An Irish perspective on education for all who value teaching
Episodes
Sunday Nov 21, 2021
Sunday Nov 21, 2021
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
In this episode I speak to Professor David T. Hansen from Teachers' College, Columbia University about the philosophy of education and the practice of teaching. Among the topics we discuss are the following:
- What it means to see teaching as an art, as a political activity and as a moral endeavour.
- Direct lessons about morality/values/ethics versus the continuous enactment of moral values.
- What hand-raising and turn-taking reveals about classroom culture and establishing dialogue among students (teachers and their students coming closer and closer apart and further and further together).
- Teaching as a profession? Teaching as vocation, calling, practice, craft? The attraction of teaching for people who want to live a meaningful life.
- Reworking his original book, The Call to Teach in 2021 as Reimagining the Call to Teach in response to (a) Accountability movement in the United States, linked to No Child Left Behind; and (b) Having learned more about the practice of teaching.
- How the implementation of No Child Left Behind in the United States was tone-deaf to classroom life. Huge resources benefited private testing companies rather than professional development for teachers.
- A poetics of teaching: What poetics means (comes from Aristotle trying to figure out why drama on a stage has the kind of effects it has on the spectators long after the play has ended). In this article, Hansen tries to understand the impact of teaching.
- Recognising the poetics of teaching; teaching is a rhythmic practice where poetics can be found alongside its drudgery/frustration/failure.
- How we all fail regularly in teaching but we rarely discuss it.
- What he means when he says that anyone interviewing a teacher for a job wants to know if the teacher loves life.
- Finding meaningfulness in teaching
- Programmes for veteran teachers to rejuvenate, reinspire, renew and refresh themselves.
- One example of such a programme is a “descriptive review” of a child.
- The importance of working on craft with initial student candidates; more can be done on the art of teaching – draw out a sense of their own humanity, possibly through story, poetry, film or a painting.
- How teaching is saturated with “why” questions – invitations to philosophy.
- Philosophy as theory and as an art of living (wisdom tradition)
- Cosmopolitanism: being reflectively loyal and reflectively open
- Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
- Plato and John Dewey.
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.
Monday Mar 22, 2021
Monday Mar 22, 2021
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
In this episode my guest is Emeritus Professor John Hattie from the University of Melbourne. Among many other contributions to education, he has developed the idea of visible learning. Among the topics we discuss in the podcast are the following:
- What Professor Hattie means by visible learning
- How children don’t have the language to talk about their learning
- Students learning from each other
- The importance of asking students two questions: What does it mean to be a good learner in this class? What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
- Impact of a student’s age on making learning visible
- Three ways of making learning visible: student voice, student artefacts, test scores. He is interested in triangulating across these three sources, in how the teacher interprets that information, and how the teacher decides where to go next with a student’s learning. The same information from a student’s perspective is also important.
- The love of learning follows, rather than precedes, learning.
- Every curriculum subject has three parts (i) content, skills (knowing that…), (ii) relationships (knowing how…) and (iii) Transfer. Understanding all three parts is important. Typically 90% of learning is focused on content/skills. John Hattie believes it’s the balance across all three that matters. However, you can’t rush to the deep parts too quickly.
- His views on learning styles
- The missing piece of teacher education – looking at students’ learning
- Research he did to develop the concept of “visible learning”
- Changing the research question on teaching from “What works?” to “What works best?”
- Why how teachers think matters more than what teachers do
- Many teachers deny their expertise
- When students do a test, the teacher should ask “What did I teach well and what did I not teach well?” What did I learn about which students gained from the teaching and which didn’t? What did I learn about how much I taught? Answering those questions helps teachers decide “where to” next.
- Ask students to predict how they’ll do in a test? From age 8 on, they’re good at answering this question.
- His research on feedback. Its impact on students can be variable, even from one day to the next.
- What is important to look at is the feedback that is received by students (is it heard, understood and actionable?)
- Why children after age 8 don’t like talking about their errors or what they don’t know…and why they might be more likely to do it through technology
- The need to learn in groups
- The value of asking a student how someone got something wrong
- If you’re not getting things wrong, the work’s too easy
- Why he dislikes a constructivist approach to teaching and its cousins (problem-based learning, and discovery learning). It’s all about timing and being deliberate.
- He refers a few times to the card game Canasta.
- The lack of support available to newly qualified teachers.
- Evaluative thinking (diagnosis, intervention, implementation, evaluate) as the essence of the teaching profession
- The difference between teacher as facilitator and teacher as activator (i.e. active listeners, active in the process about how students are going about their learning, intervening at the right time) and why he prefers the latter. Why students need experts.
- Homework and student achievement. The nature of the homework matters. We can’t assume that students know how to learn.
- He mentions other researchers in the podcast including: Gert Biesta, Shirley Clarke, Guy Claxton, and Graham Nuthall.
Saturday Dec 19, 2020
Saturday Dec 19, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
In this episode I speak to two experts on curriculum integration from Brock University in Ontario, Canada, Professor Susan Drake and Dr. Joanne Reid. Among the topics we discuss are the following:
- Multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary connections among subjects
- SAMPLE TOPICS FOR INTEGRATION: War, water, homelessness, food waste in the cafeteria, traffic patterns in a school, sustainability, patterns, change, conflict, trace origin of everyday item (Coffee, chocolate etc.), medieval fair.
- Finnish requirement that students do a phenomenon-based learning unit each year based around transversal competencies (21st century)
- Project-based learning examples
- Students present their work to an authentic audience
- Finding themes for integration (look out your window!)
- Project-based learning on Edutopia
- Buck Institute and Project-based learning
- Benefits of integration: more fun, students are engaged, fewer behaviour problems, social and emotional development, wellbeing, relevance, focus on whole person. Teachers who collaborate are more energised and creative
- OECD Report: Curriculum Overload: A Way Forward.
- Student achievement and integrated curricula
- Obstacles to integration: textbooks, timetabling, subject-specific responsibilities,
- Origin of Integrated teaching and its relation to constructivism which is relevant, interactive, real-world, choice, inquiry-based.
- The Eight Year Study with Ralph Tyler, Hilda Taba and others. It was written up by Aikin.
- Balancing integration and disciplinary integrity
- Cross-curricular and teaching to the big ideas compared to integrated curriculum
- Explanation of their curriculum framework: KDB: Know, Do, Be
- Twenty-first century competencies: Communication (reading, writing, oral communication, listening, media literacy), critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, global competency, design thinking, digital skills, data literacy, financial literacy.
- How they conduct research on integrated curriculum
- Gordon Vars and research on integrated curriculum.
- Bluewater study
- What happened when standards/accountability model arrived in schools in the 1990s.
- How the pandemic has impacted on assessment
- Assessment and integration.
- Benefits of students seeing the value of their work in the wider world (having an audience outside the classroom).
- Finding out more about integrated curriculum and its history.
- John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick and The Project Method.
- James Beane.
- Twenty-first century life skills
- High Tech High
- Getting started with integration : Genius Hour. More here.
- Student-led teaching
- How integrated curriculum is for students of all ages.
- bell hooks
- Inside the Black Box by Paul Black and Dylan William
In addition, Susan and Joanne compiled a list of resources with additional information about curriculum integration:
Drake, S. M. & Reid, J. L. (2020). How education can shape a new story in a post-pandemic world. Brock Education, 29(2), 6-12
Drake, S. M. & Reid, J. L. (2020). 21st Century competencies in light of the history of integrated curriculum. In “Rethinking what has been rethought consistently over the millennia: A global perspective on the future of education”. Frontiers in Education Journal, 5(122), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00122
Drake, S.M. & Reid, J.L. (in press). Integrated curriculum In J. Flinders & P, Hiebowitsh (Eds.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Education. New York: Routledge
Drake, S.M. & Reid, J. L. (2018). Integrated curriculum as an effective way to teach 21st Century capabilities. Asia Pacific Journal of Educational Research, 1(1), https://doi.org/10.0000/APJER.2018.1.1.031
Drake, S.M. & Reid, J. L. (2018). Integrated curriculum for the 21st Century. In J. Miller, M. Binder, S. Crowell, K. Nigh and B. Novak (Eds). International handbook in holistic education (pp.118-128) New York: Routledge.
Drake, S.M. & Reid, J. L. (2017). Interdisciplinary assessment in the 21st Century.
file:///Users/sdrake/Desktop/IEJEE_57fa80bd928bb_last_article_57fa813187fad.pdfIn Steve Pec (Ed). Scholarship of teaching and learning Part 3 (pp. 1-8) Stuyvesant Falls, NY: Rapid Intellect Group. http://www.rapidintellect.com/AE/ec5771v14.pdf
Savage, M. & Drake, S. (2016). Living transdisciplinarity: Teachers’ experiences with the International Baccalaurete Primary years Programme. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education. (19), 1-19, file:///Users/sdrake/Desktop/IEJEE_57fa80bd928bb_last_article_57fa813187fad.pdf
Drake, S.M. & Savage, M. (2016). Negotiating accountability and integrated curriculum in a global context. International Journal of Learning, Teaching, and Educational Research, 15, 6. http://www.ijlter.org/index.php/ijlter/article/view/639
Drake, S.M. (2015). Designing across the curriculum for “sustainable well-being”: A 21st Century approach. In F. Deer, T. Falkenberg, B. McMillan & L. Simms (Eds.). Sustainable Well-Being: Concepts, Issues, and Educational Practice (pp. 57-77). Winnipeg, MB: EWSB Press. http://www.eswb-press.org/uploads/1/2/8/9/12899389/sustainable_well-being_2014.pdf.
Drake. S. M., Reid, J. L., & Kolohon, W. (2014). Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment Engaging students for the 21st century. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press.
Drake S & Burns R. (2004). Meeting standards with integrated curriculum. Alexandria, VA:ASCD. Susan says “it is the easiest "how to" book” and Joanne agrees. It is almost like a manual. Very good even if it seems old now.
Project-based learning – sites for ideas
https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl
https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/project-based-learning/
https://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning
https://iearn.org (collaborative international projects)
Saturday Apr 25, 2020
Saturday Apr 25, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's episode I speak to Professor Yong Zhao from the School of Education at the University of Kansas. Among the topics we discuss on the episode are the following:
- We currently have the opportunity to reimagine education without schools: Do we have to do these subjects? Do we have to teach this much?
- A good time to teach global understanding, empathy and competency
- Innovation in education
- The importance of having an entrepreneurial mindset
- The Digital Pencil
- Alternative ways of organising the education of young people
- Difficulty of finding like-minded people in a small school
- Globalisation as the “death of physical distance”
- Globalisation is localisation of global forces
- Implications of globalisation for teachers
- Why everyone should have a local identity and affirm the identities of others
- Your uniqueness can only become valuable when it’s valuable to others
- Why schools encourage people to be independent and selfish rather than interdependent
- Schools as a place to bring about a better society
- Students as job creators versus job hunters
- Enhancing entrepreneurship in students
- Unintended consequences of education policies
- PISA test scores and the illusions of excellence, science, progress.
- His experience of being educated in China
- The impact of technology on education
- To compete with a machine, a person must avoid becoming one!
- Be unique and great in your own way; understand yourself, your talents and virtues.
- "Creative" means identifying problems worth solving
- Empty creativity versus good creativity – the need to have a domain to excel in
- What schools should be for: a place to equalise community resources
- David Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle The Manufactured Crisis.
- David Berliner as a former guest on the podcast
- Diane Ravitch’s blog: https://dianeravitch.net/
- If we want a better life in the future, we need to help our children create a better life for us
Wednesday Apr 15, 2020
Wednesday Apr 15, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
On this week's podcast I bring you my interview with Alfie Kohn, who writes and speaks about education, especially in areas such as homework, standardised testing and punishments and rewards. Among the items we discuss on the podcast are the following:
- Fostering students’ curiosity and encouraging them to think deeply
- Teachers participating with children in an exploration of ideas to move beyond factual knowledge
- How teachers can teach to promote students’ thinking
- The inverse relationship between teacher control and student learning
- Why learning starts with a question
- John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Ed Deci and Richard Ryan (Self-determination theory)
- Why rewards and punishment don’t help children learn
- Why saying “Good job” to your students is the equivalent of a “verbal doggy biscuit”
- Children who are frequently praised are less generous than their peers
- How children know when they’re being controlled and how they respond to it
- How teachers can respond to students’ work and respect the child’s autonomy
- Implementing a no-homework policy in a school
- Why he believes that giving homework to children constitutes malpractice.
- Excitement (about learning) drives excellence
- Standardised tests and teacher accountability; Authentic assessments – tap into projects done by students over time
- Why standardised teaching tells you only two things: (i) how much time was given to teaching test taking and (ii) how big the houses are near the school.
- Differences between role of parent and teacher: Unconditional parenting and unconditional teaching
- Punished by Rewards
- Unconditional Parenting
Wednesday Nov 29, 2017
Wednesday Nov 29, 2017
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
This week I bring you the second part of my interview with writer, blogger, speaker, trainer and former English teacher David Didau. We focus particularly on his book, What if everything you knew about education was wrong? Among the topics discussed are the following:
- How teachers can use research
- Why less feedback is more
- Carol Dweck’s research on mindsets
- The difficulties in telling if what children learn is retained or transferable
- Why a sat-nav is the perfect “assessment for learning machine”
- The illusion of knowledge
- Assessment for learning
- Why testing should be rebranded as quizzing
- Why differentiation is a “dark art”
Wednesday Oct 26, 2016
Wednesday Oct 26, 2016
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's programme the distinguished Educational Psychologist, Professor David C Berliner, who is Regents Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, shares more of his ideas and reflections about education. Among the topics he discusses this week are assessment literacy, the instructional sensitivity of tests, why he would hesitate in using international comparative tests to shape education policy, and the attractiveness of teaching as a career.
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Wednesday Mar 16, 2016
Wednesday Mar 16, 2016
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's programme Ciara Brennan, a teacher in St. Peter's Primary School in Bray and a part-time lecturer in Marino Institute of Education, talks about her use of technology for assessment in her class and to motivate her pupils. She presented a workshop with Mary Jo Bell at the 2016 annual conference of the Computers in Education Society of Ireland.
Among the websites mentioned by Ciara were the following:
Kahoot (for students)
Kahoot (for teachers)
Socrative
Padlet
Animoto
Bett
Wednesday Feb 18, 2015
Wednesday Feb 18, 2015
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's programme I bring you the second part of my interview with Dr. Michael O'Leary from St. Patrick's College on the topic of assessment. I also speak to Susan Marron from St. Patrick's College about the topic of fitness testing of children. Susan Marron is Chairperson of the Irish Primary PE Association.