Tes Podagogy

What do we know about the causes of eating disorders, and what teachers can do to spot the signs and intervene early? Helen Amass speaks to clinical psychologist Dr Tara Porter to find out. 

How much of a problem is diversity in children’s literature, and what can teachers do to make events such as World Book Day more inclusive? In this week’s episode of the Tes Podagogy podcast, Helen Amass talks to professor of English Karen Sands O’Connor to find out. 

“Students do a whole lot of things to prepare for their exams, some of which are good uses of their time and some of which are not,” explains professor John Dunlosky, professor in the department of psychological sciences at Kent State University.

Dunlosky is well placed to tell you which techniques fall into each category: he is behind the oft-quoted paper Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Speaking on this week’s Tes Podagogy he provided an overview of the key points from the paper, with some interesting comments on the various techniques and broader education issues.

Mental health among teenagers is out of control, there is an epidemic of issues, and things are so much worse than they used to be - that is the message that has been perpetuated in the media and that has largely been bought into in schools. But the data simply does not support that narrative, according to Tamsin Ford, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Exeter.

Professor Ford was one of the principal researchers for the largest study of mental health in 2-19 year olds in the UK, which was published last year and funded by the NHS. It was a follow up to two previous studies, one in 1999 and one 2004.

“The question we were answering was how many young people in England have a serious impairing mental health condition. This was clinically relevant problems, not mild conditions,” she explains on this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast (see audio player below to listen).

“If we look at the 5-15 year old group, across the three studies we see a bit of an increase, but not much. It is a matter of a couple of per cent, and the increase is almost all explained by more teenagers having more emotional problems, so significant anxiety and depression.”

The figures for this group were as follows: 9.7 per cent in 1999 and 10.1 per cent in 2004 to 11.2 per cent in 2017.

In this podcast, Professor Ford delves deeper into the data (including some figures around very high levels of problems among 16-19 year old girls), discusses what schools can do to support mental health and explains how social media is not necessarily the driver of problems it is widely considered to be.

Play is one of the most misunderstood topics in education, says developmental cognitive psychologist and early years specialist David Whitebread. In this week’s episode, he talks to Helen Amass to set the record straight.

What is ‘spatial thinking’ and how important is it in the classroom? In this week’s Tes Podagogy Helen Amass talks to cognitive developmental psychologist Emily Farran about the need for teachers to “spatialise” their teaching

Mentors provide crucial support for new teachers, but without proper recognition the role can become a workload ‘burden’ says Rachel Lofthouse, professor of teacher education at Leeds Beckett University. In this episode she discusses what makes a good mentor and what can be done to raise the profile of mentoring.

Is your child 'school ready'? Your answer will depend on what you think that term means. And from policy makers to parents, and teachers to pupils, everyone seems to have a different view. 

“There is no clear definition about school readiness actually means, therefore, it has been left open to interpretation,” explains Dr Louise Kay, who researches EYFS practice at the University of Sheffield School of Education.

On this week’s Tes Podagogy she talks at length about the problems with the school readiness concept and the way it is assessed by government.

Sarah Jane Blakemore wants you to be nicer to teenagers. Or rather, to show more understanding that they are not as adult as they may appear and that the behaviours they often adopt are sometimes out of their control. 

“One of the messages of my research, the papers we write and the books I have written, is that we should be more understanding of teenagers, of this really critical period of development,” she says.

Blakemore is professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London and the author of books including the multi-award winning Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain.

Speaking on the Tes Podagogy podcast, she explained that we often over-estimate what a teenager is capable of doing. She also discusses mental health, mindfulness, school starting ages, and sleep. 

"We are fed a steady diet from the press that screens are bad for kids - if you show people enough of those terrible articles based on terrible research, a proportion of people will have a terrible idea about screens," says Andrew Przybylski, associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Oxford and director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute.

In this Tes Podagogy podcast, he banishes the myths around screen time and tech, explaining that our condemnations are way ahead of the evidence and that we need a more nuanced view of tech in schools.