Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

The format of this podcast differs a bit from the usual one in that I am joined by my colleague in Marino Institute of Education, Dr. Gene Mehigan to discuss a book that influenced him on his journey as a teacher and teacher educator. The Book is The Master by Bryan MacMahon, published by Poolbeg Press in 1992. Among the topics we discuss are the following:

• How a book about teaching in Rural Ireland from the 1930s to the 1970s could speak to a teacher in a DEIS band 1 school in Darndale in the 1980s and 1990s.
• The consequences of poverty on children in schools.
• The “stain” of large classes (and their impact on children with language difficulties in particular).
• The importance of reading
• How Bryan MacMahon encouraged children to collect words (red notebook) and Gene Mehigan’s variation of it (jar on teacher’s desk).
• Stages in a reading lesson as outlined by Bryan MacMahon (who noted that they are not rigid and may need modern modification):
  • Arousal of interest (day before)
  • Introduction (before lesson begins to heighten interest in the text)
  • Examination of matter expressed in the text (Comprehension)
  • Examination of matter implied in the text (Comprehension)
  • Write difficult words on blackboard (Tier 1, 2 and 3 words today)
  • Teacher models reading
  • Children read aloud or silently
  • Isolate phrases for composition usage
  • Informed organic chat (in style of everyday conversation)
  • Dramatisation of the text (Reader’s theatre today)
  • Committal to rote “not to be scorned on special occasions”
• Why a teacher needs to back down in a confrontational situation with a pupil
• Characteristics of a good teacher;
  • Dedication
  • Sense of humour
  • Clear penetration in the timbre of the teacher’s speaking voice
  • A love of learning
  • Versatility of approach to a lesson
  • A congenial monotony (that can be departed from)
  • Occasional informal language
  • Good blackboard use and being able to sketch
  • Act in harmony with the traditions and culture of the school area
• Bringing the extraordinary into your teaching.
• The teacher’s job is to help each child find their special gift.
• Bryan MacMahon: “I realised that each child had a gift, and that the ‘leading out’ of that gift was the proper goal of teaching. To me a great teacher was simply a great person teaching.”
• Thoughts on a school library, access to books and encouraging children to read.
• Trying to entice children to read by tidying books. Buddy reading – to help beginning or reluctant readers but also helping older children consolidate their interest it reading. Helping a teacher narrow down who in a class might have dyslexia
• How Brian MacMahon practised an early version of “home-school liaison”
• Contemporary resonances – children from Germany fostered by local families during World War II.
• How Bryan MacMahon recruited children to look after other children who were vulnerable in some way
• Resonances with Johathan Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind (preparing the child for the road and not the road for the child).
• How learning tables enthusiastically helped a pupil later excel as an emigrant
• “A school is nothing if it is not a place of laughter and song.”
• Sources of creativity in education
• The importance of a teacher being a philomath.

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

In this episode I interview Hugh Catts from the Florida State University about reading comprehension, dyslexia and more. People interviewed on previous Inside Education podcasts are mentioned in this episode: Jerome Kagan, Daniel T. Willingham and Tim Shanahan.

Among the topics raised on the podcast are:

• How his interest in educational research grew from problems members of his family, including himself, had in learning to read.
• The benefits of having knowledge of phonetics and linguistics in studying reading difficulties
• His thoughts on whether someone with reading difficulties can teach reading well
• How he became interested in comprehension
• Why thinking about comprehension as a skill is unhelpful in teaching reading
• Comprehension is a complex set of behaviours or cognitive processes that is more like listening. It is the interaction between the reader and the text they’re reading to construct meaning between what is written in the text and what the reader already knows about the topic.
• Comprehension needs to be taught within the context of the subject matter we want the reader to understand.
• Quote from Daniel Willingham: “Memory is the residue of thought.”
• “Comprehension is essentially changing your understanding of the topic based upon the text.”
• “The more you learn about a topic, the more interested you are in learning more about the topic because you feel comfortable with it.”
• The “simple view of reading” claims that reading comprehension is a two-stage process where you decode/recognise the word and thereby turn print into language; this is followed by turning the meaning of words into the larger meaning of the text. Decoding can be learned over a number of years whereas the language comprehension part is learned over a lifetime. The view has advantages and disadvantages.
• We’re missing a good curriculum “in some cases by focusing in early reading on reading rather than focusing on subject matters to where you can gain the knowledge at the same time as you’re gaining knowledge about reading.”
• Questions teachers can ask to help develop children’s comprehension. (E.g. what are you thinking about? How does this relate to what you already know? What experiences have you had that are related to this?
• Assessing comprehension. It’s not easy to measure!
• “You cannot reduce comprehension down to a single score because it’s not a single thing.”
• Comprehension should be tested within texts on the subject matter upon which children have been provided with instruction.
• Benefits and shortcomings of cloze procedure to test comprehension
• Evaluating psychologist Jerome Kagan’s stance on dyslexia.
• Comparing the neurological basis of dyslexia with someone who has little musical ability.
• There is no consistent brain-based marker for dyslexia.
• The difference between someone who has dyslexia and who does not have dyslexia is evident in how much you struggle to read when provided with quality instruction.
• How dyslexia and comprehension difficulties could co-occur or could occur independently
• Consequences of having dyslexia
• The causes of dyslexia are multi-factorial, some relate to risk and some to resilience
• The probability that a child might have reading problems can be determined before a child has reading problems.
• Dyslexia cannot be diagnosed until the end of first class/beginning of second class.
• Intensive, systematic, supportive and scaffolded instruction from an early stage can help students who are at risk of having dyslexia.
• Having dyslexia is not a categorical phenomenon – it exists on a continuum.
• How he finds time to write.
• He likes the work of Daniel T. Willingham, Tim Shanahan, and Natalie Wexler

On this week's podcast I speak to Professor Etta Hollins from the University of Missouri-Kansas City about teacher education and the role of the teacher. Among the topics we discussed are:

• Why observation is key to good teaching practice and learning to teach
• The need to be observing, documenting and analysing classroom practice from early in a student teacher’s course
• How the influence of theorists like Jerome Bruner and John Dewey can be seen in classroom practice
• Directed observation – how the subject you're studying narrows your focus of observation
• She gives an example of how a student teacher might learn to teach with reference to learning to teach aspects of early literacy. She illustrates her point with reference to the book Brown Bear Brown Bear by Bill Martin and Eric Carle.
• As the teacher educator, she engages in epistemic practices (practices related to knowledge) with student teachers including focused inquiry (studying something specific that you’re going to be able to observe or apply).
• Knowing when it’s time to redesign a teacher education programme.
• How to solicit feedback on a teacher education programme’s impact and outcomes. (Do peers trust graduates’ knowledge? How do school leaders evaluate performance of our graduates?)
• Using generic versus subject-specific instruments to evaluate student teachers’ teaching.
• A student is ready to graduate from their teacher education programme when they can consistently apply academic knowledge to practice and make adjustments as needed for differences among children and get the learning outcomes that are expected for the child’s age, grade and subject matter. How students can progressively demonstrate their development of teacher knowledge throughout their programme.
• Why she believes assessing students in particular contexts does not mean that their competence is confined to those contexts: responding to students is a habit of mind that can be transferred to wherever you are teaching.
• She draws a parallel between how teachers respond to children in classrooms and how she responds to teacher educators when reviewing teacher education programmes.
• Why teachers need not just academic knowledge but to be aware of why they’re teaching. Teachers need a bigger purpose for their work.
• How children responded to her as a middle-school history teacher
• “Every teacher, whether they do it intentionally or not, influences children’s perception, their relationships, their values and who they become.”
• How extreme events such as school shootings can be traced to children being isolated, excluded by their peers in school.
• A teacher’s role is to help every child find a place of comfort in the school, learn to build relationships with peers, and help peers become more accepting of difference.
• Bank Street in New York is an example of how teachers can help transform schools and communities serving students from socially and economically backgrounds.
• Schools founded by John Dewey. At the centre of such schools was the study of children. He conceptualised how learning takes place and he had a conception of diversity. The spirit has been maintained because of a sense of clarity and commitment to John Dewey’s principles.
• The Lab school in Chicago was founded by John Dewey and takes children from low-income environments.
• Culture influences cognition, values and practices.
• She compares how children learn to think with how they learn a language from caregivers.
• She gives an example of how student teachers trusted their own experience over theory. She gave them an experience to help them understand difference.
• She is inspired by the awesome responsibility of being a professional educator.

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

On this podcast I discussed social and emotional learning with Professor Sara Rimm-Kaufman from the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development.

Among the topics discussed were:

• What social and emotional learning is
• The implicit and explicit process of learning social and emotional skills
• How children can learn empathy
• Her book for teachers: SEL from the Start
• From listening to respectful communication to respecting others’ perspectives
• Where social emotional learning fits in the regular school curriculum
• What service learning is and examples of it in practice
• Three possible categories of service learning solutions: Educate others, change a policy or take direct action.
• The relationship between service learning and project-based learning
• How Sara Rimm-Kaufman and her colleagues (including Tracy Harkins and Eileen Merritt) developed Connect Science, a scheme that uses the service learning approach to combine social emotional learning and academic content
• Applying service learning in different curriculum subject areas
• The notion of “fidelity of implementation” in education research (and an “intent to treat” analysis)
• The theme that characterises her research interests: the centrality of social emotional learning (e.g. for racial equity) and the widespread practices in school that have never been studied but would benefit from research into their effectiveness or lack of effectiveness
• The source of her research interests
• Her early research on primates and working with Professor Jerry Kagan to subsequently working in schools with children in first grade.
• Why she likes conducting research in schools, despite the challenges such research brings
• Relational trust – what it is and why it is important among the adults in a school
• Who has responsibility for building relational trust among the adult community in a school?
• Building relational trust with and among children in a school
• The relation between a teacher’s beliefs and their practice – a bidirectional process.
• She loves the work of Dan Willingham, a former guest on this podcast.

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

In this episode I speak to Professor Art Baroody from the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign about matters related to counting and early mathematical development. Professor Baroody shares insights from his extensive research in children's early mathematical learning with anecdotes from his life and work. Among the topics we discuss are:

• The word “count” is ambiguous; he prefers the terms verbal counting and object counting. Along with subitising, these are foundational for children’s sense of number.
• The rote portion of numbers (up to 12 in English) and the rule-governed portion of numbers (13 onwards in English)
• Being able to meaningfully count objects means understanding the cardinality principle
• How a teacher can assess a child’s competence in object counting. The “hidden stars” game.
• The importance of subitising (easily recognising, without counting, the number in a set). If a child can subitise small sets of objects and connect it to their verbal counting knowledge, the child can get insights into the structure of the count sequence and into our number system.
• The importance of children understanding the “increasing magnitude” principle of numbers.
• Subitising and learning addition and subtraction concepts
• The value of playing dice games.
• The successor principle: Each step in the counting sequence means you added one more.
• A child who starts out behind in kindergarten, typically gets further behind as school goes on, indicating the importance of informal mathematical knowledge for school readiness.
• Three components of a hypothetical learning trajectory: a goal, a learning progression, instructional activities that help children move from one level to the next.
• The relevance of a hypothetical learning trajectory for a teacher’s work: questions and instruction need to be developmentally appropriate for children.
• What number comes after 9? Whether you need to start at 1 or can answer this directly depends on your current level of understanding numbers.
• How schools typically target instruction at a level that is too low or too high for students.
• There are many published learning progressions and hypothetical learning trajectories available to teachers now, especially in number, arithmetic and counting development.
• A child’s mathematical power, routine expertise (learning something by rote – hard to apply it to a new problem and easy to forget) and adaptive expertise (learning something with understanding)
• Mathematical power comes from understanding, engaging in mathematical inquiry, to reason mathematically, to solve problems, having an interest in mathematics and using it. In short, conceptual understanding, mathematical thinking skills, and a positive disposition towards mathematics
• Example of applying knowledge to finding the area of a parallelogram
• Why memorising mathematics by rote is crazy.
• All children, even those with learning disabilities, can develop mathematical power up to lower secondary school level, if properly taught.
• Teaching mathematics by rote is cheating children.
• Things that can be discovered are the additive commutativity principle (3+5 = 5+3)
• Children are capable of much more than we give them credit for.
• Why getting children to learn off tables of number facts is cheating children. The importance of seeing patterns and relationships in the number tables – make it a thinking exercise and make mathematics learning fun.
• Working with his mentor Herb Ginsburg
• The use of manipulatives in teaching mathematics, even to college-level students.
• The value of children inventing procedures themselves.
• To understand fraction multiplication, the analogy of multiplication as repeated addition does not suffice. You need a more powerful analogy. A “groups of” analogy is more helpful. And it helps you understand why multiplication doesn’t always make something bigger.
• How to make sense of fraction division.
• How he conducts his research (Case study; random controlled trials)
• Substitution errors in reading
• John Holt’s books
• John Dewey’s book, Experience and Education
• Why parents and teachers need to be patient
• The power of examples and non-examples when teaching mathematics.

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

In this episode I speak to Professor David T. Hansen from Teachers' College, Columbia University about the philosophy of education and the practice of teaching. Among the topics we discuss are the following:

• What it means to see teaching as an art, as a political activity and as a moral endeavour.
• Direct lessons about morality/values/ethics versus the continuous enactment of moral values.
• What hand-raising and turn-taking reveals about classroom culture and establishing dialogue among students (teachers and their students coming closer and closer apart and further and further together).
• Teaching as a profession? Teaching as vocation, calling, practice, craft? The attraction of teaching for people who want to live a meaningful life.
• Reworking his original book, The Call to Teach in 2021 as Reimagining the Call to Teach in response to (a) Accountability movement in the United States, linked to No Child Left Behind; and (b) Having learned more about the practice of teaching.
• How the implementation of No Child Left Behind in the United States was tone-deaf to classroom life. Huge resources benefited private testing companies rather than professional development for teachers.
• A poetics of teaching: What poetics means (comes from Aristotle trying to figure out why drama on a stage has the kind of effects it has on the spectators long after the play has ended). In this article, Hansen tries to understand the impact of teaching.
• Recognising the poetics of teaching; teaching is a rhythmic practice where poetics can be found alongside its drudgery/frustration/failure.
• How we all fail regularly in teaching but we rarely discuss it.
• What he means when he says that anyone interviewing a teacher for a job wants to know if the teacher loves life.
• Finding meaningfulness in teaching
• Programmes for veteran teachers to rejuvenate, reinspire, renew and refresh themselves.
• One example of such a programme is a “descriptive review” of a child.
• The importance of working on craft with initial student candidates; more can be done on the art of teaching – draw out a sense of their own humanity, possibly through story, poetry, film or a painting.
• How teaching is saturated with “why” questions – invitations to philosophy.
• Philosophy as theory and as an art of living (wisdom tradition)
• Cosmopolitanism: being reflectively loyal and reflectively open
• Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
• Plato and John Dewey.

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

Theme tune composed by David Vesey.

On this episode of Inside Education, engineer Patricia Scanlon of Soapbox Labs discusses how improving how well software can recognise children's voices can support how teachers teach, assess and give feedback on reading and enhance equity in the classroom. Among the topics discussed are:

• How children’s voices differ to adult voices
• How voice recognition software has been found to be biased in favour of some populations over others
• How she became interested in applying speech recognition technology to education after watching her daughter experience the limits of educational software when she was learning to read and do mathematics
• Applying speech recognition technology to teaching reading – the software acts like a helpful adult who “listens” to and “assesses” the child’s reading.
• The software is used in dyslexia screeners, reading practice products, fluency assessment products, speech therapy.
• Use of the software at home and in classrooms
• The use of rapid naming as one of a suite of tasks in a screening tool that aims to predict dyslexia in pre-literate children, thus making earlier intervention possible
• The promise of voice recognition software for making school more inclusive for children of all abilities
• Applying the voice recognition software to languages other than English
• How practising reading can be formatively assessed using voice recognition software
• Feedback to encourage the student, to correct a child’s pronunciation of a sound, or to identify errors for the teacher
• Why Soapbox Labs’s niche is with children’s voice recognition software
• How they worked alongside teachers to develop the software
• Collecting data and looking at data privacy
• Future plans for developing the software