Jo’s education podcast digest (episode 2)

The last time I blogged, I shared my top learnings from education podcasts. I’ve carried on listening to episodes of my favourites since then, and wanted to share a few new ideas and points to ponder. Although, I’ll admit that I’m a little behind with some of them.*

1. Working memory is a bit like a Post-it, from Trialled and Tested: Working Memory

Working memory can be a tricky concept to get your head around at first. But this simple and apt analogy from cognitive psychologist Dr Tracy Alloway is the best I’ve heard yet. Why? Well, as she outlines in the podcast, Post-its are:

• pretty small – there’s no chance of fitting all of GCSE History onto a Post-it, and your working memory couldn’t handle it all at once either.
• come in different sizes – not everyone’s working memory capacity is the same, and it tends to increase during childhood.
• usually a temporary way of keeping track of information – you wouldn’t rely on a Post-it to remember something long-term, and working memory is similarly shortsighted.

I also love the idea of working out the size of your working memory by using the “backward digit test”. When tutoring, thinking about working memory reminds me to make steps explicit, use checklists, prompts or worked examples, so they can save the precious space on their working memory post-it for practicing whichever skill we’re working on.

2. Does slang have a place in the classroom? From Tes Podagogy S7 E6: Slang and standard English with Rob Drummond

Ever been unsure about how to respond to pupils using dialect or slang within tutoring sessions? This podcast shows you’re not alone. Although – kudos to you if you always understand all of the slang they use (I’ve often been flummoxed)! Before I say any more, I think I should come clean and recognise the irony of writing this as a born-and-bred Geordie who allowed the accent and dialect to be ironed out of me whilst at university elsewhere…

Ok, onto the episode, which carefully explores the messages we send when celebrating or denigrating slang and regional dialects, the elusive ‘standard English’ or value-laden ‘received pronunciation’. A couple of choice soundbites from this episode can act as great guides: recognise that pupils need to be able to function in “different linguistic worlds” (for example, the linguistic worlds of home, friends, hobbies or sports they play, as well as linguistic worlds of the different subjects they study, and eventually the workplace). Each is unique and worthy, but linguistic practices may or may not travel well between worlds. Secondly, we should “celebrate linguistic diversity”: slang and dialect are brilliant ways to express ourselves, and standard English or received pronunciation have their place too. This is a topic to think about and reflect upon deeply and over time, and I found Rob’s points carefully thought out and informative.

3. How valuable multiple-choice questions can be, from Inside Exams S1 E7: Guessing your way into dentistry?

Many of our pupils will encounter multiple-choice questions in their assessments: primary pupils sitting SATs, secondary maths pupils sitting their GCSE with AQA, and that’s before considering the range of other subjects they study. Plus, if you’ve used our initial secondary maths workbook, or taken a look at the website diagnostic questions, you’ll have seen some carefully-designed multiple-choice questions. They are a great way to plan for tutoring as each wrong answer has been chosen to represent a particular misconception or error in a pupil’s thought processes – meaning you can be proactive about how you might respond to a pupil getting the answer wrong.

In this podcast, the ever-informative Mr Barton discusses MCQs with Zeek Sweiry, a Senior Researcher at AQA. There’s plenty of myth-busting in this succinct episode, but my favourite phrase was the idea of the wrong answers as “really plausible distractors” – I’ll be forever imagining them as excitable cartoon characters jumping about trying to tempt pupils into picking them! Thinking this way reminds me to aim for pupils deeply understanding the content we’ve covered in tutoring, to give them the strength of mind to discount and ignore plausible distractors, despite their pleas or cute appearance. The other really interesting myth discussed was whether pupils just guess. I loved the point that MCQs are pretty intriguing puzzles even if you don’t know the content – many of us would have a go at a MCQ on a topic we know nothing about, by using deductions and trying to rule certain options out. So, if you’ve ever been a bit skeptical about how useful MCQs can be for learning, or want to know why MCQs are used in exams, this episode is well worth a listen.

*I blame my discovery of TV-related podcasts for this – they’ve competed for my listening attention recently. Anyone for Obsessed with…, Dustbusters or Shrine podcasts? If you enjoy episode-by-episode dissections, outlandish fan theories, and interviews with the professionals behind the latest TV dramas, they are definitely for you!

In praise of podcasts: five things I learnt about education from podcasts

Rewind to the late 2000s. I’d received a really cool mp3 player for Christmas, shaped like a jelly bean but made out of glimmering pearl-like plastic. It provided perfect entertainment for commuting. Until one day it squirmed its way out of my hand, executing a perfect somersault, and plummeted directly through the gap between the train and the platform edge. Panicked, I listened to it clunk against the rails, followed swiftly by warning tones that the doors were about to close and so jumped off the train impulsively, a little lost without the entertainment I’d been relying upon!

Thankfully I’ve not repeated this escapade with my current entertainment device – old habits die hard though, and I’ve still picked a similar glimmering white colour scheme from the many options available. Anyway, what was the reason for me sharing this whistle-stop tour of recent audio technology? For many of us, all sorts of tasks (commuting included), are now accompanied by our own choice of entertainment, plugged straight into our ears. Instead of noughties pop my companion is often a podcast and there are plenty on education that are both interesting and informative. Here are five things I learnt about education from podcasts:

• Homework and class sizes appear to influence pupils’ outcomes less than we think.

from BBC The Educators – John Hattie

This podcast interviews a number of big thinkers in education, and is well worth a listen. This particular episode with John Hattie includes some information about his meta-analysis of education research and how it can help us understand what might, and might not, make a difference to pupil outcomes. As I learnt at a recent event, there is a tension in meta-analytical work between the quantity and quality of studies to include – although more studies might initially seem better, this isn’t necessarily the case if they are not equally high-quality and ‘translatable’ to new and differing contexts. All the same, the work of the Education Endowment Foundation also shows that homework and class sizes might not be as significant as we might think.

• It usually takes examiners 18 months to craft an exam paper! 

From Inside exams – 1. Talking my language

It would be easy to ignore what routes test papers go through before they arrive on exam desks in the summer term. This podcast walks us through some of the processes involved in creating, reviewing and checking exam papers. A great way to learn more about exams, direct from the examinations boards themselves.

1. How wide the gap is between pupils’ everyday talk and the academic vocabulary they need to succeed in school, as well as how to bridge this gap. From Mr Barton podcast – Alex Quigley: Closing the vocabulary gap

Everyone is a teacher of language and this is a really interesting topic for both maths and English tutors – as well as any prospective teachers of other subjects. Alex Quigley is a former English teacher and now works at the Education Endowment Foundation.

• Why number lines make more sense vertically than horizontally, and how the language of ‘opposites’ can be useful in teaching negative numbers

From Mr Barton podcast – Bernie Westacott

Mr Barton is basically education podcast royalty. He’s interviewed many influential figures for the podcast, which is regularly listened to and discussed by the most maths-phobic teachers. You know when Mr Barton likes something because he says, “that’s flippin’ brilliant” and he says that a lot in this podcast, which is available to listen to as well as to watch. It gives some great context to what pupils will have experienced early on in primary school as well as great tips for teaching negative numbers. I’m a big fan of vertical number lines since watching this. Why? They link to real-life examples (think thermometers and lifts) and the higher up a number is, the bigger it is. With a horizontal line, you lose these clear links and in their place it all becomes more ambiguous for pupils.

• Why it’s desirable that pupils find things difficult, and the importance of ‘wait time’ after we ask questions. 

From Evidence based education – Robert & Elizabeth Bjork 

The Bjorks are incredibly knowledgeable and influential researchers on learning and memory. This is the sort of podcast that really makes you think about how complex learning is, and helps question the assumptions we’ve picked up along the way. It’s worth a listen to understand that when pupils find tasks hard, it might not actually be having a negative impact on their learning. For a quick written summary, I’d recommend this article. ‘Wait time’ is all about how much silence we leave, after asking a pupil a question. Often, it’s tempting to break the silence and either answer the question ourselves or rephrase it. Both approaches might result in pupils not having the time they need to think deeply about the question and formulate a response. Plus, we are tacitly telling them they don’t always need to think about the questions we pose – as we might answer them ourselves! If you want to know more about their research you can also listen to their interview on Mr Barton’s podcast and their YouTube channel.

More education podcasts I’ve enjoyed:

BBC more or less – delves deep into statistics (often sent in by the audience) and provides great examples of mathematical ‘answers’ that aren’t always simple and can be controversial or used as a starting point for debate.

TES – the education podcast – TES news is great for what’s going on in schools, and TES ‘pod-agogy’ (yes, I love that pun!) for teaching tips.

The Dysadvantage podcast – experiences of people with dyslexia: exploring how they cope with the challenges it poses and the advantages they feel it brings.

TED Talks education – more global and wide-ranging in topics, great if you want a broader view of education beyond tutoring and the UK system.

The NCETM Maths podcast – aimed at maths teachers, but there are some great episodes on the maths mastery approach and interviews with maths teachers.

Trialled and tested – a collaboration between the Education Endowment Foundation and Evidence Based Education, discussing key pieces of education research.

What I’m listening to next: Researcher Daniel Willingham’s keynote at a recent ResearchED. Willingham’s book ‘Why don’t students like school’ has been a big influence on me. The quote ‘memory is the residue of thought’ is a really pertinent one for anyone in education, so I’m looking forward to hearing what Willingham has to say.