Tes Podagogy

In this week's episode of the Tes magazine debrief podcast, we discuss: 

• How and when you should use comfort feedback - and when you shouldn't
• The power of a good pen to change your life - sort of
• And the surprising science of whether pointing at the words as a child reads is actually helpful or not
• And we play another round of Would I Lie To You?

Perhaps the biggest casualty of the ‘reading wars’, or more specifically the fight over whether to teach phonics, is that it robs a lot of time from potential discussions about how to teach phonics well.

And considering every primary school in England teaches phonics, that seems like a conversation we should be having, says professor Julia Carroll who is a reader in Child Development and Education at Coventry University and one of the world’s leading authorities on phonics.

So in this podcast, we delve into the nitty gritty of phonics teaching, looking at topics such as differentiation, spelling and when phonics should stop...

In this episode we talk through the 2 October issue of Tes. Grainne Hallahan and Dan Worth play a game to see if teachers are able to spot liars, Jon Severs dreams up his ideal horticultural classroom and the team discusses the in-depth cover feature on how play and cognitive science need to work together rather than against one another when it comes to EYFS settings.

“Structured input does not have to be children sitting on the carpet with an adult talking to them or children sitting at a table with worksheets,” states Camilla Gilmore, professor of Mathematical Cognition at Loughbrough University.

In this episode, she explains how early years settings and parents can build on a child’s natural understanding of maths to move them to being able to better understand and manipulate number and shape. It may seem easiest to simply ‘tell’ children how to do this, but from the research we have into early numeracy, she believes that is not going to work. 

In this episode we talk through the 25 September issue of Tes. Grainne Hallahan talks about using the wrong language with students, Dan Worth discusses delegation and Jon Severs looks at the feature from this week that asks whether the SLANT behaviour management technique cognitively overloads pupils...

“We overvalue early specialisation and under-value generalisation,” states David Epstein.

That’s a criticism not just of the sports world that has been the focus of much of the journalist and writer's previous work, but the world in general, and that includes education.

Epstein explains how we have come to believe that success comes from deliberate practice in a single domain – so to become a world-class golfer, or scientist, or writer, we need to start practising that skill intensely from a very early age. And more broadly than that, we see expertise in any given subject or domain as the product of specific practice within that domain.

This is all wrong, he says.

In this week's episode of the Tes magazine debrief podcast we chat about: 

• how trust between the government and teachers fell apart over the last six months
• whether it's important your pupils like you or not
• and the complex politics of make-up in schools - for both pupils and teachers.

“There is no right answer [on Covid],” laments science broadcaster and writer Dr Kat Arney. And that’s not good news for schools trying to find the ‘right’ route through the Covid-19 pandemic.

Speaking on the latest episode of Tes Podagogy (which you can watch and listen to below), Arney - author of Herding Hemingway's Cats and How to Code a Human - explains that the past six months have brought all the existing problems with science communication to the forefront, and “ramped them up to 11”.

And that’s left schools in a tricky position.

In this episode, the team discusses the 11 September issue of Tes. We talk about the over feature from professor Rob Webster, who warns of the many intervention traps schools may fall into as they attempt to 'catch children up' academically. We also discuss this issue's Focus On - which looks at whether schools are drowning in 'bullshit'.

WARNING: This episode does contain language that some may find offensive.