Inside Education - a podcast for educators interested in teaching

Programme 330, Action Research as Professional Development (30-5-18)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

On this week's programme I speak to four educational researchers who have just had their third book about educational research published by Bloomsbury. The new boook by Máirín Glenn, Mary Roche, Caitríona McDonagh, and Bernie Sullivan is titled Learning Communities in Educational Partnerships: Action Research as Transformation. They have also set up a website to support action researchers at www.eari.ie. Among the topics we discuss on the programme are:

• How this book differs to their previous ones
• The link between professional development and action research
• The transformative power of action research for teachers
• How the authors define research
• How action research works in practice
• Brookfield’s lenses

I have previously spoken to Máirín, Mary, Caitriona and Bernie on programmes 235 and 324,

 

Programme 329, Mike Vacanti on Education for Fitness & Strength (23-5-18)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

On this week's programme I speak to online strength and fitness coach Mike Vacanti who runs the On the Regimen website. He also has his own YouTube Channel, which contains hundreds of vlogs and videos about health and fitness. I speak to Mike about his own physical education and about his participation in the Ultimate Sweat Challenge. Among the topics discussed are:

• His own physical and health education
• What would he prioritise in a physical education curriculum
• What kept him motivated to continue with sport through his teen years and beyond
• What would he say to a child who works hard at sport but who is never picked for the team
• His thoughts on motivating people who are not interested in physical education to be more participative in the subject
• How he plans videos on his website to make them educational
• His role as mentor for the Ultimate Sweat endeavour
• What he learned as mentor for the Ultimate Sweat
• Why consistency trumps perfection

Mike referred to websites he finds helpful in the areas of nutrition, fitness and strength. They include:

• Lyle MacDonald’s website
• Brad Schoenfeld's website
• Eric Helms's website
• Rhonda Patrick's website
• Mike Matthews's website

 

Programme 328, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot & Sociology (16-5-18)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney

On this week's programme I bring you my interview with Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot has written 10 books, including The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture and The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other. In the course of our interview, we discussed the following matters:

• Diversity and tokenism
• Why education research needs to move away from a pathological approach
• An alternative approach to conducting educational research
• Visibility of children in classrooms
• When global atrocities make the news, how can they be handled in classrooms?
• What looking at education through a sociological lens can make visible
• The importance of context in social science research
• Portraiture as a form of research
• Her book Exit: The Endings that Set Us Free
• Why truth matters more than facts

Programme 327, Jerome Kagan on Psychology & Education 2 (9-5-18)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

On this week's programme I bring you the second part of my interview with someone who was listed as one of the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century, Professor Jerome Kagan of Harvard University. In the course of this interview we discuss some of Professor Kagan's recent publications. The topics covered included:

• Psychology's Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back
• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
• Stress
• Language and phenomena in psychology
• The crisis in psychology and what can be done about it
• The biggest unanswered question of all in developmental psychology
• Unresolved issues in human morality
• Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior

Programme 326, Jerome Kagan on Psychology & Education 1 (2-5-18)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

On this week's programme I speak to one of the pre-eminent developmental psychologists of the twentieth century who continues publishing books and articles up to the present day. Professor Jerome Kagan of Harvard University has conducted research into infants' temperaments and how they are related to personality in later life. He is interested in how psychology can inform teachers' work. Among the topics we discuss in this part of the interview are:

• The relationship between temperament and personality
• How knowing about temperament helps teachers
• Children who find it harder to work in groups
• Insights the discipline of psychology offers to teachers
  • Auditory and visual acuity
  • Short-term, recall and episodic memory
  • Ability to Infer
  • Deduction
• Questions he’d like educational psychologists to answer
• What teachers need to know about human emotions