The Broken Copier

Students walk into the classroom as individual learners, and every single student deserves to not only “access the learning” but to feel included and empowered. Unfortunately, this does not happen in nearly enough in our classrooms —but there are things we can do to move in a better direction. Dr. Nicholas Emmanuele has been teaching high school English since 2007, mainly co-teaching in inclusive...

Without question, it is immensely important to build connections and community in the physical spaces where you work. However, for many teachers and educators—including those who may have stumbled across The Broken Copier !—there is also an online education space, one to not only navigate but to potentially learn from and build connections. This space, though, has shifted considerably in recent ye...

Yes, we can always talk more about what can be done in classrooms to better support students—but what about those doing the supporting? Those looking for not just learning but leadership? Especially in these uncertain times? This is an episode that centers that focus on the way teachers and educators move through our work. Angela Stockman is a writer who also brings decades of experience as a teac...

This moment education is rife with conversations around learning science, and within these conversations the vision of the classroom often consists of students who are mostly-passive recipients of the learning— told what they need to know and then asked to regurgitate it. Christian Moore-Anderson , author of the new book Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn’t Enough , argues in this conve...

There are many exhaustions to navigate as the school year comes to a close. But amidst those exhaustions, there can still be a lot of good—and that is what this episode is: a brief reflection on a really hopeful ending to this year’s classroom, and a reminder of why we need to reject the visions of our classrooms that do not make space for what is possible within them. Question for the comment sec...

There is nothing easy about saying goodbye to a classroom. Yet so many teachers and educators have their own experience with departing a classroom. They know that how a teacher says and shows goodbye matters. I t matters a great deal. So we should talk more about what it’s like, right? Thankfully, last week Adrian Neibauer generously wrote about his own “goodbye” experience as he transitions to a...

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week everyone! For what is now becoming a Broken Copier tradition, Chanea Bond joins the podcast for a reflection on all things teaching. This conversation covers, well, a lot : what we appreciate and love about this work of teaching; what is difficult about this work, especially in this moment; and what it means to support our students as well as the teachers around us—...

With Teacher Appreciation Week forthcoming, today’s episode is very simple in its concept: sharing one good story from the classroom that is really two good stories—along with a reflection on why these stories mattered. A core belief with this Broken Copier project continues to be the importance of sharing and uplifting the good stories in our classrooms and schools. Given that, here’s an invitati...

In the opening essay of Good Teaching: a Provocation , Zach Czaia writes that, collectively as a country, we have “reduced what it means to be a teacher, let alone a good teacher.” But what does “good teaching” even look like? In today’s conversation, Zach shares his thoughts within and beyond his new collection of essays and poems—and in doing so invites all of us to consider what our own definit...

Whether you are a student, teacher or even a building leader, there is too often a shared experience of how individuals feel within our education system, no matter their role. Stressed. Drained. Overextended. Burnt out. Depleted . Ruth Poulsen believes there is a better path forward. An international school leader and author of the Regenerative Schools newsletter , Ruth is focused on the ways we c...

There’s a lot of conversation about which books students should be reading these days and how many —but too little, perhaps, about how to make their actual experiences with books in the classroom better . Today’s guest is Kate Roberts , a former middle school ELA teacher who now works with teachers all over the country to strengthen the reading that takes place in their classrooms. This conversati...

Many teachers and educators have strong feelings about “no-zeroes” or minimum grading policies. Quite often of late, strong negative feelings. A few weeks ago, Matt Brady wrote a piece for his newsletter called “The 100-Point Scale Is a Design Flaw,” which outlined not just the thinking about his own classroom policy but why it was working so well for his students. “The room is not more permissive...

Surveys show students increasingly turning to AI as a tool for their school work . Teachers who want to limit AI usage during instructional time still have many options on table—but what should they do about homework and other assigned out-of-class essays and projects? Given that the topic of homework already has been quite controversial before bringing AI into the conversation, this felt like a g...

After a couple quieter months, we are back and rolling with The Broken Copier. Today’s Unjammed episode is built around a simple-if-implausible idea: what happens when teachers are given enough time to do their work. It’s not just about having enough time to complete all the items off the to-do list, either. (Though that does matter!) More importantly, it’s about what it means for teachers to step...

The conversation about reading across education has taken a front-and-center position in many places, so it felt like the right time to have a conversation about it—especially since Adrian Neibauer recently wrote a thoughtful reflection on the topic called “The Sanctity of Literacy.” In this conversation, Marcus and Adrian talk about their experiences as teachers of reading in their respective cla...

Given that we are at the finish line of a very-busy 2025 with The Broken Copier , the goal of this short episode is first and foremost to express gratitude for what has been an incredible year of conversations and community-building—and also to share an update that over the next few months, we are going to slow down just a bit. 2025 was an incredible year with The Broken Copier , yet the pace we’v...

It is a very easy word to say in education, right? Full-stop: everyone wants to be supported and everyone wants to be supportive . However, making that support a reality that is experienced and sustainable in our classrooms and schools? For students and teachers alike? Much more complicated. Today’s conversation with Nathan Parham is 100% about this. Nathan is in his first year as a special educat...

The Broken Copier began a little over three years ago with a very simple idea: we wanted to uplift the type of conversations that happen so often between teachers in the margins of the school day: in the hallway between classes; in each other’s classrooms after the school day ends; in the faculty lounge while trying to collaboratively finagle a solution to far-too-frequently broken copiers. This i...

Over time, school years can fold into each other, in a way, with each eventually becoming indistinguishable from the next. This is why the goal of this episode, quite simply, is to pause before the month of November comes to a close and ask a simple question: What has this school year taught us so far? For this reflective conversation, we invited on one of our favorites: Adrian Neibauer , a 5th gr...

“What happened to helping them interrogate what it means to be human?” In his book Teaching without Teaching , Scott F. Parker makes a case for re-centering teaching around core human values—and away from what he calls “the whole charade” of the transactional system students and teachers alike are too often confined within. In this conversation, Scott shares his observations and reflections from h...

There is a lot of conversation happening in education around the topic of AI—but is it the right conversation? Recently Stephen Fitzpatrick wrote a piece around this, arguing that instead of two different AI conversations in education that seem to be talking past each other, what we need “is a third conversation grounded in intellectual humility.” Today’s conversation attempts to be just that. A f...

This is the third episode of our new Unjammed series, with a topic that a lot of teachers still are struggling with in their classrooms: chronic student absences and the consequent empty desks in the classroom. In this episode, he shares how difficult it can be as a teacher to encounter so many of these “empty desks”—and in particular how much it takes as a teacher to build and maintain a classroo...

For our second episode of our new Unjammed series, the focus is on a pattern Marcus was noticing in his own responses in the classroom this school year: finding himself losing his patience a bit more quickly than in previous years. In this episode, he talks through what it is like to notice yourself as a teacher losing your patience in the moment as well as after the moment; what might be the reas...

After over twenty Kicking The Copier episodes that focused on specific teaching strategies and mindsets, we’re going to make a slight pivot this school year. While still designed to be shorter, single-topic episodes, this new Unjammed series instead will feature a specific stories around a problem in the classroom—not necessarily one that was necessarily “solved,” but rather one that led to a wort...

This is a conversation between two teachers who noticed the same thing early into this school year: it feels heavier than usual. After Adrian Neibauer wrote a piece in his newsletter around this idea, he joined The Broken Copier to reflect collaboratively with Marcus about how the school year is going, what is creating the “heaviness” they both are feeling, and moving forward what a lighter, more-...