Emma & Tom's Pgce Podcast

A warm podcast welcome back to Dr Rhiannon Packer, who joined us just after Christmas in a double-act with Dr Susan Davis, but is now back for a solo appearance! Rhiannon has just published a book: All Change! Best Practice for Educational Transitions, and is here to talk to us about all things transitional. The lives of our learners are full of transitions, and managing these so that they are a positive experience is hugely important for all of us who work in education. Rhiannon has plenty of pointers for us in today's deep discussion, and hopefully you'll leave with some new things to consider when approaching these pivotal moments for whoever you teach. Top marks to Rhiannon for coming back so soon with another set of homework slots, too! Rhiannon's book is published by Critical Publishing and is well worth a read!     -------------------- Recorded remotely on 25th February 2021

PGCE research bites 4 features Lydia Bundy, a student teacher on our PGCE Primary programme, and also a guest appearance by Jo Bowers from the primary team. Lydia researched into the Reading for Pleasure pedagogy, something that Jo has talked to us in detail about on the podcast in the past, and its potential for enhancing the wellbeing of primary pupils. In this research bite she runs through her findings and conclusions. Jo, meanwhile, gives us some perspective from the point of view of a primary specialist and a Reading for Pleasure veteran! Lydia's six main literature sources were: Clark, C. and Teravainen-Goff, A. (2018) ‘Mental wellbeing, reading and writing’. National Literacy Trust. Pp 1-37. Mak, H.W. and Fancourt, D. (2020) ‘Reading for pleasure in childhood and adolescent healthy behaviours: Longitudinal associations using the Millennium Cohort Study’. Preventive medicine, 130, p.105889. Ledger, S. and Merga, M.K. (2018) ‘Reading Aloud: Children's Attitudes toward being Read to at Home and at S

For this episode we welcome one of our lead partnership school colleagues, Abi Chase. Abi is associate headteacher at Bassaleg School just outside Newport. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Abi had the exciting task of revamping and redefining the school's vision and values around pedagogy. When Covid-19 hit, Abi's work had its ultimate test! In this conversation, Abi explains how she worked to 'rebrand' the school's priorities, and how she then used these to keep a steady ship as the school was challenged by the need to move to remote teaching and learning almost overnight in the Spring of 2020. There are plenty of interesting insights into leadership and strategy, as well as where we go from here as educators now that there is (hopefully) some light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel. A huge thank you to Abi for taking the time to speak to us!   -------------------- Recorded remotely on 25th February 2021

Croeso i bennod arall o Dameidiau o Ymchwil TAR, yn dod â’r ymchwil gorau gan athrawon dan hyfforddiant o Bartneriaeth Caerdydd ar gyfer Addysg Gychwynnol i Athrawon. Yr wythnos hon rydym ni’n lledaenu’n Gymraeg, ac yn croesawu Beca Harries o’r cwrs TAR Uwchradd Ieithoedd Tramor Modern a fydd yn sgwrsio gyda Dr Gina Morgan. Mae Beca wedi bod yn ymchwilio strategaethau i annog cyfranogaeth ar lafar mewn gwersi ieithoedd tramor modern. Bydd Beca yn cyflwyno chwe phapur allweddol ac yn rhannu ei chasgliadau. Mae Beca eisoes wedi cyflwyno’r ymchwil yma i’w phrif ysgol partneriaeth ar ffurf crynodeb weledol, ac wedi rhoi caniatâd i ni rannu ei ffeithlun, y gallwch chi ei weld drwy glicio yma. Os hoffech chi ddarllen mwy, mae cyfeirnodau ar gyfer y chwe phapur allweddol i’w weld isod. Diolch yn fawr i Beca am rannu ei ymchwil, ac i Gina am gyflwyno! Christie, C., 2013. Speaking spontaneously in the modern foreign languages classroom: Tools for supporting successful target language conversation. The Language Learni

It's time for us to turn our gaze up to the dizzy heights of educational leadership! Whether you're a student teacher or a hard-bitten old cynic like Tom, let's pause and consider the challenges and delights of being in charge. Lisa is Director of Initial Teacher Education at our friends the University of South Wales, another teacher education institution from just down the road. She's been a listener to the podcast for quite a while, and has answered the call we put out in our Easter special 2020 for anyone from senior leadership in education to come and tell us what makes them tick. In a wide-ranging conversation, we explore the difference between leadership and management, how to keep hold of our core moral purpose in the challenging world of education, and how to lead collaboratively. Plus, has the research-informed revolution reached the world of educational leadership, and how should a brand-new entrant to the profession set their sights on leading? Many thanks to Lisa for coming on, and do take a look

We're back with another edition of PGCE Research Bites, and this week we've got Cameron Corsi, who's a student on our PGCE Secondary PE programme. Cameron was, like many of our other students this year, given the topic of blended learning to research for his Lead Partnership School. There are some specific considerations for practical subject domains like PE, and Cameron was careful to ensure these were drawn out as part of his research. Cameron has kindly given permission for us to share his visual summary, which you can see by clicking here. Cameron's six main literature sources for this piece of research were:   Rossett, A., & Frazee, R. (2006). Blended learning opportunities. New York, NY. American Management Association. Garrison, D., & Kanuka, H. (2004). Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 7(2), 95–105. Vernadakis, N., Giannousi, M., Sitskari, E., Antoniou, P., & Kioumourtzoglou, E. (2012). A comparison of stude

Welcome to our 2021 Easter light episode! Last Easter, Tom was recording furtively in his car in the dark, so things have improved a little - he's back in the office. And Emma remains at home, so it's another remote recording in which we bring a selection of random goodies for your enjoyment. Actually, enjoyment might be a bit optimistic, as both of our presenters seem to have arrived with some slightly heavier material than usual. Stick with us, though, as we ruminate over freedom of speech, inclusion, decolonisation and impostor syndrome. Eventually we'll arrive at the sunlit uplands of our comedy twitter offerings, with some ruthless university management parodies and something unmentionable involving Weetabix. Have a wonderful Easter break, and we'll be back with normal service next time!

Welcome to another edition of PGCE Research Bites! Once again, we've given a PGCE student 30 minutes to tell us about some research that's benefited his own practice and informed the work of his placement school. This week, Matthew Green from PGCE music talks about feedback in music. Always a knotty subject, he's looking specifically at how this can be done in a blended learning environment. Matthew discusses six academic sources in detail and explains how they informed his conclusions and recommendations. Matthew has very kindly made his infographic available if you'd like to view it - just click here! Matthew's six pieces of academic literature are: Hattie, J. and Timperley, H. (2007) 'The Power of Feedback', Review of Educational Research, 77(1), pp. 81-112. Wiliam, D. (2016) 'The secret of effective feedback', Educational Leadership, 73(7), pp. 10-17.   Christodoulou, D. (2020) Teachers vs Tech? The case for an ed tech revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   Clark, R., Mayer, R. (2016) 'Doe

We're starting to hear more and more about cognitive science when discussing research-informed approaches to teaching. It can seem an intimidating field, and can also come across as quite 'black and white' - especially when co-opted as an argument-winner in some of the less friendly contributions to edu-Twitter! So we thought it was high time to sit down for a discussion with someone who can throw some light on cognitive neuroscience - and just a few doors down the corridor we have Dr Louise Allen-Walker, Programme Director for the MSc Psychology in Education programme! Of course, we haven't seen Louise in person for quite some time, so we posted her some kit to allow us to hook up remotely, and got down to a deep discussion. Along the way, we define cognitive neuroscience, get some honest answers about what it can and can't tell us, as well as showing which of the current big themes of teaching and learning have their roots in Louise's field of specialism. There are plenty of useful, practical strategies for

Welcome to the first in a new podcast venture! From the team behind Emma and Tom Talk Teaching we present PGCE Research Bites! Every year our PGCE students produce high-quality research work that informs their own philosophy and practice, and benefits the schools they work with. We've decided to make use of the 'in between' Fridays to share some of the very best of that work with you. We've got one PGCE student each time, who has 30 minutes to talk through their work and what they found. You'll hear details about the academic literature they discovered, the conclusions they drew from it, and the recommendations they came up with for their own practice and their placement school. This week, Ellis Seddon from PGCE Secondary Religious Education talks about the work she did to better understand how to support pupils with ADHD while working in a blended learning environment. With Ellis's kind permission, you can click here to take a look at the visual summary of her research! Ellis's six pieces of academic literat

Our guest today is Cameron Stewart, who runs the PGCE secondary mathematics programme here at Cardiff Met. He's come to talk to us about research he's carried out into strategies for closing the gender gap in mathematics. Maths is a subject that can sometimes feel like it needs an image makeover - why, we ask Cameron, is it so socially acceptable to say you're bad at it?! And how do we try and dispel the genuine fear that very intelligent people often experience when faced with maths? Cameron's got a number of practical strategies for us, and outlines his thoughts about the subject more widely. For anyone who wants more maths content, there's a big shoutout to the Mr Barton Maths podcast and his other online resources. We hope you enjoy the discussion, and even if you're not a maths specialist, there's plenty here to get you thinking about gender differences and how to create the right ethos in your classroom. And if you want to experience Cameron's musical side, you can find his band, Session, at www.session

For this episode we welcome three special guests to our podcast! Dr Fiona Chambers is the head of the School of Education at University College Cork, and she has co-authored a book with our very own Dr Anna Bryant and Dr David Aldous. The book, entitled Threshold Concepts in Physical Education covers an enormous amount of fascinating ground, and isn't just for PE specialists. With curriculum design a hot topic, and many of us revisiting some of our most fundamental assumptions about our subject disciplines, this book is a timely addition to anyone's reading list. In the course of our discussion, Fiona, Anna and David explain what threshold concepts are, and what we mean by a design thinking approach. The book itself outlines a collaboration between the three authors and a number of school practitioners. Finally, with three guests, we've got a bumper crop of wellbeing tips, interesting things and ideas to try! The book is Chambers, F. C, Aldous, D. & Bryant, A. (2020) Threshold Concepts in Physical Educati

It's always good when a previous podcast guest comes back for more, so we're delighted to welcome Fiona Heath-Diffey back to our studio! Fiona is the programme leader for PGCE Secondary PE here at Cardiff Met, and you may remember her from our interesting discussion about physical literacy way back in season 1. Fiona's back to talk about the new Health and Wellbeing Area of Learning and Experience in the new curriculum for Wales, and where the subject domain of PE fits in that much bigger and more complex picture. Whether you're listening from Wales or not, there's loads to take away from this discussion about the interface between physical education and wellbeing more generally, and how schools can join the dots to give our pupils the best chance of being healthy, confident individuals with a positive relationship with their physical and mental selves. The document Emma mentions (The Journey to 2022) is here: https://hwb.gov.wales/api/storage/cbe5e2c9-16cf-4eb7-87a1-c1a64fc598d8/the-journey-to-2022.pdf ...an

This week we've cast our net outside the world of schools to speak to two peer mentors from the homelessness charity, Shelter. Thanks to loyal friend of the podcast Becky Brynolf, we've got an interview with Colette Carter and Lee Demetriou, who are peer mentors with lived experience of homelessness and multiple complex needs. We wanted to speak to Colette and Lee about their experiences of education, and their thoughts about how teachers can approach pupils who experience homelessness and other complex needs. What follows is a powerful discussion, and you may find some of the content upsetting. Lee and Colette were keen to emphasise that they were happy for us to use all the content, and we hope it illustrates the need to approach our pupils as humans first and foremost. If you'd like to hear more from Colette and Lee, the Shelter podcast Challenging is available on all good podcast platforms. If you'd like to find out more about the work of Shelter, you can visit their website. And if you're concerned about

So here we are, the newly regenerated version of the PGCE Podcast! We're now known as Emma and Tom Talk Teaching, and hope this will encourage more serving teachers to listen to us and realise that we're here for educators of all types! Hope you enjoy the snazzy new artwork and remixed podcast theme music too. For this first episode of 2021, we're talking to two colleagues from Cardiff Met who specialise in supporting quiet, shy and anxious children in the classroom. Dr Susan Davis and Dr Rhiannon Packer tell us about a gloriously simple intervention that pays dividends with these children, and gives us an insight into how we can help them feel comfortable and safe in the learning environment. The book reviews this episode are: Criado-Perez, C (2020) Invisible Women. London: Vintage Van Ness, J (2020) Over the Top. London: Simon and Schuster   Also, Rhiannon has a book out around about now! It's All Change! Best Practice for Educational Transitions, and it's published by Critical Publishing. Congratulations,

Merry Christmas! In a quirk of the release schedule, this one's coming out on the big day itself, so we hope you enjoy the traditional spectacle of two lecturers in the last stages of complete exhaustion, wittering on about some random things that seemed interesting or amusing at the time. We've got it all this year: from a pair of academic papers to a humorous twitter account; from book quotes to music. There are plenty of nods to the big story of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic that changed the course of all our lives. But there are some tenuous links to education, plus some big news about the podcast for 2021. We hope you've enjoyed our many and varied offerings this year, and there are plenty of interesting conversations already in the can for the rest of this season. Please do spread the word about the podcast, and do drop us a review on your favoured podcast platform if you get a moment. Have a wonderful break, and we'll be back in January 2021 with a fresh new look. Thanks for listening and merry Christmas

It's high time for another book review, and our podcast pair have reached for the latest work by Daisy Christodoulou. Tom still lives in a safe house under an assumed identity after being less than effusive about the famous Seven Myths About Education a while back, so here's hoping he can redeem himself with some much happier thoughts about Teachers vs. Tech, an amazingly timely book given the global pandemic that ensued shortly after its publication. With help from some audio extracts from the famous Cardiff Met ITE staff book club, Emma and Tom explore some of the issues raised by Christodoulou as she presents a thought-provoking look at the vexed question of where education and technology could be a marriage made in heaven, and where the pitfalls lie for those who are too wedded to the shiny toys. Our short slots all come from a single article - The Binge Breaker, published in the Atlantic. Check it out here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122/ Meanwhile, Tom's ad

It's time for another addition to our new strand of episodes loosely entitled 'ethics in teaching', and for this we've called upon the expertise of Rachael Morgan-Jones. Rachael has had a very successful career teaching music in schools where an enormous number of cultures, languages, faiths and backgrounds come together. She's here to argue that there are exciting opportunities to make a difference and broaden our own minds as teachers, and gives us some specific examples of how this can work in her specialist subject. We hope Rachael's specific experience serves as a great stimulus for all of us from our different subject specialisms to look at how we work with the many different cultures and backgrounds that our pupils bring to the classroom. See you in a fortnight, and huge thanks again to Rachael for her time and expertise!     ---------- Recorded at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus (with remote guest) on 24th September 2020

This week we've got a guest from our friends at the University of South Wales - it's Professor Brendan Cropley, who is a professor of sport coaching. The world of elite sports has plenty to tell those of us in education about reflecting on our performance, so we asked Brendan to join us on the line to chat about his work. Brendan has a wealth of down-to-earth advice for any of us engaged in reflection, whether as an experienced teacher or someone who's new to the profession. We hope you'll find plenty to inspire and motivate you to take a step back from your practice in order to make those all-important steps forward. As ever, our short slots provide us with some thought-provoking take-aways, including Brendan's secret musical talents, and a book review from the front line of the NHS. Join us in a fortnight for more!   ---------- Recorded at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus (with remote guest) on 7th October 2020

Congratulations, fellow education specialists - we've made it to October half term! We're doing our bit for the Welsh lockdown and have fired up the remote recording gear to bring you our latest offering from our houses (so please accept our apologies for the odd glitch in the sound quality). Since we're at the half-time break in a very long and very strange term, we thought this would be another good time to model excellent practice by letting our hair down and putting something out that's a little lighter and looser than usual. As ever, Emma brings the substance, with a couple of book extracts and a tweet thread that muse on the nature of being a teacher. Tom brings us a blog, a heartwarming tweet about his previous life in the classroom, and the usual random news story with only the most tenuous link to education. If you want to read any of the material from this episode, here are the links, in order of appearance:   Myatt, M. (2020) Should it stay or should it go? Available at: https://www.marymyatt.com/b