Emma & Tom's Pgce Podcast

We’ve travelled a whole mile away from campus for this episode, for the very first ResearchED Cymru event. ResearchED is an organisation aimed at bringing educational research to teachers in a way they can use, promoting the idea that knowing about the clues to ‘what works’ that current research gives us as teachers can save us chasing myths or getting stuck in practice that’s not the best for our pupils. ResearchED events happen on Saturdays, and this year the organisation came to Wales for the first time. There was a star-studded list of speakers for teachers to choose from… and us! While we waited to give our presentation on cross-curricular pedagogies in the expressive arts (see episode 2 of this season of the podcast for details of what we were talking about), we attended some interesting presentations, watched a video message from the mighty Dylan Wiliam, and grabbed some informal interviews with some of the big-name speakers. Now we’ve glued it all together, along with an interview with Gareth Rein w

With the nation still in lockdown, and no prospect of normal life resuming, our intrepid podcasting pair have used all the ingenuity and bloody-mindedness that comes as standard with classroom teachers everywhere to bring you some light relief, despite our enforced separation now well into its third week (or fifth, by the time this hits your devices). With Emma still speaking down the line from her house, and Tom’s car parked in his street doing sterling work as a recording studio (picking up the all-important WiFi signal through the front room window), we’ve scoured the internet to bring you our trademark mix of high-minded, substantial reflection on the world of education (Emma) and a load of bizarre ramblings from way out of left-field (Tom). We flatter ourselves that the overall effect is something that will at least while away 40 minutes of lockdown time, so kick back, ignore your children trashing the house [or is that just mine? - Tom] and enjoy the audio equivalent of that meal you cooked from things

In an unfortunate quirk of the episode schedule, we were originally going to put out a lovely episode about our community of international students who travel to Wales to train as teachers here. But that just seemed like adding insult to injury when we’re all confined to our homes by the global Covid-19 pandemic, so we’ve postponed the release of that episode and cobbled together a lockdown special for you to enjoy, if enjoy is the right word. With Tom sitting in a deserted university campus and Emma speaking down-the-line from her house, we discuss the very sudden transition of educational institutions to remote learning approaches. What can we realistically expect to achieve as teachers in this new environment, and how do we keep a critical eye when investigating the huge flood of resources that have been kindly made available by individuals and institutions as a response to the global lockdown? We’re assisted by a blog post from the mighty Tom Sherrington which gives lots of practical advice to those grap

While anyone who knows anything about education (and especially primary education) will know that literacy is a Very Big Deal, our guests this episode want to talk about something very specific and slightly different: reading for pleasure. Could it be that such a strong focus on literacy skills might mean that the simple pleasure of reading things for fun might be getting squeezed out? How can we as teachers help our pupils to be motivated to read for pleasure? In the last of our suite of episodes this year on the theme of literacy (the others being episodes 6 and 7), we're joined by Jo Bowers from Cardiff Metropolitan University, Claire Douglas from Clytha Primary School in Newport and Lucy Matthews from Llanedeyrn Primary School in Cardiff to discuss how they have set up a 'reading for pleasure' group for teachers to support them in knowing what books are out there and how to get pupils reading. If you're inspired by this episode to investigate what support is out there to get a reading for pleasure culture

Our curriculum design panel mega-episode landed in your feed today, with nearly two hours of thought-provoking presentations and discussion about curriculum design and the new Curriculum for Wales. We actually ran this event twice on the day so that every one of our PGCE students could see it. The second run had a slightly different panel - Kathryn Lewis from Central South Consortium replaced Nicky Hagendyck and Lloyd Hopkin from the Welsh Government replaced Sonny Singh. We retained the services of Dr Kevin Smith, Gareth Rein and Barry Crompton. The second batch of students also had some great questions for the panel, and we didn't want you to miss out on hearing these, so we hope you enjoy an additional 20 minutes with our experts.  

Today, we’re gatecrashing one of the lecture theatres at Cardiff Metropolitan University to join our student teachers as they grapple with some of the big issues in education today. In a special (very) extended edition of the podcast, recorded live in front of an audience of PGCE primary and secondary students, we’ve gathered together a panel of speakers who represent school senior leadership, government, the regional consortia and academia to present and discuss on the topic of curriculum design. Speaking just three days after the publication of the final version of the Curriculum for Wales, due to be implemented in schools from 2022, our panellists are generous with their thoughts and advice to the next generation of the profession, making it clear that we need to become curriculum designers as well as classroom practitioners. Our panel consists of: Dr. Kevin Smith from Cardiff University Gareth Rein from St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Penarth Barry Crompton from Stanwell School in Penarth

A slightly different episode for February half term - this is our reflection on a talk we attended in September which was presented by the Singaporean ITE specialist Professor Pak Tee Ng. An adviser to the Scottish government on their education reforms, the professor was making a quick trip to Wales to deliver a 'masterclass' entitled 'The Singapore Story'. Singapore is the world's highest-ranking education system according to the international PISA tests (with Wales considerably further down the list!) so we were eager to hear what he had to say, and we weren't disappointed. On returning from the talk back at the start of this academic year, we sat down and recorded a podcast episode with our thoughts, which was then promptly relegated to the 'we have no idea when to put this out' folder, and then became our unofficial 'emergency episode', to fill a gap if something went disastrously wrong with something else! More than four months later, with no sign of a podcast disaster, we decided that if we didn't relea

In an episode recorded in the final hours before we staggered into the sunset for our Christmas break (indeed, just a few hours before we recorded the Christmas special episode!), we travelled the short distance to the other university in Cardiff: the mighty Cardiff University, member of the Russell Group and now officially part of the Cardiff Partnership for Initial Teacher Education. While not involved in the training of school teachers, Cardiff University has an education department staffed with top-flight, internationally-renowned researchers, so we wanted to have a chat with one of them about the various knotty questions around how we can work to close a perceived gap between academic research and classroom practice. Professor David James kindly invited us to his office for a conversation which ranged widely across some really interesting questions in this important area, and we hope you find the discussion as thought-provoking as we did.  

If you've been with us since the start, you may remember our second-ever episode, in which we sat in Emma's house and discussed coaching and mentoring. We were inspired by a talk by a colleague from another university, Jordan Allers, to chew over the different ways we can help novice teachers (as well as more experienced colleagues) to improve their practice. Well, now we can return to the discussion because the wonderful Jordan Allers has jumped ship and joined us here at Cardiff Met! We managed to track him down and bring him to the microphone to put some substance on the original discussion, and to give us some pointers about how we in the teaching profession can raise our mentoring game! Tackling the regular slots, Jordan reveals himself as a lover of organisation, as well as providing us with some reading material and something to try that relates to today's topic. We hope you enjoy what Jordan has to say. We'll be back in a fortnight, when we'll be discussing the role of educational research with Profes

Happy New Year / Blwyddyn Newydd Dda to you all! We've gone back on the road, battling through torrential rain to the town of Caerphilly, where we tracked down what can only be described as edu-twitter royalty! Yes, it's the mighty Impact Wales, aka Finola and Jane, who provide tailored support to schools. However, for those of us without a school budget to play with, Impact Wales are probably better known for filling Twitter with wonderful sketchnotes, each of them informed by a solid bed of research, and serving up the findings of that research in a single graphic. We know lots of you are, like us, huge fans of their work, so we thought it was high time to get inside Impact Wales HQ and ask them how they ended up as a team, what they do, and how we can all be a bit more impact-focused in our working lives. And while we were there, we couldn't resist asking Finola and Jane for their responses to our regular slots: wellbeing and something interesting - only letting them off 'something to try' because there wa

Merry Christmas from us both! For your festive pleasure, we present the 12 days of Christmas in the form of 12 items drawn from our regular topics of 'wellbeing', 'something interesting' and 'something to try' - four of each. It's a slightly more wholesome Christmas special than last year, but hopefully there's something in here for everyone, from substantial academic text recommendations to wellbeing tips and a vintage Tom item in the form of 'the bus factor'. Please do rate and review us if you have a moment. We'll be back on January 10th, when we'll be talking to edu-twitter royalty in the form of Finola and Jane from Impact Wales. See you then!

For our final episode of the Christmas term, we welcome an award-winning researcher to our humble studio! Bethan Rowlands joined Cardiff Met from our friends at the University of South Wales at the start of this year, and promptly won a BERA award for a poster presentation on raising awareness fo dyscalculia. Dyscalculia is, as Bethan describes it, dyslexia with numbers, and is very much the poor relation of the much better-known condition of dyslexia. Bethan explains to us the personal journey which led her to find out more about the condition, the dawning realisation that it was almost unheard of for a pupil to be diagnosed with it, and her work raising awareness in the student teachers that she works with. If you think you might have dyscalculia, or as a teacher you want to know more about it, you can contact the British Dyslexia Society (yes, they do dyscalculia as well!), or check out the authors that Bethan names in the end credits. We'll be back one more time in 2019 for our festive episode. See you th

We’re looking at literacy again today, and particularly what seems to be a perennial problem: the engagement of boys with reading. Our guest is Paul Warren, a former primary headteacher who now advises schools across a wide area of south Wales, and who is in the final stages of a PhD investigating this very area. His approach is to use comics to engage young pupils with stories, and he’s got plenty of interesting things to tell us about his findings, as well as about how rewarding it is to find things out for yourself through action research in the classroom. Paul also brings us some nice ideas for the wellbeing slot, plus a book recommendation for anyone who wants educational research explained in clear terms (which is pretty much all of us!). Paul’s book recommendations for this episode were: Coe, R. et al., 2017. Research methods and methodologies in education 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics: [the invisible art]. New York: HarperPerennial.

We're back on the road, and have finally got some pupils on the podcast! For this episode, recorded back in July (hence the frequent references to the summer holidays, now a distant memory), we popped down the road to Eastern High School in Cardiff, taking over a room in their shiny new building to interview four special guests. Georgina Saunders was mentioned in one of the regular slots back in season 1, and now gets the chance to appear in person to tell us about how she pulled off the impressive feat of being the student teacher who took forty pupils to the Hay Festival to develop their love for all things to do with reading. She's joined by Eastern High's librarian, James Emery, who was a vital part of the team who brought it all together. They've got plenty of tips for anyone who can see the value for pupils of putting on something like this, but can't imagine how they'd survive the experience! For good measure, we've got two wonderful pupil guests who went on the trip, who tell us about everything from

Teachers should always practise what they preach, and we firmly believe that the holidays are a great opportunity to do just that! So we want everyone to make time for a break from whatever they do in the hard-working world of education. In true teacher style, we've provided you with a resource to assist! It's a small but perfectly-formed episode following the 'blogs, tweets and stories' format that was so successful in the Easter break last year, and we'd like you to listen while doing something restorative - whether that's a walk, a bit of sofa time or a trip to the coffee shop, we don't mind! On with the show, then: Tom has a piece from the Guardian which encourages us to use a Japanese technique to get real about how many things we should be doing at once. Emma has a tweet with something to try which gets the parents on board, and then we move on to the stories, givign Tom his customary opportunity to sail close to the wind. Grabbing the opportunity with both hands, Tom makes yet another attempt to get th

We've got a very special treat for you this episode - an exclusive half hour interview with none other than Professor Graham Donaldson, author of the Successful Futures report in 2015 that made 68 recommendations for reform of the education system in Wales. His name is used as a shorthand for the new curriculum that was finally published in draft in the summer of 2019, and somehow, we're still not sure how, we managed to grab an extended interview with the man himself. In it, we discuss how the report came to be written, what it's like being the lightning-rod for endless Twitter debate, where our lovely student teachers fit into the picture, and - of course - how Professor Donaldson himself looks after his wellbeing. The interview itself was recorded in a conference venue that was being packed away around us, so please forgive us for the background noise! Huge thanks to Professor Donaldson for his generosity. Thanks also to the coffee shop employee who didn't throw us out when we turned our table into a tempo

Today we're joined by primary specialist Sian Davies-Barnes to consider a recent report by the Education Endowment Foundation entitled Improving Behaviour in Schools. We love the EEF because they crunch a lot of research, make it clear and accessible and give us several points of entry depending on how busy we are! This episode is particularly aimed at our student teachers who are just starting their first placements as it goes out, but is equally useful for early career teachers, or anyone looking to distil the wide range of information around behaviour into something manageable. Check out the EEF's report at https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/guidance-reports/improving-behaviour-in-schools/ or follow them on Twitter at @EducEndowFoundn Thanks to Sian for dropping by our studio. Don't forget to tune in next time, when we have an interview with a very special guest indeed...!  

It's episode 2, and Dr Judith Kneen is still with us for the second half of this double-bill. We're discussing our ongoing research into how to combine subject disciplines in the expressive arts (though plenty of this will be relevant for those working in other subject areas too). In season 1 episode 5 we described how we jumped in with both feet, trying out some bright ideas with our students with mixed success, and came away with the strong impression that we needed to do some reading. Fast-forward to this year, and we've done a systematic literature review of all things cross-curricular, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in the expressive arts, and have come to some interesting conclusions about what creates those all-important 'powerful connections' that we need to make in order for our learning to be meaningful, and for the subject disciplines to be well-served. In the course of today's deep discussion we explain what we found, present a taxonomy of cross-curricular approaches in the expressive art

We're back! It's season 2, and we've decided that the best way to get over the fear of dusting off the microphones and recording a new episode is to call upon the ever-reassuring Dr. Judith Kneen, who is now approaching the status of regular guest and national podcast treasure. Judith has stopped by to discuss her recent research into how primary and secondary schools are faring with their work to pioneer the new curriculum for Wales, and especially the expressive arts Area of Learning and Experience (AoLE), though plenty of what she says will be relevant to other subject areas too. 'Pioneer schools' were chosen by the Welsh Government to have a go at some aspects of the new curriculum, so they're interesting subjects for research as they get to grips with concepts such as making powerful connections between subject areas. Judith has lots of interesting things to report about how differently things are going in the primary and secondary age phases, the opportunities and challenges presented, and where things

We're coming back to your podcast feed very soon! Emma and Tom's PGCE Podcast will return for Season 2 on Friday 6th September. We'll have all the deep discussions about teaching that you need to see you through your Friday commute or the weekend, plus regular tips for wellbeing, things to try and pointers to interesting things we've read, heard or watched. If you haven't subscribed already, you can catch us wherever you get your podcasts. Please rate, review and tell your friends. See you soon!