Episodes

Today we're all on our own without a guest, because we're presenting original Cardiff Met research! But our colleague Sioned Dafydd is with us in spirit as she was a key member of the three-person research team that carried out this work. Today we're looking at what happens when student teachers change from one school placement to another, and when they move from their initial teacher education into their first job. In particular, we're focusing on the part that Wales's Professional Standards f...

In a very impressive move to win 'most dedicated podcast guest', today we welcome Dr Rachel Shanks from the University of Aberdeen to our studio in person! For obvious reasons, our original request to Rachel involved a down-the-line interview, but we were very happy indeed to be able to instead welcome her to Cardiff after an epic train journey from Scotland. Rachel has had a major impact on school uniform policy in Scotland following her work with students to analyse the policies of a huge num...

It’s that festive time of year again, and hopefully anyone involved in the world of education is relaxing after a very long Autumn term. We’re back with our usual Christmas offering - though we’re out of our normal studio as our friends in the Sport Broadcast and Media programmes are having a busy last week of term up on the second floor. In a partially successful attempt to cut the duration of our epic Christmas special, we’ve limited ourselves to four items each, and as ever, neither of us k...

One of the perks of hosting the podcast is that we get to invite people who’ve influenced us to come on as guests, and in our world of teacher education, there are few people who’ve had more influence on us than Professor Trevor Mutton from the University of Oxford. Co-author of a huge number of articles and books that have shaped our thinking about how new teachers learn, we’ve been privileged to work with Trevor for a number of years. Now, we’ve managed to get him into the studio to discuss a...

Teaching people to be teachers can feel like a bit of a head-spinner - it can get meta quite quickly! But teacher educators (in school or in university) are also part of a wider group of slightly unusual people who teach people to become public-service professionals like social workers, youth workers or police officers. In all of these cases, these educators have moved from a professional role to a role teaching people to do that job. While our colleagues looking after students in their work pl...

It's time for another 'delve' (!) into the world of AI, and how large language models have found their way into the world of education. Following our episode last year with Karl Jones, today we welcome Mark Lester from the library service into the studio. Mark's been keeping an eye on all things AI for a number of years now, and has some interesting thoughts for us on where it might make life more productive for students and those who teach them. He's also got some insights for us into the chall...

It’s October half term, and therefore time for one of our ‘light’ episodes! To entertain you with something a little different, we’ve gone a bit rogue and found three interesting things each. As ever, we don’t tell one another what’s coming in advance (though if you listened to the last episode with Emma, it’s fair to say that Tom had a good idea that an epistemology quiz was in his immediate future…). We also quietly drop our usual 60 minute limit on episode length in order to chew things over ...

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 forward to what Emma’s going to do next. Thanks to Emma for lots of interesting food for thought! ———...

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 her work in progress with Tom, she ended up providing enough content for two episodes! In this first ...

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 the Welsh education reforms might be pointing to wider questions or concerns with the Curriculum for ...

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 teaching on the MA in Education here at Cardiff Met. Jan tells us what community focused schools can b...

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 and Sarah Cason join us from Whitchurch High School and Palmerston Primary school - both schools wi...

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 you've stuck with us for the long haul, thanks for being with us, and if you're a new listener, wel...

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 policy at Yr Athrofa, UWTSD, and Matthew Maughan who's deputy headteacher at Bassaleg School in Newport...

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 list of resources and links below. Dr Kev says: https://www.currereexchange.com/currere-exchange-j...

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 teacher. With more and more teachers engaging in research and enquiry in their own classrooms and school...

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 questions from our student teachers. We hope you find the discussion interesting and useful! Huge thanks ...

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 become teachers. Using a massive treasure trove of longitudinal data from the ASPIRES project at the ...

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 pedagogy of professional decline Things fell apart: the most mysterious deaths Tom’s three things: Fi...