It’s been another packed year for the Tes Podagogy podcast, as we’ve delved into topics varying from peer learning to the “proper” way to speak, via attachment theory, “unteachable” children and Bananarama.
Here are some of our most popular episodes:
With exclusions never far from the headlines, a focus on trauma and its impact on behaviour has been fiercely debated in schools.
In this podcast, Essi Viding, professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London (UCL) and Eamon McCrory, professor of developmental neuroscience and psychopathology at UCL, explain how trauma affects young brains - including autobiographical memory functioning, threat-processing and reward-processing - and how instinctive self-protective measures can cause issues in school.
That was the question we explored with Professor Samantha Johnson, a developmental psychologist at the University of Leicester.
She explained how the 8 per cent of children who are born pre-term in the UK are more likely to have difficulties with mathematical ability, social and emotional skills, and attention, but “they do not tend to be the children who are disruptive or aggressive”, and, as a result, “may not be coming to the teacher’s attention as being in need of support”.
...is that they disregard the complexity of the social forces at play within schools, argues Brett Laursen, professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, US, and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Behavioural Development.
“The whole-school norm has to be properly translated into the smaller group setting,” he says. “The teens in a classroom are not blank slates. They have histories together and the teacher is going to have to work with the histories of the children in the classroom.”
If you’ve ever found yourself worried about your students’ use of computer games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty, you’re not alone - but you may be stressing unnecessarily, says Dr Pete Etchells, a reader in psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University and author of the book Lost In A Good Game: why we play computer games and what they can do for us.
He details the dubious science behind the moral panics around gaming disorder, and praises the benefits that online worlds can bring to young people, from community to “culturally meaningful” experiences.
There are two kinds of knowledge, according to Professor David C Geary, of the department of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri: primary knowledge and secondary knowledge.
These don’t refer to the age brackets, but instead a fascinating theory that breaks learning down into “human universal abilities” and “evolutionary novel knowledge” - here, Geary explains the distinction between the two, and how teachers should be aware of them in their practice.
