Teachers' Lounge

On a new Teachers’ Lounge podcast, a Marengo music teacher breaks down the barrier between students who love music and students who typically join a school band.

On a new Teachers’ Lounge podcast, a music teacher with the Rockford Symphony Youth Orchestra tells us how students have fun while playing really high-level music.

How can students be expected to make hard decisions about their future when the world feels like it’s changing faster than ever? A book -- written as a fable -- designed to help students plan their life. It’s on a new Teachers' Lounge podcast.

On a new episode, it's our chat with Chris Mrofcza. He's a counselor at Hiawatha High School. We had a great conversation about the unique role school counselors play. He helps students consider their future, what career they want to pursue or classes they should take, and also provides meaningful mental health support to students in need.

Andrea Gustafson! She’s an English teacher, speech team coach, and head of the drama department at Morris Community High School.Morris is her hometown, so it’s been really meaningful to build a career at the same school she went to and continue the legacy of the teachers who inspired her.

On a brand-new Teachers' Lounge, Julie is a physics teacher who encourages her students to learn through play. Sometimes that looks like rolling food cans down the hallway and sometimes that looks like her students growing synthetic rubies in a microwave!

On a brand-new Teachers' Lounge Podcast, we’re talking about America’s first school culture war: JAZZ!"Jazz was seen as more of a lifestyle, and so if you are interested in jazz, you were, as critics believed, also interested in drinking, in smoking, some degree of sexual activity. The belief was that if you could dissuade young people from not being interested in jazz, that all these other vices would would also go away."How the Jazz Problem set the stage for modern moral panics.

What’s the point of social studies?"Some students will go on and be doctors and some will be lawyers and some will be blue collar workers, but all of them are members of society," said Teresa Kruger. "The whole point of social studies, to me, is to prepare you to be that really active, participatory person in our in our democracy."Helping students find their voice and use their power in a democracy. That’s on a new Teachers' Lounge.

NIU's Jason Klein joins the show to dive into some of the most important education issues of 2025

A group of northern Illinois students put on their school’s first ever theatre production this fall. Hear the full journey from auditions through opening night. It’s on a new Teachers' Lounge, out now on WNIJ.org or wherever you get podcasts.