50 episodes listed below
Classroom engagement, made concrete.
James Sturtevant Hacking Engagement is a teacher-focused show about making lessons more active, humane, and memorable. Episodes mix classroom stories, educator interviews, and specific strategies for assessment, constructivist learning, revision, and student relationships.
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James Sturtevant Hacking Engagement is a practical education show shaped by the rhythms of real classrooms. It is not slick consultant talk. It sounds closer to an educator thinking aloud with colleagues, students, and classroom teachers about what actually makes school feel alive. Recent episodes return again and again to engagement as something built through relationships, revision, student agency, and careful lesson design. Assessment gets special attention. Instead of treating grades as a final event, the show explores feedback, student revision, Google Forms reflection, Moat, Voxer, and process-based assessment as ways to help students improve while also strengthening trust. That gives the conversations a useful tension. The show is interested in rigor, but it is just as interested in the human conditions that make rigor possible. Constructivist learning appears as more than a theory from a methods course. A conversation around Kennedy Borcoman connects prior knowledge, hands-on work, and real-world relevance to the daily choices teachers make. Another episode turns first-day expectations into a jigsaw-style activity built around curriculum, assessment, deadlines, revision, and cell phones. It is policy talk, but with students in the room. The retention episodes carry a different charge. Michael Brilla reflects on leaving a technology coach role to return to classroom instruction, while Jim Mahoney’s conversation centers on discouraged educators, resilience, and the danger of hasty exits. These episodes do not romanticize teaching as easy. They argue that its hardest parts can coexist with unusually meaningful highs. The show’s recurring strength is its refusal to separate classroom strategy from teacher identity. A lesson hook, a grading policy, a feedback tool, or a student conference all become part of the same larger question: how can teachers create learning experiences that students remember and participate in? The pacing is conversational and sometimes winding. The payoff is concrete. Listeners leave with usable classroom moves, but also with a sharper sense of why those moves matter.
Made for: Designed for teachers, education students, and future educators. It especially suits educators looking for practical engagement ideas with a reflective, relationship-centered frame.
What sets it apart: The show ties classroom tactics to lived teacher experience, moving from grading dilemmas and lesson hooks to morale, burnout, and student connection. Its strongest material comes from concrete examples rather than abstract professional-development language.
It is my great pleasure to publish this weekly podcast that supplements my book "Hacking Engagement". Listen and get creative ideas on how to engage students tomorrow! Please visit my website: http://jamesalansturtevant.com/ And...for a cornucopia of teacher empowerment resources, visit: http://hacklearning.org/
This is the show that sends you back to class with one usable idea and steadier nerves.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A childhood leaf collection becomes a grounded case for hands-on learning beyond the classroom.
Constructivist learning lands best here when the host ties the idea of learners building knowledge through experience to a childhood habit of collecting leaves.
A first-day jigsaw turns familiar classroom policies into dilemmas future teachers have to weigh from both sides.
A first day of school turns into a practical test of classroom judgment, with the host building a jigsaw activity around assessment, late work, revisions, and cell phones.
Process-based assessment turns the grade question into a better piece of work.
Assessment becomes most revealing when students stop treating class as a route to an A and start caring about the poem, welding project, or choir piece in front of them.
Michael Brilla weighs the classroom's hardest days against the student connections he found difficult to leave behind.
Teacher discouragement becomes concrete through Michael Brilla's story of leaving classroom instruction for a technology coach role in 2019, then returning when the choice came back around last year.
A warm, candid argument for giving a discouraged teacher one more reason to stay.
This episode speaks to educators who feel close to done, using the host's own departure from education after seven years, his six-month break, and his return as the frame for a conversation with Jim Mahoney, the superintendent at the host's home school.
Art teaching, grounded in real classrooms.
Practical systems for calmer elementary classrooms.
Classroom strategy, talked through by working educators
Practical ideas for reaching every student in the room.
Classroom scripts and steady reassurance for elementary teachers' first years.
James Sternemann frames constructivist learning with a University of Buffalo definition and an Ohio leaf-collection project that still stays with him after 40 years.
James Sternovich links the Ohio Teacher Evaluation Rubric's classroom-environment language to a Magna Carta jigsaw for the first day of Education 313 at Muskingum University.
James Sternemann records Hacking Engagement from the Room 111 studios on St.
Michael Brilla tells James Sturdivant why he left a TOSA technology-coach role and returned to eighth-grade social studies in Owen J.
The Hacking Engagement episode centers on Jim Mahoney’s book, To Lead is to Teach, and on the claim that teachers should not quit in discouragement.
James Sturtevant discusses using assessment and student revision based on teacher feedback to build strong relationships with students.
James Sturtevant encourages teachers to take risks and try new methods, featuring an interview with innovative middle school science teacher Shane Knifefeller.
The host clarifies a previous comment about food preferences and shares a story from his college teaching certificate class.
The host introduces the February 'dog days' and previews a book review of 'Quit Point' to offer engagement strategies.
James Sturtevant shares a personal story about learning to coach discus to illustrate the value of stepping out of one's comfort zone for student engagement.
James Sturtevant shares a keynote experience in Dover, Delaware, and discusses reconnecting with a former student, Mo Ross, to illustrate the impact of teacher-student relationships.
The host shares his personal meditation practice and how it benefits his teaching, then recounts attending a breakout session at a professional development day.
James Sturtevant discusses the concept of a 'supplemental class' and shares strategies for engaging challenging students.