An Irish perspective on education for all who value teaching
Episodes
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 Mar 04, 2020
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
This week's podcast is a collaborative one with Darren Ralston from The Ed Narrative podcast. Darren was in Ireland to present a workshop at the annual conference of the Computers in Education Society of Ireland (CESI), which was held in Athlone on Saturday last. Among the topics we discuss on the podcast are the following:
- Integrating technology into one’s teaching
- The difference between an instructional coach and a learning technology integrator
- Using virtual reality in the classroom, using Google Expeditions
- How instructional coaches are organised in US schools
- Becoming, and working as, an instructional coach
- Managing his workload as a coach
- Comparing mentoring and coaching as interpreted in his setting
- How he got into teaching
- How he teaches literature
- How he chooses literature to teach
- Teaching drama – using comedic improvisation
- Brave New World
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Starting The Ed Narrative Podcast
- Equipment used for podcasting
- Selecting guests for podcats
- Neil Postman
Wednesday Feb 26, 2020
Wednesday Feb 26, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's podcast I interview Finbarr Hurley about his experience teaching in some European Schools and about his thoughts on leadership. He is currently working as a Coordinator with the Centre for School Leadership. Among the topics we discuss on the podcast are the following:
- Wanting to teach from a young age
- His experience in Mary Immaculate College
- Proving yourself as a teacher when you begin in a school
- The importance of changing career post every 5-6 years
- The importance of figuring out what makes children tick
- Teaching in Cork and Teaching in Brussels
- Designing a classroom of the future
- A synopsis of the European Schools system
- Learning from working alongside teachers from other countries
- Moving to an International School in Qatar
- Working with teaching coaches
- Involving children in parent-teacher meetings
- Teaching without textbooks
- Bringing members of a circus in to work with his students in Germany
- Identifying what is valued in a school, across the school community
- Challenges of being a principal in Ireland
- Providing continuous professional development (CPD) for principals and principals’ needs for CPD
- Why it’s okay for principals to fail (the first attempt at learning)
- One of his own principals
- Simon Senek (Be the last to speak)
- Andy Hargreaves
- Book: Wholesome Leadership
- Luke Jefferson Day, editor of GQ Magazine in London.
- Simone Marchetti – creativity outside of education
- The value of sofas in classsrooms
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's programme I speak to Dr. Liz Dunphy, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education in Dublin City University's Institute of Education about her work. Among the topics we discuss are the following:
- Choosing a career in teaching over one in law
- Becoming interested in early childhood education
- Childcare and the growth of love by John Bowlby
- Her first teaching job
- Doing a Masters degree in education in Trinity College Dublin
- Offering professional development for teachers through the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation
- Children’s early experience of number as seen through a socio-cultural lens
- Looking at how the work of educational researchers complement each other rather than adopting a more polarised approach.
- Her research on early childhood education: mathematics, curriculum, and assessment
- How the area of early childhood education has evolved nationally and internationally over Liz’s career in education to date
- Play, Playful pedagogy, and playfulness
- James McGarrigle – psychologist and a student of Margaret Donaldson
- Why international models of early childhood education cannot be imported directly to Ireland
- Jerome Bruner
- Reggio Emilia model of early childhood education
- Why developments in the last five years have been positive for early childhood education and care
- Choosing a pre-school for your child
- The transition from non-compulsory to compulsory education
- The qualities she looks for in early childhood education practice
- The Katie Morag books with Mairi Hedderwick
- How teachers and children can establish a “shared world”
- Understanding the child from the perspective of their family
- Mathematics with reason: The emergent approach to primary mathematics by Sue Atkinson:
- Assessment and record keeping in early childhood education settings
- Vivian Gussin Paley Mollie is Three. The Boy Who Would be a Helicopter. White Teacher was also mentioned: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88364.White_Teacher
- The Erikson Institute
- Herb Ginsburg
Wednesday Feb 12, 2020
Wednesday Feb 12, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's podcast I speak to Dr. Karen Edge who is a Reader in Educational Leadership at the University College London Institute of Education. Karen Edge was a keynote speaker at the 2020 annual conference of the Irish Primary Principals' Network, the IPPN. Among the topics we discussed were the following:
- Helping principals make their job meaningful
- Constraints on principals working on teaching and learning and working with students and teachers include: to be accountable, to share information, manage data, manage external relations
- How principals can live a full life outside of work and be a leader in their work
- Helping principals align their professional priorities with what students, teachers and parents expect of them
- Supporting a new generation of principals from Generation X (born from 1965 to 1980) in schools designed for Baby Boomer principals who have now retired or who are retiring (those born from 1946 to 1964)
- Collaborative decision making and Generation X leaders
- How leadership in education differs across countries and continents and how this is influenced by being an adult in the wider society (and why borrowing policies from other countries may not work in the same way here).
- Rewards of being principal
- Why “being busy” is not a badge of honour
- How schools can productively partner with schools in other countries
Among the people she mentioned on the podcast were the following:
- Dan Freedman- book series Jamie Johnson
- Judy Goldberg and Wondershift
- Viv Grant
Wednesday Feb 05, 2020
Wednesday Feb 05, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's podcast I speak to Viv Grant who is Executive Coach and Director of Integrity Coaching. She was a keynote speaker at the 2020 annual conference of the Irish Primary Principals' Network. Among the topics we discuss are the following:
- Identifying your stories as a school leader: why are you in the profession? What motivates you? What inspires you? What brings you joy?
- Her story and how she began to articulate it for herself
- The importance for principals of recognising and articulating their inner, subconscious narrative
- How underlying thoughts and experiences can affect a principal’s ability to have difficult conversations
- Becoming aware of when the old narratives no longer serve us
- Getting our back stage narratives aligned with our front stage performance
- The role of the Centre for School Leadership
- What coaching for principals involves
- Just like social workers and psychologists get “supervision” in their work as a matter of course, so should school principals because as well as being leaders of curriculum and instruction, many of them are practising aspects of psychology and social work.
- Why school development and human growth and development go hand in hand and why offering coaching to principals is a way of appreciating their taking on this important role.
- Is coaching something that is needed on an ongoing or on a needs-only basis?
- How coaching for a principal works
- Qualities a coach needs to have in order to work with principals
- How coaching differs from mentoring
- Why supporting coaching for principals is a good investment for a school
- Why coaching is the norm in several other sectors
- How she turned around “failing” primary school
- How to bring about change at school level
- The source of a school’s vision
- Her book called Staying a head: The stress management secrets of successful school leaders
- The challenge of creating time to develop the inner work of school leadership
- Pauline Lysaght Jones and Mary Fuller
- David Whyte’s poetry
- John O’Donohue
Wednesday Jan 29, 2020
Wednesday Jan 29, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.
On this week's podcast I speak to the President (Damian White), Deputy President (Brian O'Doherty) and Chief Executive Officer (Páiric Clerkin) of the Irish Primary Principals' Network at the annual conference of the Network. The IPPN is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Among the topics we discuss are the following:
Damian White
- Workload and making the job of principal more sustainable into the future
- The PIEW model: Prioritise, Implement, Embed, Wait.
- Prioritising initiatives in a school. Refers to the Looking at our Schools document.
- Identifying and making room for urgent new initiatives within the PIEW model.
- Wellbeing
- Support groups for principals
- Working with local education centres
- Relationship between the Centre for School Leadership, the Professional Development Service for Teachers (PDST) and the IPPN
- Relationship between the IPPN and the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO)
- On having the Secretary General and not the Minister address the conference
Brian O’Doherty
- Difference between roles of President/Deputy President and Chief Executive Officer of IPPN
- Being principal of a large school
- Working collaboratively with an administrative Deputy Principal
- Principalship and school budgets
- The financial and support services unit (FFSU) and reporting procedures
- Challenges in managing cash flow in schools
- Questions principals should ask about school finances
Páiric Clerkin
- Reflecting on life for principals before the IPPN (on the 20th anniversary of its founding)
- Progress made over the last 20 years
- The importance of dialogue in our education system
- Reflecting on factors that brought about the establishment and success of the IPPN
- The challenge of sustainability for principals
- The importance of remembering small schools and teaching principals when considering policy changes
- What he’s reading: Uplifting Leadership: How organisations, teams, and communities raise performance by Hargreaves, Boyle and Harris.
Wednesday Jan 22, 2020
Wednesday Jan 22, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
On this week's programme I speak to Professor Mark Morgan from Dublin City University about psychology, education, his career and his thoughts on education. Among the topics we discuss are the following:
- How he became interested in psychology as a student teacher in St. Patrick’s College
- Being taught by John McNamara (who was known for his study of bilingualism)
- Completing postgraduate studies in London
- Being appointed as lecturer in St. Patrick’s College
- Having Albert Bandura as a tutor when offered a fellowship at Stanford University
- The idea of self efficacy
- His interest in TV and violence, resilience and substance misuse prevention
- The use of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods data in psychology
- His doctoral research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
- His research on adversity and resilience
- What teachers can do to be more resilient
- How he planned his classes as a teacher educator
- How early home and school experiences influenced his subsequent interests and ideas
- Why psychology is useful for student teachers
- How the field of educational psychology has evolved over the last 50 years
- His involvement in the Growing Up in Ireland study
- Learning in later years
- He recommended Albert Bandura's book Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory.
Wednesday Jan 15, 2020
Wednesday Jan 15, 2020
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
This week I bring you an interview with the new Chief Executive Officer of Educate Together, Dr. Emer Nowlan in the week she takes up her new appointment. Among the topics we discuss are:
- Her career in education to date: becoming a PE teacher, running a language school in Portugal
- Doing a masters and doctorate in UCD
- Being project manager for setting up second level Educate Together schools
- Working on the Migrant Teacher Project
- Challenges faced by migrant teachers who wish to teach in Ireland
- Lessons learned from the Migrant Teacher Project to date
- Anticipating her new role as CEO of Educate Together
- Plans for establishing new Educate Together schools
- How Educate Together has evolved over the last 40 years
- What equality-based education looks like
- How to promote equality-based education without stereotyping
- Educate Together’s role as school patron
- Enrolment policies for schools
- The work of CEO in Educate Together
- Her priorities for her term as CEO
- Challenges facing the Educate Together sector
- Characteristics of a principal in an Educate Together school
- Facilitating denominational religious instruction in Educate Together Schools
She names some people whose work she admires.
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
Presented and produced by Seán Delaney
On this week's podcast I speak to Professor Paola Valero from Stockholm University about the political aspects of teaching in general and of teaching mathematics in particular. Professor Valero was in Ireland as a keynote speaker at the 2019 Mathematics Education in Ireland conference, which was held in Dublin City University in October.
This podcast will be of interest to anyone who likes to stand back from their teaching and think about the why, what and how of their work. Among the topics we discuss in the podcast are:
- The difference between teacher knowledge and researcher knowledge and why both need to work together
- Responsibilities of researchers (in education)
- Relevance of her work on the politics of mathematics education for teachers
- Why teachers’ work is inevitably political, whether or not that is acknowledged
- How can teachers become more aware of their political stance (from 12’06”)
- What it means to be a teacher-intellectual
- What is political specifically in mathematics education
- Working with powerful and empowering knowledge
- It is a desired area of competence/it is highly valued
- Mathematics is widely assessed
- A brief history of how the status of mathematics in schools evolved
- How less was expected of girls in mathematics education
- The experience of learning mathematics for immigrants and people with disabilities
- How teachers can respond to the political nature of mathematics
She recommended the work of Ole Skovsmose and in particular the chapter he co-wrote with Lene Nielsen, Critical Mathematics Education.