An Irish perspective on education for all who value teaching
Episodes
Wednesday May 20, 2020
Wednesday May 20, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
This week on the podcast my guest is Derek Sivers, a musician who founded the CD company CD Baby before leaving it to write and practise philosophy. His website is well worth checking out. Among the topics we discuss on the podcast are:
- We all have the ability to be smart or to be stupid and how some environments reward stupidity and others reward being smart
- Thriving educationally in and out of school: being engaged and receiving direct feedback
- The power of finding the intersection between students’ interests and a nudge from parents’ towards learning/growing experiences
- Why being smart (critical thinking, challenge assumptions, look past the obvious, to question the world) is more impressive than being educated (you’ve done the assignments)
- Naval Ravikant is an example of someone he thinks is smart.
- Smart is something you do, not something you are
- A list of books Derek Sivers has read and the notes he made on them.
- A great teacher or educator interrupts expectations: teaching a mindset (questioning assumptions, interrupting expectations) rather than delivering information. Teaching students how to carry on or learn on their own, to be smart out in the world).
- You don’t have to copy the teacher's example all the time; as long as you get the gist of an idea, you can get creative within it.
- Impact of Kimo Williams on Derek.
- Why the typical school curriculum goes way too slowly
- Being in awe at the patience of public school teachers
- Intrinsic interest in music following an initial foundation in music
- Moving from being passive in the education system to taking control of his own education: from mediocrity to excelling. His love of learning came after school
- The importance of having something to pursue, something you want, something you’re driven towards – whatever it is. By learning to be great at that one thing, you learn everything else (how to learn, improve, practise, mastery) as a side effect.
- How well his education prepared him for being an entrepreneur
- Why he things entrepreneurship cannot be taught successfully (it’s very holistic, about psychology, thinking about things from the customer’s, client’s, partner’s point of view), being out in the world staying at the forefront of people’s minds, bring flexible.
- Seeing learning as a key to his success; loving having his brain tickled – learning new ways of looking at things
- The need to have a focus for what you want in life. His current focus is on being a great writer, programmer and dad.
- Recognising that sometimes we just stumble into things (e.g. circumstance or a recommendation from someone we admire) or deliberately spreading out in other directions.
- Audio version of The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson:(listened to after hearing a podcast between Tyler Cowen and Emily Wilson)
- Avoiding distraction by finding work that is not so easy that it’s boring and not so difficult that it’s overwhelming as described in Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Maintaining focus by hating having something unfinished
- Learning for the sake of creating something
- Pain and anger as sources of ideas.
- Things he wants to create (build a house from scratch; a company that will host websites after you die); a forum on which to highlight the next generation of musicians (BMajor); build a 100-acre forest over 15 years; create an app to connect people who like talking on the phone; and Cloud Free a service to teach people technical independence
- Finding something that is endlessly interesting (computer programming for him)
- Learning from different media and perspectives: reading diverse books, listening, multi-media videos, courses that give assignments
- Mastery School (with coaches) sivers.org/masch: Pick something to do and make it happen
- The Flipped Classroom
He recommends the following books, article and pieces of music in the course of the interview:
- Total recall Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography
- Guns, germs and steel by Jared Diamond
- Cows, pigs, wars and witches by Marvin Harris.
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- Charlie Tips on How to Raise Your Kids as Billionaires
- Black Sabbath Iron Man
- Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley
Friday May 15, 2020
Friday May 15, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's programme school librarian from the Albemarle School System in the State of Virginia in the United States, Ida Mae Craddock (Mae) makes the case for having a school librarian in every school. We discuss her work as a school librarian. Among the topics covered are:
- A description of the school she teaches in
- Allocation of librarians to schools in Virigina
- The job of school librarian
- Describing the library and the services offered
- Doing a masters in library science (Old Dominion University)
- Content of masters course
- The challenge and importance of locating resources that are relevant and used
- Developing the library collection
- The library of things
- “Being stuck at home is no fun, being stuck at home with no books is tragic.”
- Cataloguing library materials
- The kind of literature that is popular among the students in the school she works in
- Loss of library stock
- Value of having a librarian in a school
- The history of school libraries
- The future of school libraries – innovation hubs
- Writing regularly for School Librarian Connection and School Library Journal
- The Maker Educator Collective
- Laser cutting and 3-D printing
- CRICKETS – Computer Aided Cutting
- Teaching as a subversive activity by Neil Postman
- Walden by Thoreau
Saturday May 09, 2020
Saturday May 09, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this 400th episode of Inside Education I am delighted to be joined by the co-presenter of my favourite podcast, Speak-up Storytelling. Matthew Dicks is also an elementary school teacher and the author of Storyworthy: Engage, teach, persuade, and change your life through the power of storytelling. He blogs and shares other resources at his website. Matthew shares a story with listeners to this week's podcast and among the other topics we discuss are:
- Becoming a teacher
- Studying in a community college while working in McDonalds before winning scholarships to university
- Manipulating his dream to fit his reality instead of manipulating his reality to fit his dream
- What he likes and dislikes about teaching
- Teaching children writing like an editor treats a writer (giving them time, choice, audience, purpose)
- The importance of letting a child share their writing and how to respond to the child’s writing
- Providing feedback for students on their writing
- Why he writes
- The kind of stories he tells on stage
- The idea he developed called “homework for life”
- How he uses storytelling in his elementary school teaching
- Improvisational story telling games
- The consequence of storytelling and story-writing being acts “of courage”
- Sharing writing as a celebratory moment
- Having a stage, curtains, lighting and a sound system in his class
- Teaching Shakespeare to fifth grade students
- “Whatever your passion is, bring it to the classroom”
- Albert Cullum Shakespeare in the classroom
- A typical day in his classroom
- Disliking school as a student
- Why he teaches to the students who don’t want to be in class; not assuming that any student wants to be in school on any given day
- How his approach to planning has changed
- He is a problem-solving, big-picture person – not someone who likes to write a unit of work or draft a school plan
- Managing behaviour in the classroom
- Why he dislikes homework: children should read every day and learn to study. He prefers long-term assignments over short-term ones
- Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
- Using competence in storytelling to be a better interviewee when you go for a job
- Telling a story
Friday May 01, 2020
Friday May 01, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
On this week's podcast my guest is website entrepreneur, bestselling author and performance nutritionist, Daniel Davey. Daniel Davey is the senior performance nutritionist with Leinster Rugby and with the Dublin Senior Football team. The focus of our conversation is nutrition and education. Among the topics we discuss are the following:
- What made him decide to study nutrition
- Memories of preparing food and cooking at home from a young age
- Studying home economics at school and agricultural science at college
- Making the connection between nutrition and sport
- Importance of a positive relationship with food
- His message for students when he visits schools
- Challenges in applying principles of healthy nutrition in our lives
- How he sees his role in promoting nutrition as that of a coach
- Why he does not prepare meal plans for the athletes he works with
- Questions he is asked by students in schools
- Attempts to use schools in the fight against childhood obesity
- Why he prefers the healthy plates to that of the food pyramid
- Taking responsibility for the food you eat
- Why it’s good to raise your own awareness and curiosity about food
- Making the classroom a safe space to talk about food
- The power of questions when talking about nutrition
- Work of a nutritionist is to facilitate and empower
- Relationship between nutrition and physical exercise
- How coaches of school sports teams can promote good nutrition with their members
- Elite school sports performance and nutrition – place of supplements
- Advice for parents around school lunches
- Positive and negative impacts of teachers on him
- His continuing professional development
- How our nutrition practices have set us up to fail in school
- What inspires him