Emma & Tom Talk Teaching

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 for...

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 h...

ITV National News* have just dropped a hard-hitting report about standards of literacy in Welsh schools. If 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...

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 teac...

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...

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...

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 poli...

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 l...

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 teach...

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 questio...

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 be...

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 Concepts Taking a stand against the pedago...

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 list...

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 wit...

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...

For this episode we welcome (and bow down to) our colleague Kerry Bevan! Programme leader for PGCE secondary languages, but also still a practising languages teacher in school, Kerry recently completed her thesis for the National MA Education (Wales) programme and stormed to a mark in the 90s for her research into perceptions of decolonising the languages curriculum. In today's discussion, Kerry t...

We always like a good collaboration here on Cardiff Met's initial teacher education (ITE) programmes! Today we welcome to the studio our colleague Sioned Dafydd, and podcast veteran (from all the way back in season 1, no less) Sarah Cason from Palmerston Primary School. Since she joined us last time, Sarah has been upgraded to headteacher, and has a key role in partnership with Cardiff Met, creati...

Happy new year! Despite Emma and Tom both being performing arts specialists, we've never had an episode on the podcast about dance. Having recently met and collaborated with National Dance Company Wales, we didn't want to miss an opportunity to invite them to our studio to talk all about this very special art form. Paul Kaynes and Maris Lyons from NDCW talk to us about what makes dance unique, the...

Merry Christmas one and all! Yet again we find ourselves between Christmas and New Year, hopefully enjoying a well-earned break. And for the sixth time we have entered the studio with a total of twelve (one for each day of Christmas) weird and wonderful gifts for our listeners.  This year we have everything from poetry to scary sounds, from the joys of solitude to a nostalgic unsung hero of music,...

As an initial teacher education (ITE) institution, we spend a lot of our time thinking about mentoring student teachers, especially how to support our school-based colleagues who undertake this vital role. Our colleagues in the regional school improvement consortia think about it too, especially with their responsibility for mentoring newly-qualified teachers (NQTs). One consortium, Central South...

We break new ground for the podcast today by having two guests from His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC)! HMRC are the organisation who administer tax in the UK, and a little known fact about them is that they have volunteers who go into schools to deliver HMRC's very own programme of lessons all about tax - Tax Facts! We're very grateful to Amy Healey and Heather Hughes from HMRC who joined u...