple Podcasts

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We've all played the "what does that cloud look like" game. Maybe you saw a bunny... or an airplane... or a unicorn. What if that same cloud could also be seen by someone in a far off continent? That's what a listener in Minnesota wondered.

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Podcasts/audio files can promote creativity in the classroom by giving students the opportunity to have a choice in how they deliver the content to users and the way their show is created.

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https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/podcasts-in-the-classroom/

In this podcast, we are able to learn about why podcasts should be included in your classroom. Podcasts can be listened to anywhere. You can be laying down, walking, running, cleaning, or whatever it is you are doing. It also helps boost brain activity and memory.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to the interview with Lindsay Patterson, Monica Brady-Myerov,
and Marshall Escamilla (transcript):
Sponsored by Listenwise and Scholastic Scope

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Imagine this scene in your classroom: Students are at their desks, completely engaged and attentive. But no one's talking. You're also quiet. Your students are not doing a worksheet. They're not watching a video. They're listening.

A podcast is playing from speakers at the front of the room. You can see how your students are caught up in the story. Every so often they laugh at a joke or gasp with surprise at a twist in the story. Their imaginations are alive. The words are turning into movies in their minds. Physically, they're in the classroom, but really, they're in another world.

That's the power of audio. And the best part? Just the act of listening to a good narrative helps your students become better learners. Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Whether you are in-person, remote, hybrid, flipped or blended, podcasts can enhance your teaching in meaningful ways.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about the benefits of podcasts for education. In 2015, I created Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, one of the first educational podcasts for kids. The following year, I helped put together a list of 8 Great Educational Podcasts for Kids for Cult of Pedagogy. I also co-founded Kids Listen, a non-profit organization advocating for podcasts for kids. And now, I'm the CEO of Tumble Media, a production company dedicated to creating children's educational audio. Through the years, I've interacted with teachers who have brought podcasts into their classrooms in incredibly innovative ways. I've done in-class demos and have seen students fall in love with podcasts. I wanted to share why using podcasts is so powerful in education. But there hasn't been a roadmap for how to bring audio into the classroom.

To build that roadmap, I teamed up with Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder and CEO of Listenwise, a platform for improving listening skills through podcasts and public radio stories. She's one of the pioneers of educational audio and author of the new book, Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners. Monica is an expert on the science of audio, the research behind it, and ultimately, how to use audio to enhance listening and learning.

In this blog post, we share what we've learned over years of immersion in educational audio-land, explore why podcasts are so great for education, and provide a roadmap for how to get started. Let's start with the science.

On the podcast, we talk with three leaders in educational podcasts (L to R): Lindsay Patterson, Marshall Escamilla, and Monica Brady-Myerov.

The Science of Listening

We are always listening. And yet a lifetime of hearing doesn't make us good listeners. We have to work at it. Years of research have proven the benefits of listening in education.

Listening Is a Critical Factor in Learning How to Read

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. The Simple View of Reading formula developed by Gough & Tunmer shows that reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the science of reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening and reading together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words. Research shows listening while reading improves text reading rates and leads to higher comprehension.

As students get older, the importance of listening to reading doesn't disappear; it increases. Researchers found that, over time, the relative importance of listening comprehension increases as a child becomes a more proficient reader. Decoding is still important to reading comprehension, but it's less of a potential roadblock once kids have mastered it. In fact, by 8 th grade, literacy researcher Tiffany Hogan says " all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension could be explained by the listening comprehension factor."

In other words, introducing more listen-only content will benefit reading comprehension for years to come.

Listening Shapes Your Brain and Memory

Our brains make a mental imagery -the "movie in our minds"-of what we hear. When we listen, our ears aren't just passive absorbers of information. We are activating systems in the brains that are responsible for sight, sound, motor control and olfaction. "We imagine sounds using the same brain regions that allow us to hear real sounds," says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen.

Listening improves social-emotional wellbeing. Researchers found that when someone is engaged in a story, it's positively associated with psychological safety and negatively associated with social anxiety. And that connection actually improves your listening.

Listening Supports Multilingual Learning

For the English learners in classrooms, listening provides an equal opportunity to access content and hear authentically spoken language. While listening can occur at different speeds to improve comprehension, everyone is listening to the same text. Unlike reading exercises in which the text is leveled down to the reader's ability, listening-with the right scaffolding-has the same high level of academic language and content vocabulary.

In addition to learning about the world, listening is an excellent way to build background knowledge of the subject, a key element of listening comprehension, especially in learning a second language.

Why Podcasts Make a Great Addition to Your Classroom

Let's be honest: Audio has been lifting its weight in the classroom for decades in various forms. But podcasts have unique advantages. They feature authentic language, real conversations, and diverse voices. You can choose from a wide variety of topics-everything from stories, to history, to mindfulness, science, music, literature, and more-and some podcasters even make special episodes designed for the classroom. They're designed to catch the ear and hold attention in a way that feels almost magical. Best of all, podcasts fit any classroom budget: They're free.

Kids Love Podcasts

Podcasts aren't a tough sell for kids. They're a dedicated audience. One in 4 kids already listen to podcasts, according to Ipsos, a global market research firm. At Kids Listen, we found a variety of reasons behind this in our most recent survey of listening families. The top reason was that they are fun and entertaining (49 percent), followed by their educational appeal (33 percent). A host of other reasons included that podcasts build skills, calm kids, prompt family discussion, allow for multitasking, and provide regular new content. In one notable response, a teacher from Texas said, "One of the new TEKS for 4th and 5th graders is LISTENING. We listen most mornings in the classroom. The kids LOVE it."

When you introduce podcasts to your classroom, ask students if they have listened to podcasts, and which are their favorites. It may give you some ideas of podcasts to check out!

Podcasts are Portable and Mobile

A primary benefit of audio is that it doesn't tie students to a screen. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for creative educational experiences. This is highlighted by the most recent Kids Listen survey. We asked parents what activities children engage in while listening to podcasts. The majority of respondents (78 percent) responded that kids "just actively listen," they also did a variety of other things: Playing, working with art materials, getting ready for bed, doing chores, and other elements of their daily routine.

That flexibility at home translates to educational settings as well. Play a podcast while your students do classroom chores or creative activities that don't require mental focus. Cue up podcasts on their devices while they walk around the school, getting exercise while practicing their listening skills. Or combine podcast time with drawing-students can sketch scenes from the podcast as they listen. The list of things to do while listening is endless.

These ideas work for any podcast. But some podcasts are built around activity.

Mindfulness podcasts like Peace Out and Like You guide kids through meditation and movement.

Music education shows like Noodle Loaf and The Music Box encourage making music and moving around.

On Tumble, we've leaned into these audio advantages by designing episodes and audio courses that encourage active exploration. For example, our interactive episode "Solve the Case of The Sleeping Trees" leads students through making observations, asking questions, and making conclusions. The ideal setting to listen is outdoors, in nature.

Podcasts Are a Great Way to Explore Current Events

Most podcasts are designed to be evergreen; you can return to the same episodes year after year, and they'll still be relevant. But others are designed for the moment.

News podcasts are a great way to approach current events. Typically short, you can play episodes as a warmup for the day, or as a lead-in to larger discussions.

KidzNuz is designed for the classroom, with a quiz at the end of each daily episode to practice comprehension.

Published twice weekly, The Ten News clocks in at ten minutes: Each episode tackles the biggest headlines, followed by fun segments and trivia questions.

Newsy Jacuzzi is an international take on the news, hosted by a mother and daughter in India.

Listenwise curates daily current events for the classroom and gives you a bank of questions to spark conversation.

It's not just news podcasts that can help kids process current events and realities. At Your Level, hosted by an 11-year-old kid, did an episode on pandemic birthdays during the coronavirus lockdowns. Even fictional stories can take on elements of real life. For example, in the Stoopkid Stories episode "The BB Twins," the characters deal with the effects of their dance going viral on social media. Stories can also take on hot topics like The Imagine Neighborhood's 6-part series on Race, Identity, and Making Things Right.

Podcasts Come in a Variety of Lengths

Not only do podcasts provide a variety of content, they come in a variety of lengths. You can choose whether to make listening your main meal, or simply a side of your lesson.

Many educationally-minded podcast creators have consulted with teachers in order to develop special episodes that fit into classroom time.

Pamela Rogers, a school librarian and creator of the literature podcast Buttons & Figs, developed playlists of 5 minute interactive wordplay challenges for the classroom.

What Will She Do Next, a women's history podcast, creates 10 minute episodes in addition to their usual 20 minute episodes.

Timestorm, a serialized audio podcast for tweens and teens, creates 10 minute stand-alone minisodes.

Love Learning, which offers everything from poems to mediations for elementary students, clocks in episodes from one minute to 11 minutes.

Other short podcasts include the serialized fiction podcast Six Minutes, a personal growth podcast Five Minutes with Dad, African Folktales, and Two Whats and A Wow.

Other podcasters have found that 20 minutes is a great length for the classroom. Kitty Felde edits her episodes of Book Club for Kids and her series, The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, to that length based on teacher input. Eat Your Spanish, a language learning podcast, can serve as a full lesson at 20-25 minutes. From personal experience, Tumble's 15 minute episodes are frequently used in the classroom as well.

Listenwise offers a happy medium by editing longer podcasts and NPR stories into shorter versions. The audio stories are 5 minutes long and come with listening discussion questions, interactive transcripts and quizzes across a wide variety of subjects in ELA, social studies and science.

Podcasts Help You Meet Academic Standards

Aside from the fun benefits, there's a very practical one too. Listening now is an anchor standard of the Common Core. Even states that are not using Common Core standards include listening in their curriculum standards. Twenty-two states include listening in their high-stakes exam. If you are in California, Wisconsin or Indiana, a portion of your ELA exam is listening.

Practicing students' listening "muscle" for these tests makes sense, and you can build their listening stamina with a podcast. When they enjoy listening to podcasts, they'll be strong for the assessment audio. Following listening, asking kids to identify the main idea, make an inference or recall a specific detail from the story also addresses many other ELA standards. And if you listen to a podcast aligned with your curriculum such as an Earth Rangers episode on frogs and metamorphosis, you can also knock off some NGSS science standards.

Top 4 Places to Find Audio for Kids

Now that we've convinced you that adding audio to your instruction is an easy, fun way to build skills and knowledge, you're probably wondering where you find all this great audio? We've already mentioned a few shows and platforms, but here's a list of platforms for you to discover your favorite podcasts.

Kids Listen is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality audio content especially made for kids, with over 130 member podcasts. The Kids Listen App (for iOs, Android, and web browser) organizes these podcasts by age, interest, and curated playlists. The Kids Listen Activity Podcast brings you episodes from different podcasts, paired with suggested activities for further learning. Kids Listen University is a place to find podcast-based lessons and curriculum.

This online platform brings NPR and podcasts to the classroom with easy-to-use podcast lessons and listening comprehension quizzes. The collection of 2500+ curriculum-aligned podcasts for grades 2-12 keep teaching connected to the real world. Free for teachers, a Premium subscription available for schools.

Librarians Pamela Rogers and Anne Bensfield write a regular column about "Kidcasts," exploring recommended episodes by themes like "Black Changemakers," "Podcasts to Encourage Mindfulness," and "Poetry." They created this handy poster with their top "classroom-ready" podcasts.

A paid subscription for teachers or parents who want ad-free streaming services for kids podcasts ages 3-13. PINNA is quickly producing new podcasts for kids so there is a lot to explore on this platform.

Additionally, I've written two kidcast recommendation articles for The New York Times: A Big List of Podcasts for Little Kids and A Big List of Podcasts for Bigger Kids.

More kids' podcasts are coming out all the time, so keep your ears open. With all these resources, all you need to do is go forth and listen!

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

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Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Learn the benefits and where to find great ones.

# data[].attributes.body
This podcasts is about the reasons that teachers should bring podcasts into the classroom. There is so much that can be learned by listening to podcasts, because of the personal aspect of them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to the interview with Lindsay Patterson, Monica Brady-Myerov,
and Marshall Escamilla (transcript):
Sponsored by Listenwise and Scholastic Scope

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Imagine this scene in your classroom: Students are at their desks, completely engaged and attentive. But no one's talking. You're also quiet. Your students are not doing a worksheet. They're not watching a video. They're listening.

A podcast is playing from speakers at the front of the room. You can see how your students are caught up in the story. Every so often they laugh at a joke or gasp with surprise at a twist in the story. Their imaginations are alive. The words are turning into movies in their minds. Physically, they're in the classroom, but really, they're in another world.

That's the power of audio. And the best part? Just the act of listening to a good narrative helps your students become better learners. Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Whether you are in-person, remote, hybrid, flipped or blended, podcasts can enhance your teaching in meaningful ways.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about the benefits of podcasts for education. In 2015, I created Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, one of the first educational podcasts for kids. The following year, I helped put together a list of 8 Great Educational Podcasts for Kids for Cult of Pedagogy. I also co-founded Kids Listen, a non-profit organization advocating for podcasts for kids. And now, I'm the CEO of Tumble Media, a production company dedicated to creating children's educational audio. Through the years, I've interacted with teachers who have brought podcasts into their classrooms in incredibly innovative ways. I've done in-class demos and have seen students fall in love with podcasts. I wanted to share why using podcasts is so powerful in education. But there hasn't been a roadmap for how to bring audio into the classroom.

To build that roadmap, I teamed up with Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder and CEO of Listenwise, a platform for improving listening skills through podcasts and public radio stories. She's one of the pioneers of educational audio and author of the new book, Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners. Monica is an expert on the science of audio, the research behind it, and ultimately, how to use audio to enhance listening and learning.

In this blog post, we share what we've learned over years of immersion in educational audio-land, explore why podcasts are so great for education, and provide a roadmap for how to get started. Let's start with the science.

On the podcast, we talk with three leaders in educational podcasts (L to R): Lindsay Patterson, Marshall Escamilla, and Monica Brady-Myerov.

The Science of Listening

We are always listening. And yet a lifetime of hearing doesn't make us good listeners. We have to work at it. Years of research have proven the benefits of listening in education.

Listening Is a Critical Factor in Learning How to Read

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. The Simple View of Reading formula developed by Gough & Tunmer shows that reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the science of reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening and reading together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words. Research shows listening while reading improves text reading rates and leads to higher comprehension.

As students get older, the importance of listening to reading doesn't disappear; it increases. Researchers found that, over time, the relative importance of listening comprehension increases as a child becomes a more proficient reader. Decoding is still important to reading comprehension, but it's less of a potential roadblock once kids have mastered it. In fact, by 8 th grade, literacy researcher Tiffany Hogan says " all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension could be explained by the listening comprehension factor."

In other words, introducing more listen-only content will benefit reading comprehension for years to come.

Listening Shapes Your Brain and Memory

Our brains make a mental imagery -the "movie in our minds"-of what we hear. When we listen, our ears aren't just passive absorbers of information. We are activating systems in the brains that are responsible for sight, sound, motor control and olfaction. "We imagine sounds using the same brain regions that allow us to hear real sounds," says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen.

Listening improves social-emotional wellbeing. Researchers found that when someone is engaged in a story, it's positively associated with psychological safety and negatively associated with social anxiety. And that connection actually improves your listening.

Listening Supports Multilingual Learning

For the English learners in classrooms, listening provides an equal opportunity to access content and hear authentically spoken language. While listening can occur at different speeds to improve comprehension, everyone is listening to the same text. Unlike reading exercises in which the text is leveled down to the reader's ability, listening-with the right scaffolding-has the same high level of academic language and content vocabulary.

In addition to learning about the world, listening is an excellent way to build background knowledge of the subject, a key element of listening comprehension, especially in learning a second language.

Why Podcasts Make a Great Addition to Your Classroom

Let's be honest: Audio has been lifting its weight in the classroom for decades in various forms. But podcasts have unique advantages. They feature authentic language, real conversations, and diverse voices. You can choose from a wide variety of topics-everything from stories, to history, to mindfulness, science, music, literature, and more-and some podcasters even make special episodes designed for the classroom. They're designed to catch the ear and hold attention in a way that feels almost magical. Best of all, podcasts fit any classroom budget: They're free.

Kids Love Podcasts

Podcasts aren't a tough sell for kids. They're a dedicated audience. One in 4 kids already listen to podcasts, according to Ipsos, a global market research firm. At Kids Listen, we found a variety of reasons behind this in our most recent survey of listening families. The top reason was that they are fun and entertaining (49 percent), followed by their educational appeal (33 percent). A host of other reasons included that podcasts build skills, calm kids, prompt family discussion, allow for multitasking, and provide regular new content. In one notable response, a teacher from Texas said, "One of the new TEKS for 4th and 5th graders is LISTENING. We listen most mornings in the classroom. The kids LOVE it."

When you introduce podcasts to your classroom, ask students if they have listened to podcasts, and which are their favorites. It may give you some ideas of podcasts to check out!

Podcasts are Portable and Mobile

A primary benefit of audio is that it doesn't tie students to a screen. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for creative educational experiences. This is highlighted by the most recent Kids Listen survey. We asked parents what activities children engage in while listening to podcasts. The majority of respondents (78 percent) responded that kids "just actively listen," they also did a variety of other things: Playing, working with art materials, getting ready for bed, doing chores, and other elements of their daily routine.

That flexibility at home translates to educational settings as well. Play a podcast while your students do classroom chores or creative activities that don't require mental focus. Cue up podcasts on their devices while they walk around the school, getting exercise while practicing their listening skills. Or combine podcast time with drawing-students can sketch scenes from the podcast as they listen. The list of things to do while listening is endless.

These ideas work for any podcast. But some podcasts are built around activity.

Mindfulness podcasts like Peace Out and Like You guide kids through meditation and movement.

Music education shows like Noodle Loaf and The Music Box encourage making music and moving around.

On Tumble, we've leaned into these audio advantages by designing episodes and audio courses that encourage active exploration. For example, our interactive episode "Solve the Case of The Sleeping Trees" leads students through making observations, asking questions, and making conclusions. The ideal setting to listen is outdoors, in nature.

Podcasts Are a Great Way to Explore Current Events

Most podcasts are designed to be evergreen; you can return to the same episodes year after year, and they'll still be relevant. But others are designed for the moment.

News podcasts are a great way to approach current events. Typically short, you can play episodes as a warmup for the day, or as a lead-in to larger discussions.

KidzNuz is designed for the classroom, with a quiz at the end of each daily episode to practice comprehension.

Published twice weekly, The Ten News clocks in at ten minutes: Each episode tackles the biggest headlines, followed by fun segments and trivia questions.

Newsy Jacuzzi is an international take on the news, hosted by a mother and daughter in India.

Listenwise curates daily current events for the classroom and gives you a bank of questions to spark conversation.

It's not just news podcasts that can help kids process current events and realities. At Your Level, hosted by an 11-year-old kid, did an episode on pandemic birthdays during the coronavirus lockdowns. Even fictional stories can take on elements of real life. For example, in the Stoopkid Stories episode "The BB Twins," the characters deal with the effects of their dance going viral on social media. Stories can also take on hot topics like The Imagine Neighborhood's 6-part series on Race, Identity, and Making Things Right.

Podcasts Come in a Variety of Lengths

Not only do podcasts provide a variety of content, they come in a variety of lengths. You can choose whether to make listening your main meal, or simply a side of your lesson.

Many educationally-minded podcast creators have consulted with teachers in order to develop special episodes that fit into classroom time.

Pamela Rogers, a school librarian and creator of the literature podcast Buttons & Figs, developed playlists of 5 minute interactive wordplay challenges for the classroom.

What Will She Do Next, a women's history podcast, creates 10 minute episodes in addition to their usual 20 minute episodes.

Timestorm, a serialized audio podcast for tweens and teens, creates 10 minute stand-alone minisodes.

Love Learning, which offers everything from poems to mediations for elementary students, clocks in episodes from one minute to 11 minutes.

Other short podcasts include the serialized fiction podcast Six Minutes, a personal growth podcast Five Minutes with Dad, African Folktales, and Two Whats and A Wow.

Other podcasters have found that 20 minutes is a great length for the classroom. Kitty Felde edits her episodes of Book Club for Kids and her series, The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, to that length based on teacher input. Eat Your Spanish, a language learning podcast, can serve as a full lesson at 20-25 minutes. From personal experience, Tumble's 15 minute episodes are frequently used in the classroom as well.

Listenwise offers a happy medium by editing longer podcasts and NPR stories into shorter versions. The audio stories are 5 minutes long and come with listening discussion questions, interactive transcripts and quizzes across a wide variety of subjects in ELA, social studies and science.

Podcasts Help You Meet Academic Standards

Aside from the fun benefits, there's a very practical one too. Listening now is an anchor standard of the Common Core. Even states that are not using Common Core standards include listening in their curriculum standards. Twenty-two states include listening in their high-stakes exam. If you are in California, Wisconsin or Indiana, a portion of your ELA exam is listening.

Practicing students' listening "muscle" for these tests makes sense, and you can build their listening stamina with a podcast. When they enjoy listening to podcasts, they'll be strong for the assessment audio. Following listening, asking kids to identify the main idea, make an inference or recall a specific detail from the story also addresses many other ELA standards. And if you listen to a podcast aligned with your curriculum such as an Earth Rangers episode on frogs and metamorphosis, you can also knock off some NGSS science standards.

Top 4 Places to Find Audio for Kids

Now that we've convinced you that adding audio to your instruction is an easy, fun way to build skills and knowledge, you're probably wondering where you find all this great audio? We've already mentioned a few shows and platforms, but here's a list of platforms for you to discover your favorite podcasts.

Kids Listen is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality audio content especially made for kids, with over 130 member podcasts. The Kids Listen App (for iOs, Android, and web browser) organizes these podcasts by age, interest, and curated playlists. The Kids Listen Activity Podcast brings you episodes from different podcasts, paired with suggested activities for further learning. Kids Listen University is a place to find podcast-based lessons and curriculum.

This online platform brings NPR and podcasts to the classroom with easy-to-use podcast lessons and listening comprehension quizzes. The collection of 2500+ curriculum-aligned podcasts for grades 2-12 keep teaching connected to the real world. Free for teachers, a Premium subscription available for schools.

Librarians Pamela Rogers and Anne Bensfield write a regular column about "Kidcasts," exploring recommended episodes by themes like "Black Changemakers," "Podcasts to Encourage Mindfulness," and "Poetry." They created this handy poster with their top "classroom-ready" podcasts.

A paid subscription for teachers or parents who want ad-free streaming services for kids podcasts ages 3-13. PINNA is quickly producing new podcasts for kids so there is a lot to explore on this platform.

Additionally, I've written two kidcast recommendation articles for The New York Times: A Big List of Podcasts for Little Kids and A Big List of Podcasts for Bigger Kids.

More kids' podcasts are coming out all the time, so keep your ears open. With all these resources, all you need to do is go forth and listen!

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Learn the benefits and where to find great ones.

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts/audio files can promote creativity in the classroom by allowing students the freedom to prepare their own content, record it how they want to, edit and add sounds of their choice. It allows them to be as creative as they want to be and even demonstrate their personality.

# data[].attributes.headline
Teacher Centered Podcast: Calley Anderson

# data[].attributes.subject
Teacher Centered Podcast: Calley Anderson

# data[].attributes.body
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/using-podcasting-to-improve/id606677009?i=1000380377956&mt=2
The Every Classroom Matters Podcast by Vicki Davis is an awesome teacher-centered classroom. Davis explores various topics concerning the evolving nature of education in a simple 10 minute podcast. In the specific episode "Why do teachers still ask students to 'sit and learn?'" Davis and a special guest explore why movement in the classroom not only improves health, classroom management, and overall learning.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Join us as we discuss the connection between listening and learning and how to improve both.

Follow: @coolcatteacher @thomasdaccord @listenwiselearn

#edtechchat #edchat #edtech

Tom Daccord is Director of EdTechTeacher and has worked with schools, colleges and educational organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
using podcasting to improve the listening skills of your students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
every classroom matters with cool cat teacher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
‎Every Classroom Matters With Cool Cat Teacher: Using Podcasting to Improve the Listening Skills of Your Students on Apple Podcasts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join us as we discuss the connection between listening and learning and how to improve both. Follow: @coolcatteacher @thomasdaccord @listenwiselearn #edtechchat #edchat #edtech Tom Daccord is Director of EdTechTeacher and has worked with schools, colleges and educational organizations in...

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts/audio can promote creativity in the classroom by allowing students to express themselves and demonstrate how they prepared and delivered their podcasts Students can also use podcasts to demonstrate their understanding of a subject.

# data[].attributes.body
When learning about the crystals, it switched between the different students in the class talking. Some of the students were pretending to be crystals while the others were pretending to be minerals.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.brainson.org/episode/2021/10/19/crystals-more-than-just-shiny-rocks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brains On Universe is an independent media company for kids and curious adults. We make podcasts, books, videos and more. Our goal is to fill the world with stuff that is smart and funny, silly and serious, all at once -- just like the people in our audience.

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts/audio files can promote higher order thinking skills in the classroom by allow students to take charge of the content they created and being able to present it in an audio file. Because of this, the students Loti Level is higher and students can use this type of product in the future as well.

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts/audio files can promote accessibility in the classroom by providing different methods for students to receive information and instruction, as well as giving them many different ways to complete their assignments.

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts/audio files can promote authentic learning in the classroom by allowing students to prepare themselves for learning, before class. Podcasts can be used in a flipped classroom. Teachers can post these podcasts before class and students can do activities or gain knowledge that prepares them for class.

# data[].attributes.body
Critical Thinking Skills, by showing students what they can create with simple ideas and words.

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts/audio files can promote accessibility as they appeal to auditory learners and some podcasts also include a video component which appeals to visual learners. Likewise, this offers differentiation for students so instead of them reading an article or viewing a PowerPoint, they can listen to the content topic.

# data[].attributes.body
Higher Order Thinking Skills

# data[].attributes.body
Podcasts/audio files can promote accessibility in the classroom by giving students the option to hear or read a lesson or idea wherever and whenever they need to. If a student misses class, having this available for them to review and not fall behind in lessons is extremely beneficial for students. Students also may prefer to listen, rather than read, so the fact that podcasts provide both options makes them very accessible for students as well.