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...

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 (https://cambridge-community.org.uk/professional-development/gswkey/index.html)* Taking a stand against the pedagogy of...

It's always a special podcast episode when we get our student teachers into the studio, and today's discussion is no exception! Just after Christmas this year, we spent an exciting couple of weeks digging into the details of our expressive arts subject disciplines, and the potential for making powerful connections between them.Today, some of those student teachers are here to tell us and our listeners what they found out! Chloe Griffiths and Tianna Hancock (PGCE secondary drama), Serena...

Artifical Intelligence: is it going to revolutionise learning and the world of work? Or take our jobs and then kill us all? We've had our eye on doing an episode on AI for quite a while, but needed a guest who would give us an education angle and avoid the sensationalist stuff... step forward Karl Jones from Cardiff Met's School of Technologies! Karl was previously in Initial Teacher Education with our colleagues in Trinity Saint David, Carmarthen, so knows his way round a classroom as well...

Today we welcome back our colleague Dr Anne Hodgson, who's here to talk to us about adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed practice in schools. It's a wide ranging discussion with some hard-hitting facts about the challenges facing many of the children in our classrooms. As Anne says, being informed about the impact of these adverse factors is everybody's business, and we can all make a difference.Thanks to Anne for joining us...

For this episode we welcome (and bow down to) our colleague Kerry Bevan! Programme leader for PGCE secondary languages, but also still a practising languages teacher in school, Kerry recently completed her thesis for the National MA Education (Wales) (https://nationalmaeducation.wales/) programme and stormed to a mark in the 90s for her research into perceptions of decolonising the languages curriculum. In today's discussion, Kerry tells us about the subject-specific issues around a white,...

We always like a good collaboration here on Cardiff Met's initial teacher education (ITE) programmes! Today we welcome to the studio our colleague Sioned Dafydd, and podcast veteran (from all the way back in season 1, no less) Sarah Cason from Palmerston Primary School. Since she joined us last time, Sarah has been upgraded to headteacher, and has a key role in partnership with Cardiff Met, creating the best possible experiences for our student teachers. The project, funded by two regional...

Happy new year! Despite Emma and Tom both being performing arts specialists, we've never had an episode on the podcast about dance. Having recently met and collaborated with National Dance Company Wales, we didn't want to miss an opportunity to invite them to our studio to talk all about this very special art form. Paul Kaynes and Maris Lyons from NDCW talk to us about what makes dance unique, the challenges and opportunities of incorporating dance into the curriculum, and how NDCW support...

Merry Christmas one and all! Yet again we find ourselves between Christmas and New Year, hopefully enjoying a well-earned break. And for the sixth time we have entered the studio with a total of twelve (one for each day of Christmas) weird and wonderful gifts for our listeners. This year we have everything from poetry to scary sounds, from the joys of solitude to a nostalgic unsung hero of music, to join you while you recharge the batteries or set out on some nice long walks to blow away the...

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today, we join our friends and original inspiration: Becky and Amy from And Then What? The Podcast All About Stories, to hear a Brothers Grimm fairy tale that didn't quite make the cut... Merry Christmas from all of us at the podcast!

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today we hear an article from The Guardian about the dark side of #kindness videos. Is it about being kind, or making money?! Tom takes up the story...

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today we have an extract from one of our Christmas episodes, which takes us back to the dark days of the Covid pandemic, when everyone was getting used to being online, and one of the few joys available was judging one another's video call...

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Tom's hatred of social media is well known to regular podcast listeners. Today, he's got an article about what a six hour Facebook outage tells us about people's attitude towards Mark Zuckerburg's mighty website.

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today we have some evidence-based research from the medical profession, which gives us pause for thought about where the line is drawn between research and common sense.

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today we look at what happens when an important project or piece of knowledge is imperilled by the Bus Factor...

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today Emma brings us a post by the mighty Tom Sherrington which takes aim at that beloved educational foodstuff, Wellbeing Cheese.

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Long-term listeners will know that we were originally inspired to start our podcast by Becky and Amy of the podcast And Then What? The Podcast All About Stories. This is an extract from one of Becky and Amy's episodes, in which they tell a story...

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today Tom brings us a tweet which causes our podcast duo to ask: do I have an intimidating personality?

As an initial teacher education (ITE) institution, we spend a lot of our time thinking about mentoring student teachers, especially how to support our school-based colleagues who undertake this vital role. Our colleagues in the regional school improvement consortia think about it too, especially with their responsibility for mentoring newly-qualified teachers (NQTs). One consortium, Central South Consortium, carried out an appreciative enquiry to try and get hold of the very best mentoring...

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today Tom brings us a podcast which sends up the fashion for all things true-crime, and asks some questions about the motivations of those who make true-crime podcasts, and those who listen to them.

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!This extract is from one of our earliest light episodes, and Tom reads out a news item about a truly terrible idea for a lesson. Come for the disaster, stay for the hilarious quote from the headteacher.

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today Emma reads us a thought-provoking story from her birthday gift from Tom, a book entitled The Golden Mole.

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!Today we have a tweet about the stupid memes about teacher sacrifice. Enough already!

To celebrate our five (and a bit) years on the air, we've gathered together 24 of our favourite light episode items to brighten up the end of this long autumn term!These festive gifts will disappear after Christmas, so enjoy them while they're here!It's day 11, and in this extract Emma shamelessly steals the format of one of her favourite podcasts and lots of munching ensues.