This episode celebrates EDCrocks one-year anniversary! How about that? I decided to devote it to the man, real or fictional, who inspired my book The Owl Factor: Reframing your Teaching Philosophy. You might have heard of him. His name was Socrates :)

In this episode, I basically read one of the chapters of my book about how Socrates became popular in Athens, which events led him to his death, and why he's so present in science and education today. 

If you want to purchase my book, click here to get the link.

This EDCrocks podcast episode honors two of my favorite scientists: Sir Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan. I decided to read my New Routes Magazine Cover Article entitled Learning Cosmos: A Voyage into the Learner's Universe. The Learning Cosmos conceptual framework brings together different learning principles and theories based on the cognitive sciences (psychology and neuroscience) literature into one illustration that resembles the universe: different spheres of influence, different levels of analysis. You can read more about it here and even download the PDF of New Routes Magazine

EDCrocks Podcast starts its fifth season with an emotional episode. I decided to use this season to pay tribute to people who have made their contribution to education and ELT and the very first episode honors the memory of my father. He had absolutely nothing to do with our area but he was the one who insisted I learned English as a child and who told me so many stories as I grew up. Today is Father's Day in Brazil and I wanted to share a little bit about this man, Sven Åke Lennart Hedlund, my beloved dad who passed away in 2019. 

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://edcrocks.com/2019/01/11/ode-to-viking-storytelling-as-a-powerful-learning-tool/

Your accent might define (in some people's minds) how well educated and qualified you are. However, people normally confuse things like pronunciation, accent, and teaching qualification. In this final episode, I go over the idea of native-speakerism and how we should celebrate our cultural diversity and embrace different accents.

How did humans manage to keep language alive for so many years before the invention of writing? Quite probably because of the oral tradition. Speaking in groups meant telling stories about things someone saw or dreamt of or even things they desired. In this episode, I think about the role of storytelling and how we should prioritize it in any educational setting

As we grow older and progress through our educational system, we dedicate less and less time to something that has a fundamental role in how we develop: play. In this episode, I talk about the importance of play and why we should pay more attention to it.

Is there a more effective way to teach our students? Are there specific strategies that they can use that might help them learn better? The answer is YES. In this episode, I go over 3 evidence-based strategies discussed in an article I co-authored with Hall Houston published in the MindBrainEd Think Tank+: Retrieval Practice, Interleaving, and Spaced Repetition

Due to the pandemic, many schools have opted for a teaching modality that had basically been only used in higher education: concurrent classrooms. In this modality, both online and in-person students attend the same class at the same time. Is it effective? In episode 5, I discuss a few ideas about concurrent classrooms