An Irish perspective on education for all who value teaching
Episodes
Saturday Jul 03, 2021
Saturday Jul 03, 2021
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
Theme tune by David Vesey.
On podcast 420, I welcome back Stanford University School of Education Professor William (Bill) Damon who was one of the first guests on this year's schedule to discuss his new book, A round of golf with my father: The new psychology of exploring your past to make peace with your present. Among the topics we discuss on this bonus episode are the following:
- Different interpretations of what a life story is
- Life Studies by Robert Lowell
- Your intention for telling a life story
- What a life review is and why it can be done at any stage of life
- How William Damon adapted Robert Butler’s life review idea for his purpose.
- How to go about doing a life review
- Talk to people who remember your past
- Records (school and others, ancestry searches)
- Memory search
- Putting it all together – focusing on what gave you satisfaction and fulfillment
- Why he never met his father
- How school records have changed since the 1950s.
- How his father’s character developed over time, possibly through the demands and experiences of military service in World War II.
- What he learned about his own character from doing the life review
- Why character is a movie and not a snapshot
- Why he believes that psychological theories such as some of Freud’s work and the “big five personality traits” are wrong
- How he went about making a personal story interesting for an audience beyond his immediate circle of family and friends
- How a life review can help you find a purpose in your life
- How someone not looking for a purpose can find one
- His mother’s role in his life review
- His definition of purpose
- His memories of being taught by some of the pioneering psychologists of the twentieth century, including Erik Erikson and Jerome Kagan who was a guest on Inside Education a few years ago: Podcast 1 and Podcast 2 and who passed away in May 2021.
- Some of his earlier books: Some do care (with his wife, Anne Colby), Noble Purpose, The Moral Child and Greater Expectations.
- Why he called the book A Round of Golf with my Father when he never met his father!
Sunday Dec 06, 2020
Sunday Dec 06, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's podcast Education Historian Dr. Thomas Walsh applies a historical perspective to analyse cotemporary policy and practice in curriculum, early childhood education and more. Among the topics we discuss are:
- The career trajectory that brought him to working in the Education Department of Maynooth University.
- Working in the Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education
- Influence of nationalism and Catholicism on the curriculum of the 1920s
- The Commission on Manual and Practical Instruction and its influence on the 1900 curriculum
- Removing subjects to focus on the Irish language in the 1920s
- Becoming interested in the study of curriculum and curriculum change over most of a century
- Influence of John Coolahan on Tom’s work
- How a historical perspective on curriculum enriches our understanding of curriculum today
- The Stanley Letter from 1831.
- The importance of context in curriculum development
- Policy as text and policy as discourse (Ball). Curriculum implementation – dance between policy and practice
- Influences on curriculum change in Ireland – timing and context affect the influences
- Immigrant, internationally educated teachers and controlling who can become a teacher
- Migrant Teacher Project and Turn to Teaching Project (Maynooth)
- Team teaching: when it happens; what needs to happen for it to be successful? Planning for team teaching.
- Policy and practice in relation to team teaching
- Resources for team teaching (PDST and Maynooth websites)
- Early Childhood Education in Ireland today
- Legacy of Professor John Coolahan. He featured on two episodes of Inside Education, here and here.
- School placement: from supervisor to placement tutor. What’s in a name change?
- Gert Biesta article, Resisting the seduction of the global measurement industry: notes on the social psychology of PISA and book, The Beautiful Risk of Education.
Saturday Nov 14, 2020
Saturday Nov 14, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's programme I am delighted to interview my colleague, Dr. Jennifer O'Sullivan on the topic of teaching reading. Specifically, we explore the areas of phonemic awareness, phonological awareness and picture books. Jennifer also recommends several useful resources for teaching reading.
Among the topics we discuss and the resources mentioned are the following:
- Jennifer's route to becoming a teacher
- The joys and challenges of teaching in a junior school that had disadvantaged status
- Doing a master’s degree in literacy.
- Specific challenges teachers experience in their first year of teaching
- The research base for how children learn to read
- The path to learning to read: alphabetic principle, apply sounds of language to print on page, decoding, comprehending meaning
- The importance of teacher content knowledge in diagnosing what a child needs to work on when learning to read
- The importance of phonological awareness and what phonemic awareness is
- Why not to introduce phonics to children too soon; start with speech and then move to print (rather than working from print to sounds).
- The need to teach children how to separate sounds in words and to blend them back together.
- The need to explicitly teach that, for example, a word like “eight” has only two sounds but five letters and that this makes the subsequent introduction of phonics easier for children.
- The App she’s developing to assess phonological awareness
- Why dyslexia is caused by a phonological deficit
- Visual literacy and close reading
- Reading a picture
- Picture books to use in primary school:
- Anthony Browne
- Jon Klassen I want my hat back
- The Arrival by Shaun Tan.
- The Paperbag Princess by Robert Munsch.
- How to use picture books in school: discussing difficult topics, developing empathy, developing vocabulary, springboard for writing, visual literacy, challenging stereotypes.
- What parents can do at home to help their child read better
- Literacy in the kitchen video with Clara Fiortentini.
- Model reading for children
- Choose books children enjoy: e.g. David Walliams.
- A billboard message for all teachers
- Jan Hasbrouck.
- Mark Seidenberg: Language at the Speed of Sight
- Louisa Moats (What do we need to know as teachers to teach reading?). Book, Speech to Print.
- Clara Fiorentini’s Little Miss Teacher blog. Here is a link to the interview I did with Clara Fiortentin.
- The Literacy Channel on YouTube.
Wednesday Sep 30, 2020
Wednesday Sep 30, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's podcast my guest is Professor William (Bill) Damon from Stanford University Graduate School of Education where he directs the Stanford Center on Adolescence. He is the author of many books, including The Path to Purpose. We discuss how students can be helped to find purpose in life. Among the topics discussed on this week's programme are:
- Many young people looking for something to believe in - about a quarter of them “drifting”
- Responses to being adrift: hedonism, anxiety.
- Being adrift originates in not finding something that is a positive direction for themselves.
- Profile of young people who are drifting
- How young people have found purpose in previous eras (national, economic…)
- Difference between seeking a purpose and seeking a meaning in life
- How having a sense of purpose can help you have a psychological balance
- Any activity can be purposeful if you believe in it, do it well and give it your all
- How teachers can model a purposeful life for their students
- Profiles in purpose
- A teacher’s role in helping students find their purpose
- When parents dislike the purpose chosen by their daughter or son
- Most of us have multiple purposes in life
- The link between purpose and entrepreneurship
- Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal
- The relationship between mission, commitment and purpose
- Where people find purpose
- The importance of “why” questions for teachers
- How exams could be purposeful
- Barriers students encounter in trying to find their purpose in life
- How he conducts his research
- Questions to help people find their purpose
- Diane Ravitch
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 Mar 11, 2020
Wednesday Mar 11, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's programme I'm delighted to speak to Professor Kathy Hall from University College Cork. In a wide-ranging discussion about teaching, teacher education, research and policy, the topics raised include the following:
- Becoming a primary teacher in Carysfort College
- Doing a Bachelor in Arts degree in University College Dublin, with many other primary teachers, followed by a H.Dip
- Returning to Carysfort to do a postgraduate diploma course in special educational needs
- Starting a Masters degree in Trinity College, transferring to complete and PhD and becoming a teacher educator in Christchurch Canterbury College
- Moving to Leeds Metropolitan University and subsequently to the Open University and two years later to University College Cork
- Her doctoral dissertation on the topic of discovery learning and first language learning
- Her book, Listening to Stephen Read and its implications for teaching reading
- Why some children leave school with limited literacy
- The relationship between policy and teaching literacy
- How the market influences education in Ireland
- Assessing student teachers’ preparedness to teach literacy
- Summative and formative Assessment – Black and William Important Review on Formative Assessment
- Can anyone teach?
- The relationship between skills, practice and reflection in teaching
- School and University roles in teacher education
- The unifying theme across all her research
- Discourse analysis as a research method and what you can learn about classrooms from using this method. In this framework she refers to the IRF – initiation, response and feedback – pattern of classroom interaction.
- Doctoral research topics
- How different opportunities to learn can exist within the same classroom
- Problems with competitive classrooms
- Advice she would give the Minister for Education
- Etienne Wenger Communities of Practice book
- Tara Westover Educated
Wednesday Oct 09, 2019
Wednesday Oct 09, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
On this week's programme I discuss how research can inform teaching with Professor Chris Brown from Durham University's School of Education. Professor Brown discusses his work with teachers in professional learning networks, how teachers can apply research in their schools, and the barriers to doing so.
Among the topics discussed are the following:
- How frequently do teachers consult research to solve problems of teaching?
- The need to draw first on teachers’ knowledge and experience
- How does research add to, challenge or deepen teachers’ knowledge?
- The importance of teachers collaboratively engaging with and looking at research
- Having an “evidence champion” in a school and partnerships with higher education institutions
- The quality of research available to teachers (original, significant, robust methods)
- Different kinds of research (Stokes’s quadrant)
- Carol Weiss and instrumental research use, conceptual research use and symbolic research use (9’22” – 10’08")
- Drawing on research to develop theories of action
- Teachers’ access to published research
- Networks of teachers and effective change management (17’36). The focus of the four whole-day workshops each year is:
- Vision and engagement with research
- Trialling
- Change Management
- Impact
- Leadership and degree centrality (24’53”)
- Evaluating “best practice” (27’58”)
- Areas of research that have been particularly helpful in informing teachers’ practice (30’26”)
- Factors that influence what and how research influences policy (31’49”)
- Professional Learning Networks (34’45”)
- The role played by encouragement, trust, social influence, and innovation in promoting research-informed practice (35’59”)
- Avoiding edu-myths or other dead-ends in research (39’39”)
- What are schools for (40’51”)
- A teacher who had a significant impact on him (42’17”)
- What inspires him (43’17”)
Among the people named by Chris Brown in the course of the interview are Stephen Ball, Jean Baudrillard, Alan Daly, Jim Spillane and Carol Weiss, some of whom have appeared on previous episodes of Inside Education: Ball, Spillane.
The paper that I reported on in the research section is Fan, H., Xu, J., Cai, Z., He, J & Fan, X. (2017). Homework and students' achievement in math and science: A 30-year meta-analysis, 1986-2015.
Wednesday Apr 10, 2019
Wednesday Apr 10, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
Theme tune by David Vesey
This week I am joined on the programme by Professor David Clarke and Dr. Man Ching Esther Chan from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. We discussed many aspects of research and teaching, with a focus on mathematics, tasks, questioning and language. Among the topics discussed were:
- Why a laboratory classroom was set up at the University of Melbourne
- The social unit of learning research project
- The layout of the laboratory classroom
- Negotiating of meaning in mathematics tasks (e.g. meaning of average)
- Using open ended tasks in teaching mathematics
- Marking answers to open ended mathematical tasks
- Involving students in assessing
- Sources of open-ended tasks
- If the area of an apartment is 60 square metres, what might the five-room apartment look like?
- Picture a bar graph where all you have are the bars and the axes but no labels of any sort. What might this be a bar graph of? Label the bar graph and explain what information is contained in the graph.
- The average age of a family of five people is 25 and one of them is the same age as you. Who might the people be? What are their ages? And how are they related to one another?
- The average of five numbers is 17.2. What might the five numbers be?
- A number is rounded off to 5.3. What might the number be?
- The difference between good questions and good questioning
- Asking the question, “what is your utility function?” (i.e. that which is maximised by a system)
- Recognising the learning potential of student voice and cultural differences in how student voice is promoted and elicited
- Finding tasks that link to the curriculum
- The Lexicon project
Among the collaborators named by David and Esther were Peter Sullivan, and Neil Mercer. He also mentioned this paper on "initiating and Eliciting in Teaching: A reformulation of Telling" by Joanne Lobato, David Clarke and Amy Burns Ellis.
Wednesday Apr 03, 2019
Wednesday Apr 03, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
Theme tune by David Vesey
This week on the programme I explore the area of postgraduate study in education. Why do a postgraduate accredited course? Where to do it? When is a good time to do it? How to choose it and ways to do it? Who to study with?
Such courses are addressed to the extent that they can be within a 30-minute course. To respond to any of the ideas raised, leave an idea on the programme's website or on Twitter using the handle, @insideed.
One website mentioned on the programme is the MOOC, Coursera.
Wednesday Jun 20, 2018
Wednesday Jun 20, 2018
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
This week I am joined by University College Dublin School of Education Professor, Ciaran Sugrue, to discuss child-centred education, school leadership and educational research in Ireland. Among the topics we discuss are:
- Children-centred education
- Lack of mobility for teachers
- Privileging good relations in school
- Unmasking school leadership
- Continuous professional development – changes over the last two decades
- Despite Ireland's size, how schools vary a lot
- The value of teachers collaborating on projects
- His tenure as editor of Irish Educational Studies
- His thoughts about educational research in Ireland