Episodes
Sunday Apr 25, 2021
Inside Education 417, Assessment, Feedback & Academic Integrity (25-4-21)
Sunday Apr 25, 2021
Sunday Apr 25, 2021
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
This week my guest on the podcast is expert on assessment, feedback and academic integrity, Professor Phillip Dawson from Deakin University. Among the topics we discuss on the podcast are the following:
- How academic integrity is learned throughout our lives – and how even Peppa Pig has been known to flout academic integrity.
- What a secondary school teacher needs to know about academic integrity – values and technical skills
- Academic integrity travels with us: Medical students who have more academic integrity problems have more professional integrity problems as doctors
- Acknowledging student work that is original
- Scalable feedback practices at feedbackforlearning.org.
- Text matching software (e.g. Turn-it-in) can help provide feedback at scale.
- Recognising patterns in errors legitimately made by students on a module
- Estimated instances of cheating among university students, by “outsourcing” their work, range from 6% to 16%
- When the student signals that an assignment is tough, the temptation to cheat appears, literally.
- Intellectual streaking and intellectual candour (Margaret Bearman and Elizabeth Molloy. The importance of faculty sharing their own experiences of receiving feedback with students.
- Contract cheating and blackmail. Lesley Sefcik and Jon Yorke.
- University faculty are more likely to spot contract cheating when they are looking out for it.
- Initial suspicion versus investigation of contract cheating
- Resources to combat contract cheating from the Australian Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.
- Cheating and Assessment Project
- The difference between referencing blunders and contract cheating
- Where students are more/less likely to cheat: types of work, disciplines
- The work of Tracey Bretag and colleagues
- Designing assessments to minimise the likelihood of contract cheating
- Authentic assessments
- Benefits of few, enforceable authentic restrictions
- Review of authentic assessments by Villarroel et al (2020)
- Article on authentic assessment and authentic feedback by Dawson, Carless and Lee (2021).
- Assessment rubrics Article by Dawson
- Article 1 and Article 2 on assessment by James Popham: and
- Analytical, holistic and co-constructed rubrics
- Alfie Kohn podcast
- Winstone and Bowd (2020): the need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education
- Pitt & Norton (2017) Student Responses to feedback
- Sustainable assessment and evaluative judgment
- One person who inspires Phillip is his boss, David Boud: https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/david-boud.
- One of David Boud’s articles on sustainable assessment.
Sunday Apr 18, 2021
Sunday Apr 18, 2021
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's podcast I speak to Professor Gregory Cajete from Santa Clara Pueblo and the University of New Mexico about indigenous education and what contemporary western education can learn from such rich traditions. Among the topics we discuss are:
- Belonging to the Tewa tribe and what is particular about that tribe.
- Numbers in different tribes such as the Navajo, Cherokee, the Hopi and the Tewa.
- Being the first member of his family to attend public school
- Previously native Americans would have attended federal boarding schools (created by Pratt), with a basic academic curriculum
- Professor Cajete refers to “Charles Pratt” but this may be a mistaken reference to Richard Henry Pratt, to whom the expression “Kill the Indian, save the man” was attributed.
- Tribal College Union established in the 1970s (36 colleges – like first and second year of colleges; giving 2-year degrees)
- Defining indigenous education: Distinction between native American students attending US public schools (including the Bureau of Indian affair schools and religious denominational schools) – education as assimilation versus traditional indigenous education including stories, history, customs and language of the people.
- Relationality as the basis of indigenous education – developing a relationship to the place in which we live
- In indigenous education people ask the question, “how am I related to this?” versus the predominant “western” question “What is this?”
- Currently attempts are being made to introduce native American language, culture and traditions into US public schools
- Epistemology (how we come to know what we know) of indigenous education involves storytelling, ceremony, participation in community, rhythm and dance.
- Axiology (what is the focus of/what has value in?) of indigenous education is about establishing a balanced relationship with your environment, including human and other-than-human entities; a place-based world view (based on where you live).
- Logic of indigenous education is ecological and is one of balanced interdependence. It is part of an understanding that everything you do impacts everything around you.
- The Lakota people say “We are all related.”
- The “intractable conflict” between indigenous education and public school education in the United States
- Why the curriculum focused on subject-matter is object-focused and parts-oriented whereas native education is ecological, sustainable and holistic.
- Shortcomings of the subject-based curriculum include that it doesn’t teach for relationality or about the ecological mandate, the pre-requisite for sustainability; these are “specialised fields” whereas in indigenous education, you learn these from the day you’re born and reinforced consistently throughout one’s lifetime. Consequently you acquire a life-centred focus.
- Many native artists are entrepreneurial while maintaining a traditional viewpoint. An economic focus is on benefiting the community, not just oneself.
- Gary Nabhan is not native American but he writes about native forms of agriculture.
- Enrique Salmón too has written on this topic.
- Books Greg Cajete has written:
- Look to the Mountain
- Igniting the Sparkle: An Indigenous Science Education Model.
- Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence
- Spirit of the Game.
- Indigenous Community: Rekindling the teachings of the seventh fire.
- Native Minds Rising: Exploring Transformative Indigenous Education
- Sacred Journeys: Personal visions of indigenous transformation
- Values that underpin indigenous education
- O. Wilson’s biophilic sensibility – caring and empathy for each other, caring and empathy for the natural world and caring and empathy for your soul
- The indigenous stages of developmental learning; finding the essence of your soul.
- Question: What does it mean to become a full human being? Chant: One must first find one’s face (you identity), one must then find one’s heart, finally one must find one’s foundation (what you stand on) in the context of relationship, responsibility, respect and resonance, with one’s self, one’s community, one’s place, then with one’s world, within the context of your relationship with the cosmos.
Friday Apr 09, 2021
Podcast 415, Gene Mehigan on Literacy & Disadvantage (9-4-21)
Friday Apr 09, 2021
Friday Apr 09, 2021
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's episode I interview my long-time colleague and fellow vice-president of Marino Institute of Education on the topics of literacy and disadvantage and more. Among the topics we discuss during the podcast are the following:
- What constitutes a struggling reader
- Identifying a struggling reader in a class setting
- Why it is important to move on from focusing on individual sounds and words to help students become fluent readers.
- The article referred to in the programme can be downloaded here: Effects of Fluency Oriented Instruction on Motivation for Reading of Struggling Readers
- Fluency oriented instruction and the work of Stephen Stahl, Kathleen Heubach and Bonnie Cramond.
- The value of repeatedly reading the same text
- Why fluency oriented instruction is particularly important around first class
- The value of teachers and parents reading to children, modelling the reading process
- Why choral reading is helpful in developing fluency – communicatively choral reading
- Echo reading, antiphonal reading,
- Why motivation may be the most important factor in learning to read
- Louise Rosenblatt and the efferent/aesthetic continuum.
- Story of “Jason” a non-reader who loved Buddy Holly songs
- How teachers believe that fluency comes after mastery of more cognitive skills of reading and that motivation is important for beginning readers
- Conducting research in schools serving disadvantaged areas in Dublin
- Looking at motivation for reading:
- Self-efficacy for reading
- Orientation towards reading
- Perceived difficulty of reading
- The value for teachers of knowing the science of reading. Read Daniel Willingham’s The Reading Mind
- Our brains are not wired for reading (alphabet principle; decoding)
- How parents can promote motivation among children – reading to children and reading with children
- What it means for a child to be alliterate
- The role of education in a disadvantaged setting
- The “network gap” that children in disadvantaged settings experience
- The extent to which education can ameliorate disadvantage
- The value of teachers collaborating, especially in a disadvantaged setting (and in planting allotments and solving crossword puzzles and in teacher education too)
- Role of a principal in a disadvantaged school
- Derek Sivers’s book notes
- Ken Robinson
- Science of reading podcast and blogs (http://textproject.org/teacher-educators/science-of-reading/, https://understandingreading.home.blog/)
- Timothy Shanahan blog.
- Autobiographies: John Major, Arnold Schwarzenegger & André Agassi
- Derek Sivers's book notes and podcast interview