Emma & Tom's Pgce Podcast

It’s October half term, and therefore time for one of our ‘light’ episodes! To entertain you with something a little different, we’ve gone a bit rogue and found three interesting things each. As ever, we don’t tell one another what’s coming in advance (though if you listened to the last episode with Emma, it’s fair to say that Tom had a good idea that an epistemology quiz was in his immediate future…). We also quietly drop our usual 60 minute limit on episode length in order to chew things over a bit more expansively. Today we have a Hollywood actor, an ex Prime Minister, a rising star of feline academia, some bad habits, and some other bits and bobs to keep you amused and make you think. Normal service will be resumed next time, when we welcome a colleague to the studio to discuss AI in education. ————————————————Recorded in Studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 9th August 2024

Tom is joined in studio B2.15 today by Megan Cole from PGCE Primary, who talks us through her research into how learning through play can enhance the experience of older primary school pupils. ---------------------Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 29th April 2024

In the second half of our EdD work-in-progress double bill, Emma moves on from defining her worldview to realising that she needs to carry out her research using participatory methods. This is something a bit new to Emma (and quite a few of us in education) so today we take a dive into what it involves, how it differs from many of the approaches we’re used to as education specialists, and look forward to what Emma’s going to do next. Thanks to Emma for lots of interesting food for thought!—————————————Recorded in Studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 8th August 2024

For this episode, we welcome a very special guest to the studio… Emma! She’s still working away at her EdD and has been concentrating on the research design. This includes not only piloting her project on a small scale, but also getting to grips with tricky things such as her worldview, paradigm, ontology, epistemology and axiology - all long words to strike fear into researchers. In discussing her work in progress with Tom, she ended up providing enough content for two episodes! In this first one we concentrate on ontology, epistemology and axiology, and how understanding those things help the researcher come to understand their worldview and what that means for how to undertake a research study. We hope you find this a non-threatening look at plenty of big words! Next time, we’ll bring you the second half of the discussion, in which Emma concludes that she needs to dip her toe into the exciting world of participatory research. ———————————Recorded in Studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed

ITV National News have just dropped a hard-hitting report about standards of literacy in Welsh schools. I you haven’t seen it, you can get the text and video here. We wanted to put together a reaction piece to unpack the issues around phonics and reading (without getting embroiled in any reading wars!), but also zoom out a bit and see whether this first really prominent news investigation into the Welsh education reforms might be pointing to wider questions or concerns with the Curriculum for Wales. Thanks to Rhys Williams at ITN, Gareth Rein at St Peter’s RC Primary School in Cardiff, Dr Gareth Evans at UWTSD and the various people who gave me background information and understanding, especially about systematic synthetic phonics!If you were hoping to hear Emma's dulcet tones on this episode, apologies - she was teaching all day and we wanted to turn this episode around in a single day. She'll be back next week!

For today's snippet of student teacher research Tom is joined by Ella Cleary from PGCE Secondary Biology. Ella was interested in how to use assessment for learning strategies to create an equitable biology classroom.-----------------------------------------------------Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 29th April 2024

For today's episode, we return to a comment made by Professor David Egan in a previous episode, where he identified community focused schools as important in supporting pupils and their families living in poverty.To dig a little deeper into what they are and what they do, we've invited Dr Jan Huyton to the studio. Jan has done a lot of work on this, and also uses a multi-agency approach when teaching on the MA in Education here at Cardiff Met.Jan tells us what community focused schools can be, what they do, and what obstacles we need to overcome to join up various types of organisations which seek to support children and families.--------------------------------------------------------------Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 24th April 2024

English language listeners: a reminder that we also produce occasional episodes in Welsh! This is the beginning of a new block of PGCE Research Bites, and English-speaking listeners can get their fix in a fortnight!

Welcome back for our seventh season of the podcast!We’re opening the new academic year with another of our live panel sessions - this one was recorded in June this year at our PGCE research conference. Joining us to discuss what enquiry can look like in schools, and how we can make it work for us as teachers, is a quartet of people with a claim to have something to say on the subject! Emma Aston and Sarah Cason join us from Whitchurch High School and Palmerston Primary school - both schools with excellent track records. Louise Muteham was previously heard this time last year asking a great question and now joins us as a panellist - she’s from the Central South Consortium. And Dr Matt Hutt is a colleague from just down the road at the University of South Wales. We hope you enjoy what they have to say, and their answers to the questions provided by our audience. As ever, we’ll be back in a fortnight with more goodies for you. ———————————————Recorded live in Lecture Theatre 1 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s

Hello to all our listeners, and we hope you're enjoying the tail end of a well deserved summer break!We recently popped in to the studio to have a brief look back at season 6 and discuss some of our favourite moments that you might want to listen to if you missed them. Then it was time to lift the lid on a few things you can look forward to in season 7, which kicks off on the 6th September. If you've stuck with us for the long haul, thanks for being with us, and if you're a new listener, welcome and we hope you enjoy our podcast. Don't forget you can watch us on youtube - our channel is at youtube.com/@talkteachingpod and our handle on Twitter/X is @talkteachingpodIf you like what you hear, why not leave us a rating or review? See you on the 6th!Best wishes from Emma and Tom--------------------------Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 9th August 2024

We've reached the end of season 6 of the podcast, and thanks to all our listeners for coming along for the ride!Today we bring you a live recording of a panel discussion we put on for our PGCE Secondary student teachers. The panellists were the international curriculum consultant and bestselling author Lucy Crehan, former educational journalist Dr Gareth Evans who's now director of education policy at Yr Athrofa, UWTSD, and Matthew Maughan who's deputy headteacher at Bassaleg School in Newport. We asked them to tell our student teachers where they need to look and what they need to prioritise as they join the profession early in the implementation of the new Curriculum for Wales. But if you're listening from outside Wales, there are plenty of universal bits of advice to help everyone make their way as teachers!Thanks to all our panellists, and to the student teachers who asked the questions. We'll be back in the new academic year with season 7 - see you there!--------------------------------------------------

Strap in and prepare yourselves for another roller-coaster ride as regular guest Dr Kevin Smith from Cardiff University is back in the studio, and this time he's brought sweets!Kev is here to talk about Currere, an approach to considering curriculum which might be refreshing to those of us who work in the world of education. We'll leave it to Kev to explain all about it, but you can also find a list of resources and links below. Dr Kev says:https://www.currereexchange.com/currere-exchange-journal.html - this is the Currere Exchange Journal. It is a journal solely dedicated to Currere work and welcomes submissions from everyone teachers, academics, etc. They also offer a 'Currere exchange' event where people take part in, and learn about, the currere method. This year it is a virtual event (here are the details: https://www.currereexchange.com/registration.html).  https://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct - this is the link to the Journal of Curriculum Theorising. My friend/colleague Tom Poetter is currently

Conferences are a great opportunity to find new guests for the podcast, and last November's Scottish Educational Research Association (SERA) conference in Edinburgh didn't disappoint! Dr Lisa Reed from the University of Dundee joins us down the line to discuss how we can ensure we're being ethical when carrying out school-based research, especially when we're also working in that school as a teacher. With more and more teachers engaging in research and enquiry in their own classrooms and schools, it's increasingly important to take a step back and think carefully about how we navigate the blurred lines between our identities as researcher, teacher and colleague in these situations. Thanks to Dr Lisa for joining us, and anyone wanting to follow her on Twitter/X can find her at @phdindeed We'll be back with more in a fortnight!----------------------------------------------------Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus (with remote guest) on 28th February 2024

For today’s episode, we’re bringing you a panel discussion about equity and diversity in the classroom, which was originally broadcast live on YouTube as part of our PGCE programme. Our panel of experts, Dean Pymble from Show Racism the Red Card, Marc Lewis from Ysgol Gyfun Cymraeg Plasmawr, and Mark Williams from Cardiff Met, joined Tom and our colleague Lisa Fenn in the studio to answer questions from our student teachers. We hope you find the discussion interesting and useful!Huge thanks to our panel and also to our colleagues from the MSc Sport Broadcast programmes here at Cardiff Met who helped us get on the air.———————————————————————Originally broadcast live from studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 19th January 2024. 

Those of you who listened to our epic Christmas special in December will remember Tom reading out a stream of tweets from Dr Emily MacLeod, who had just completed her doctorate about teacher recruitment. Well, now we have Dr Emily in person, speaking to us down the line, to delve deeper into the fascinating study she undertook which seeks to understand what motivates (and demotivates) people to become teachers. Using a massive treasure trove of longitudinal data from the ASPIRES project at the Institute of Education, Emily takes us through some of the really interesting things she’s found out, and what the implications might be for the ever more difficult task of recruiting new members of our wonderful profession. ————————————Recorded at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 28th February 2024

Welcome to our not-very-light Easter holiday special! As ever, we bring you some random things to liven up your school holiday, and as usual for our Easter special we’ve ended up with something a bit less than fluffy…Nevertheless, we hope you find it interesting, useful or just a break from our usual service!Emma’s three things:Getting Started with Key ConceptsTaking a stand against the pedagogy of professional declineThings fell apart: the most mysterious deathsTom’s three things:Fighting ChoirsThousands of AI authors on the future of AIZombie leadership: dead ideas that still walk among us———————————————Recorded in studio D0.12 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 20th February 2024

It's always a special podcast episode when we get our student teachers into the studio, and today's discussion is no exception! Just after Christmas this year, we spent an exciting couple of weeks digging into the details of our expressive arts subject disciplines, and the potential for making powerful connections between them.Today, some of those student teachers are here to tell us and our listeners what they found out! Chloe Griffiths and Tianna Hancock (PGCE secondary drama), Serena Hancock (PGCE secondary art and design) and April Pinch (PGCE secondary music) tell us what they've come to know about their own subjects, each other's subjects, and the pleasures and pitfalls of bringing them together. For our listeners in Wales, hopefully this is a great working example of the sort of meaningful conversations that areas of learning and experience (AoLEs) can have when designing a curriculum, and for our listeners further afield it's interesting to consider how this might enhance your own practice and underst

Artifical Intelligence: is it going to revolutionise learning and the world of work? Or take our jobs and then kill us all? We've had our eye on doing an episode on AI for quite a while, but needed a guest who would give us an education angle and avoid the sensationalist stuff... step forward Karl Jones from Cardiff Met's School of Technologies! Karl was previously in Initial Teacher Education with our colleagues in Trinity Saint David, Carmarthen, so knows his way round a classroom as well as a computer. He joins us in the studio to discuss what teachers need to know about AI, where it can help, what the traps are, and how they should open a discussion with pupils about what's a legitimate application for everyone involved. Thanks to Karl for coming in, and this feels like a topic we'll be returning to more than once in the coming few years!-------------------------------------------Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 29th November 2023

Today we welcome back our colleague Dr Anne Hodgson, who's here to talk to us about adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed practice in schools. It's a wide ranging discussion with some hard-hitting facts about the challenges facing many of the children in our classrooms. As Anne says, being informed about the impact of these adverse factors is everybody's business, and we can all make a difference.Thanks to Anne for joining us again!----------------------------------------------Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 20th November 2023