Teachers Rethinking Student Engagement
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Welcome back to a new episode of Rebel Teacher Alliance! This week we have an absolute treat: Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games joins us to talk about what happens when great game design and great teaching collide. We get into how Wingspan almost went in a completely different direction, why Scythe is basically a global politics class in a box, how the best games and the best lessons both start…
Welcome back to a new episode of Rebel Teacher Alliance! End of year energy is high and we are feeling all the feelings. This week Fabian finally got to play Salem 1692 with his students -- and used NotebookLM to build a rule explainer slide deck straight from the rulebook PDF, which worked beautifully. Jamie's district is adopting a Building Thinking Classrooms-based math curriculum next year and…
Welcome back to a new episode of Rebel Teacher Alliance! This week we are sitting down with Travis Hancock, founder of Facade Games -- the company behind Salem 1692, Tortuga 1667, Deadwood 1876, Bristol 1350, and the newly Kickstarted Roma XLI. Travis talks about how a slow college summer tweaking Mafia rules turned into a full-blown game company, why social deduction games pull emotions out of…
Welcome back to Rebel Teacher Alliance -- just Fabian and John this time, Jamie had somewhere else to be. Fabian's turn-in rate was 23.5% and he is not okay. What followed was one of the more honest conversations on the pod -- about grade-less classrooms, students triaging their workload like professionals, and what it looks like to slow down and have the hard talk instead of reading kids the riot…
Welcome back to Rebel Teacher Alliance. Fabian is back from scuba diving with students -- five sea turtles, one octopus, one Insta360 camera, zero regrets. Jamie's class has hit their magical end-of-year stride. John is three days into teaching seventh graders for the first time and already knows every kid's name. Then Fabian asks Claude for assessment ideas and gets two words back: "Fabian.…
Welcome back to Rebel Teacher Alliance -- all three of us this time. We open with updates: Hawaii is slowly drying out, the California teacher strikes have resolved, and John survived a travel nightmare involving a five-hour airport delay, a missing rental car, and someone else's 5:30am alarm. Then John drops his big news -- he's back in a school building full time as a staff development teacher,…
Welcome back to Rebel Teacher Alliance -- just Fabian and Jamie this time, John's off traveling. Fabian opens with Hawaii survival mode: the Kona Low brought flooding, snapped coconut trees, and a power outage he fixed with a tarp and a pizza. Jamie brings the California teacher strike saga -- 800 kids in her husband’s district without a permanent teacher, superintendent salaries pushing $700K…
Welcome back to a new episode of Rebel Teacher Alliance! This week we sit down with Dr. John Spencer, fresh off his keynote at the Learning and the Brain Conference in San Francisco. We talk about why slowing down is actually the move in a world that keeps telling us to go faster, how to use AI as a study tool without letting it do all the thinking, and what it even means to teach for depth when…
Welcome back to a new episode of Rebel Teacher Alliance! This week we sit down with Jenny Chan, founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, to talk about the history most Western classrooms still barely touch: World War II in Asia and the Pacific. Jenny shares how her grandma’s reaction to Japanese anime led her into archives, denialist comment sections, and a mission to make “never again” mean…
Welcome back to Rebel Teacher Alliance! Today we pick up where the last episode left off, then get practical. We revisit key takeaways from our conversation with Sheri Schmidt, then jump into Fabian’s Articles of Confederation lesson flow: AI-made explainer with NotebookLM, image generation in Gemini’s Nano Banana, and a simple prompt-tracking organizer students actually complete. From there we…
