Emma & Tom Talk Teaching

This half term, we're bringing you a triple-bill of episodes recorded at ResearchEd Cymru Bach. The event was convened to discuss where Wales goes now at this important moment for education. A new Plaid Cymru government coincided with yet another poor set of results in the international PISA results for Wales, and this has brought questions about the last decade of education reforms to a head. The event heard from a range of speakers, all of them well-known here in the country. Today we'll hea

Half term rolls around at last, and it's our tradition here on the podcast to do something a little different. Emma and Tom have each hunted down three interesting things with which to amuse, intrigue and/or torment the other, with no advance warning of the contents. Emma's got a blog by the almighty guru of teaching and learning, Tom Sherrington, and she has some feedback... Tom has a cautionary tale of why our instincts to run a mile from purveyors of corporate waffle are bang on the money. P

The Aberfan disaster, 60 years ago today, still looms large in the collective memory here in Wales. At 9.13am a coal tip slipped, engulfing Pantglas Junior school and a row of houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Back in 2023, in one of our Easter holiday episodes where we bring a variety of things to discuss together, Tom brought this clip from David Lloyd's excellent 'Radio Moments - Conversations' podcast. In it, journalist John Humphrys talks about the day when, as a young man, he wa

Wales has an increasingly popular Welsh medium sector and, in secondary at least, an increasing problem finding enough teachers to staff the classrooms! With a government policy to reach a million Welsh speakers by 2050, it’s clear that the target won’t be met without thinking beyond those people whose families have spoken Welsh at home for generations. Sporting a fresh new title of Dr, our friend and colleague Sioned Dafydd joins us in the studio to talk about her doctoral research, which seek

Planning - a huge part of the working life of any student teacher, and (in the opinion of many of us who work in ITE) the key to all sorts of aspects of the process of learning to teach. We spend hours banging on about it, our student teachers spend hours writing them, and yet an experienced teacher appears to do the whole thing in their head, and be able to replan the whole thing on the fly during a lesson if needed. To a new member of the profession it looks like magic, and to someone who teac

As teachers, we can work all the magic we like, but if a pupil’s not in our classroom, there’s not much impact to be had. In the wake of Covid, there are more and more pupils who are missing significant amounts of the school year. Somehow, we’ve got to season 9 without having an episode specifically about this important issue, but today we’ve managed to find a guest who can help with the details. Scott Norman-Stephenson supports attendance for a cluster of primary schools in Cardiff, and he’s w