Episodes
Monday Dec 12, 2022
Monday Dec 12, 2022
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
On this podcast I spoke to Professor Mark Windschitl from the University of Washington about teaching science and especially the science of climate change. As usual with these podcasts we covered a wide range of topics, including the following:
- What core practices are in teacher education (e.g. teachers need to elicit ideas students already have about the topic being taught).
- Why, although important, there is much more to teaching than core practices, such as developing respectful and trusting relationships with students.
- As teachers gain experience, they add nuance and flexibility to the core practices.
- What ambitious science teaching is: willingness to constantly improve one’s practice, to take risks to improve their practice and to base changes on students’ response to their teaching.
- The need for a teacher pursuing ambitious science teaching to understand topics (e.g. the greenhouse effect) in great depth, with flexibility, and connected to children’s everyday lives.
- The biggest ideas in biology that can be taught in a second-level school setting (e.g. how ecosystems function in the world).
- Trees extend their roots out to other trees and can cause chemical changes in other trees.
- Selecting candidates for teaching science and engaging in ambitious science teaching
- How the impact of testing in schools shapes the curriculum.
- The importance of academically productive discourse in the classroom about science ideas. Productive talk in a classroom is a process of sense-making and meaning making.
- The need for teachers to have models of ambitious science teaching that is relevant to the setting in which they teach.
- How to teach children the science of climate change without elevating eco-anxiety.
- Why solutions need to be threaded into the teaching of climate change
- The importance of understanding the greenhouse effect and why understanding that is not enough (the need to know about ecosystems, the oceans, the cryosphere – the frozen parts of the earth, and tipping points)
- The scale of climate change phenomena
- The idea of “carbon footprint” was introduced by a petroleum company (BP)
- What schools can do to mitigate the effects of climate change (e.g. making Prom night – the Debs – greener)
- Plastics pollution is different to climate change but both are connected in many students’ minds
- Students being exposed to sceptical points of view in some areas. Although such perspectives need to be managed carefully, sceptical views might not be as big a problem as we would expect. It may help to focus on the science of the greenhouse effect.
- The challenge of beef production as part of the climate change discussion
- The difficulty of conveying the scale of climate change
- Finding and evaluating climate change data – the challenge of media literacy. Among the known reputable outlets he identifies are: NASA, NOAA, WHO, and the UN.
- The importance of having a reason when sharing data about climate change.
- Assessing students’ knowledge of climate change
- How he became interested in education research
- How he conducts his research to find out how novice teachers become “well-started beginners”
- Helping novice teachers use agency to move beyond reproducing someone else’s teaching
- How he finds time to write – bringing a notebook with him when going out for a stroll and doing 14 versions of an article before it’s ready for publication
- Who research in education is for and how does it influence practice in education? Is it through instructional coaches? School leaders?
- Having children do well-structured work in small groups (that is equitable and rigorous) in class, at least part of the time, is hugely beneficial for their learning.
- Productive academic discourse in science is difficult to find in classrooms in the Unites States.
- Another research question is why technology failed to deliver for education during COVID
- Why schools and the communities around them should have porous boundaries
- The value of a teacher sharing (a) the kind of science they’re interested in (b) something about their family and (c) a hobby they have with their class in order to decrease the psychological difference between the teacher and their students.
- He refers to the book Teaching and its predicaments by David Cohen.
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Inside Education 424, Art Baroody on Early Mathematics Learning (16-3-22)
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
In this episode I speak to Professor Art Baroody from the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign about matters related to counting and early mathematical development. Professor Baroody shares insights from his extensive research in children's early mathematical learning with anecdotes from his life and work. Among the topics we discuss are:
- The word “count” is ambiguous; he prefers the terms verbal counting and object counting. Along with subitising, these are foundational for children’s sense of number.
- The rote portion of numbers (up to 12 in English) and the rule-governed portion of numbers (13 onwards in English)
- Being able to meaningfully count objects means understanding the cardinality principle
- How a teacher can assess a child’s competence in object counting. The “hidden stars” game.
- The importance of subitising (easily recognising, without counting, the number in a set). If a child can subitise small sets of objects and connect it to their verbal counting knowledge, the child can get insights into the structure of the count sequence and into our number system.
- The importance of children understanding the “increasing magnitude” principle of numbers.
- Subitising and learning addition and subtraction concepts
- The value of playing dice games.
- The successor principle: Each step in the counting sequence means you added one more.
- A child who starts out behind in kindergarten, typically gets further behind as school goes on, indicating the importance of informal mathematical knowledge for school readiness.
- Three components of a hypothetical learning trajectory: a goal, a learning progression, instructional activities that help children move from one level to the next.
- The relevance of a hypothetical learning trajectory for a teacher’s work: questions and instruction need to be developmentally appropriate for children.
- What number comes after 9? Whether you need to start at 1 or can answer this directly depends on your current level of understanding numbers.
- How schools typically target instruction at a level that is too low or too high for students.
- There are many published learning progressions and hypothetical learning trajectories available to teachers now, especially in number, arithmetic and counting development.
- A child’s mathematical power, routine expertise (learning something by rote – hard to apply it to a new problem and easy to forget) and adaptive expertise (learning something with understanding)
- Mathematical power comes from understanding, engaging in mathematical inquiry, to reason mathematically, to solve problems, having an interest in mathematics and using it. In short, conceptual understanding, mathematical thinking skills, and a positive disposition towards mathematics
- Example of applying knowledge to finding the area of a parallelogram
- Why memorising mathematics by rote is crazy.
- All children, even those with learning disabilities, can develop mathematical power up to lower secondary school level, if properly taught.
- Teaching mathematics by rote is cheating children.
- Things that can be discovered are the additive commutativity principle (3+5 = 5+3)
- Children are capable of much more than we give them credit for.
- Why getting children to learn off tables of number facts is cheating children. The importance of seeing patterns and relationships in the number tables – make it a thinking exercise and make mathematics learning fun.
- Working with his mentor Herb Ginsburg
- The use of manipulatives in teaching mathematics, even to college-level students.
- The value of children inventing procedures themselves.
- To understand fraction multiplication, the analogy of multiplication as repeated addition does not suffice. You need a more powerful analogy. A “groups of” analogy is more helpful. And it helps you understand why multiplication doesn’t always make something bigger.
- How to make sense of fraction division.
- How he conducts his research (Case study; random controlled trials)
- Substitution errors in reading
- John Holt’s books
- John Dewey’s book, Experience and Education
- Why parents and teachers need to be patient
- The power of examples and non-examples when teaching mathematics.
Sunday Nov 01, 2020
Podcast 407, Pam Moran on 21st Century Education (1-11-20)
Sunday Nov 01, 2020
Sunday Nov 01, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
My guest on the podcast this week is Dr. Pam Moran who is the Executive Director of the Virginia School Consortium for Learning and is a former superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools.
Among the points we discussed in the podcast were the following:
- The role of a superintendent in US education
- Desmos software that is used to teach mathematics.
- The reintroduction of maker skills into US education in response to narrow testing and the benefits of it
MAKER LEARNING
- Students who take making courses
- Safety in maker learning
- Involving the wider family in maker learning
- How maker learning is reflected in the school curriculum
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR TEACHERS
- Her thoughts on professional development that works best for teachers
- Professional development to help teachers teach online
- Flipgrid
EDUCATION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
- What schools need to do to be more relevant to the twenty-first century (automation, climate change, working from home, demographic changes, superficial learning for tests)
- Edward Hess books: Learn or Die, Humility is the New Smart and Hyper Learning: Learning at the speed of change)
- How she would reform the mathematics and science curriculum to make it more relevant for students
- The book she co-authored, Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools. Reimagining education using zero-based thinking
- Ira Socol.
- Yong Zhao episode on Inside Education.
- Catherine Cronin's interview on Inside Education.
- Pam O’Brien, Mags Almond, John Heffernan.
- Maya Angelou, Séamus Heaney
- Stories from the Pandemic.
- Website of Pam Moran and Ira Socol
Monday Jun 01, 2020
Monday Jun 01, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
This week on the programme I interview five colleagues who participated recently in an Erasmus+ project titled EDUCATE. This project involved developing materials for teachers, providing providing professional development, and conducting research on how to combine challenge and differentiated instruction in the teaching of mathematics at pre-primary, primary and post-primary levels. Project materials are available here. The guests on the programme are Charalambos Charalambous from the University of Cyprus, Ann Marie Gurhy from the Marino Institute of Education, Despina Potari from the University of Athens, João Pedro da Ponte from the University of Lisbon, and Evridiki Kasapi from the University of Cyprus. Among the topics we discuss are:
- Realising that mathematics is more than memorisation and drill and practice.
- How the study of differentiated instruction and challenge in mathematics came about
- What it means to introduce challenge to mathematics tasks
- An overview of differentiated instruction
- Using enablers and extenders to promote differentiated instruction
- Why a teacher needs to know a student’s cognitive, social and affective needs in order to differentiate
- Observing teachers’ needs in differentiating and providing challenge through reading research and observing lessons
- Developing materials to support teachers
- Using video clubs as a model of teacher professional development
- Challenges teacher encounter when working with challenging tasks
- The difference between video clubs and lesson study
- Overview of the modules created as part of the project (each module is based around a number of cases of practice)
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
Podcast 390, Liz Dunphy on Early Childhood Education (19-2-20)
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's programme I speak to Dr. Liz Dunphy, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education in Dublin City University's Institute of Education about her work. Among the topics we discuss are the following:
- Choosing a career in teaching over one in law
- Becoming interested in early childhood education
- Childcare and the growth of love by John Bowlby
- Her first teaching job
- Doing a Masters degree in education in Trinity College Dublin
- Offering professional development for teachers through the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation
- Children’s early experience of number as seen through a socio-cultural lens
- Looking at how the work of educational researchers complement each other rather than adopting a more polarised approach.
- Her research on early childhood education: mathematics, curriculum, and assessment
- How the area of early childhood education has evolved nationally and internationally over Liz’s career in education to date
- Play, Playful pedagogy, and playfulness
- James McGarrigle – psychologist and a student of Margaret Donaldson
- Why international models of early childhood education cannot be imported directly to Ireland
- Jerome Bruner
- Reggio Emilia model of early childhood education
- Why developments in the last five years have been positive for early childhood education and care
- Choosing a pre-school for your child
- The transition from non-compulsory to compulsory education
- The qualities she looks for in early childhood education practice
- The Katie Morag books with Mairi Hedderwick
- How teachers and children can establish a “shared world”
- Understanding the child from the perspective of their family
- Mathematics with reason: The emergent approach to primary mathematics by Sue Atkinson:
- Assessment and record keeping in early childhood education settings
- Vivian Gussin Paley Mollie is Three. The Boy Who Would be a Helicopter. White Teacher was also mentioned: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88364.White_Teacher
- The Erikson Institute
- Herb Ginsburg
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
Programme 384, Teaching as a Political Activity (18-12-19)
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
On this week's podcast I speak to Professor Paola Valero from Stockholm University about the political aspects of teaching in general and of teaching mathematics in particular. Professor Valero was in Ireland as a keynote speaker at the 2019 Mathematics Education in Ireland conference, which was held in Dublin City University in October.
This podcast will be of interest to anyone who likes to stand back from their teaching and think about the why, what and how of their work. Among the topics we discuss in the podcast are:
- The difference between teacher knowledge and researcher knowledge and why both need to work together
- Responsibilities of researchers (in education)
- Relevance of her work on the politics of mathematics education for teachers
- Why teachers’ work is inevitably political, whether or not that is acknowledged
- How can teachers become more aware of their political stance (from 12’06”)
- What it means to be a teacher-intellectual
- What is political specifically in mathematics education
- Working with powerful and empowering knowledge
- It is a desired area of competence/it is highly valued
- Mathematics is widely assessed
- A brief history of how the status of mathematics in schools evolved
- How less was expected of girls in mathematics education
- The experience of learning mathematics for immigrants and people with disabilities
- How teachers can respond to the political nature of mathematics
She recommended the work of Ole Skovsmose and in particular the chapter he co-wrote with Lene Nielsen, Critical Mathematics Education.
Wednesday Nov 27, 2019
Programme 381, Scifest Finals and Science Teaching (27-11-19)
Wednesday Nov 27, 2019
Wednesday Nov 27, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's podcast I bring you interviews from students, teachers and organisers who attended the National Finals of Scifest 2019 in Marino Institute of Education on Friday, 22 November. Among the guests I speak to are the following:
- Sheila Porter, the founder and CEO of Scifest
- Aideen Hodgins from TU Dublin – Blanchardstown
- Students Ella, Eva and Willemijn from Loreto Balbriggan
- Students Caomhán Budhlaeir and Illann Wall from Presentation Brothers’ College, Cork
- Teacher Kristina Troy from Kishoge Community College
- Overall Winner Timothy McGrath from Killorglin Community College
- Former winner Aaron Hannon
- Eoin Gill from Waterford Institute of Technology.
- Rory Geoghegan
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
Programme 377, Jane Shimizu & Science on Stage and More (30-10-19)
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's Inside Education I bring you another chance to meet with Jane Shimizu where she tells us about her participation in Science on Stage over the midterm break. We also discuss the participation of her class in the Scoil Féile Drámaíochta. From research I bring some insights around education and sleep following my reading of Matthew Walker's book, Why We Sleep.
Among the topics I discuss with Jane Shimizu are the following:
- Her participation in the Science on Stage Festival this week in Portugal, representing Irish teachers.
- Getting children interested in science through space using projectiles and rockets
- How she makes mouse, toilet roll, air, straw and foam projectiles with her class
- The science and maths that can be based around foam projectiles
- Making predictions and recording answers to questions
- Using controls and the importance of fair tests
- How she times activities to coincide with Space Week.
- Sharing work with other classes and hosting a space display day for parents.
- Structuring lessons around projectiles and rockets and how they provide integration opportunities with several other curriculum subjects.
- What happens when questions arise to which she does not know the answer.
- Online resources: https://www.dltk-teach.com/, https://www.safesearchkids.com/.
- Her school’s website. Here are some of the links Jane recommended.
- Recommended sources for ideas and materials for teaching about space and science from ESERO and Science Foundation Ireland.
- Her class, which is in a school serving an area traditionally associated with disadvantage, participates in An Féile Scoildrámaíochta by entering a musical each year. Because many of the available scripts are intended for students in Gaelscoileanna and Gaeltacht schools, Jane writes her own scripts for her class.
- How she prepares the class during the school year for staging the musical
Wednesday Oct 16, 2019
Programme 375, Using Picture Story Books to Teach Maths (16-10-19)
Wednesday Oct 16, 2019
Wednesday Oct 16, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
On this week's programme I bring you a special episode for Maths Week and to mark the seventh conference of Mathematics Education in Ireland held last weekend in Dublin City University's Institute of Education. First I speak to Dr. Siún Nic Mhuirí (from 1'43") from Dublin City University about the Maths4All project she's working on. Among the topics we discuss are:
- The Maths4All website and resources
- Alan Schoenfeld's Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework
- Challenges of developing video representations of teaching
- Pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching mathematics
- Her thoughts on this year’s Mathematics Education in Ireland conference
- A message about the importance of believing that maths is for all students
Next I speak to Dr. Natthapoj Vincent Trakulphadetkrai from the University of Reading (from 15' 51") about using picture story books to teach mathematics.We discuss the following:
- His goal to have mathematics picture story books used in both primary and secondary schools to teach mathematics
- Why picture books can help students learn abstract topics
- Handa’s Surprise
- Sir Cumference series
- Using a picture book to provide context for a lesson
- Reading a story to apply learning to help characters in a story solve a problem
- How to use a maths picture story book in a mathematics lesson
- Benefits of using maths picture story books
- How children react to using maths picture story books in maths class
- Children writing their own maths picture story books
- Papert’s theory of constructionism
- When should maths picture story books be used in mathematics teaching
- His website mathsthroughstories.org
- His view of effective mathematics teaching
- The journey that brought him from Thailand to England
- Why he likes the Times Educational Supplement
The episode closes with a rant from me about teaching mathematics. I refer to the following books:
- W. Timothy Gallwey The Inner Game of Tennis
- Donald Graves A Fresh Look at Writing
Wednesday May 15, 2019
Programme 366, Teaching Science, Going to College & More (15-5-19)
Wednesday May 15, 2019
Wednesday May 15, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
Theme tune by David Vesey
On this week's programme I bring you the second part of my interview with Professor Barbara Schneider from Michigan State University. Among the topics discussed this week are the following:
- The need to review the Irish science curriculum in line with other countries
- How can a curriculum value both knowing and doing, especially doing
- Her upcoming book titled, Learning Science (2020)
- The role of family and school in aligning one’s education with one’s career choice (“aligned ambitions”) and how this led to the “College Ambition Program.”
- Enhancing one’s career prospects with a “dual degree”
- Educational outcomes v occupational outcomes
- Fluidity of careers and implications for developing curriculum materials
- How media influence career choices
- Career paths of females
- A typical working day for her
- What schools are for
- Two books she regularly returns to are Foundations of Social Theory and Flow