With some excitement we find ourselves recording back on our beloved university campus - but outdoors to avoid having too many lines on our risk assessment! With suitably long wires plugged in, our podcast duo tackle the very topical concept of resilience, with the aid of a number of sources that we've mashed up to help us. Having become something of a hot buzzword even before we all found ourselves battling the coronavirus, resilience is a tricky concept to nail down, but very relevant to those...
Sep 18, 2020•50 min•Season 3Ep. 2
We're back! And to celebrate the start of season 3 we're back together in person, recording safely outdoors (complete with strange background noises) to bring you a bumper first episode to help you get thinking about your philosophy. As teacher educators, we sit in a sometimes uncomfortable place outside the schools where our students undertake their placements, and it's important for all of us to understand what we're for, what we do and why we don't just point student teachers at a school and ...
Sep 04, 2020•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 1
Just a week to go until Emma & Tom's PGCE Podcast returns for its third season! Here's a little trailer to whet your appetite. Tune in on Friday 4th September for our first episode, in which we discuss philosophies of teaching and teacher education. See you soon!
Aug 28, 2020•2 min
It's a momentous day for the PGCE podcast! This week we managed to meet and record in person, which was the first time we'd seen each other outside of a screen for FIVE MONTHS. And it's doubly momentous because this is our first episode sound-edited by Emma! Using some suitably social-distance-friendly long cables, we produced our first al fresco recording, to bring you a quick reflection and reminiscence on season 2 of the podcast, plus a look forward to some of the goodies we've got planned fo...
Aug 14, 2020•12 min
It's the final episode for this season of the PGCE podcast, and we've got a fascinating discussion that gives our listeners plenty to chew over, whether you're a brand-new member of the profession or a high-powered senior leader. We're joined again by Dr Judith Kneen to discuss an article she has lead-authored, entitled Pioneer teachers: how far can individual teachers achieve agency within curriculum development? We hear a lot about the need for teachers to have more agency - the power to do th...
Jun 12, 2020•43 min•Season 2Ep. 21
In an episode which was bumped from its original position in the schedule by the global Coronavirus pandemic, we've gathered together two of our international student teachers - both from Canada - to talk about what it's like to train as a teacher in Wales when you've come to us from another country. From the practicalities of explaining to the pupils where you're from to the differences between education systems, Rachel and Ben have got first-hand advice for anyone looking to take the plunge an...
May 29, 2020•Season 2Ep. 20
Our recent mega-episode on curriculum design featured, amongst other stars, Dr Kevin Smith from Cardiff University. His presentation to our student teachers encouraged them to think about their values and beliefs, and question everything, while also giving them a rucksack-full of book recommendations. We decided it would be good to invite Dr Kevin back for a longer discussion about curriculum theory and, undeterred by the Coronavirus lockdown, we got him on the line from his house to expand on h...
May 15, 2020•Season 2Ep. 19
We’ve travelled a whole mile away from campus for this episode, for the very first ResearchED Cymru event. ResearchED is an organisation aimed at bringing educational research to teachers in a way they can use, promoting the idea that knowing about the clues to ‘what works’ that current research gives us as teachers can save us chasing myths or getting stuck in practice that’s not the best for our pupils. ResearchED events happen on Saturdays, and this year the organisation came to Wales for the...
May 01, 2020•Season 2Ep. 18
With the nation still in lockdown, and no prospect of normal life resuming, our intrepid podcasting pair have used all the ingenuity and bloody-mindedness that comes as standard with classroom teachers everywhere to bring you some light relief, despite our enforced separation now well into its third week (or fifth, by the time this hits your devices). With Emma still speaking down the line from her house, and Tom’s car parked in his street doing sterling work as a recording studio (picking up th...
Apr 17, 2020•Season 2Ep. 17
In an unfortunate quirk of the episode schedule, we were originally going to put out a lovely episode about our community of international students who travel to Wales to train as teachers here. But that just seemed like adding insult to injury when we’re all confined to our homes by the global Covid-19 pandemic, so we’ve postponed the release of that episode and cobbled together a lockdown special for you to enjoy, if enjoy is the right word. With Tom sitting in a deserted university campus and...
Apr 03, 2020•Season 2Ep. 16
While anyone who knows anything about education (and especially primary education) will know that literacy is a Very Big Deal, our guests this episode want to talk about something very specific and slightly different: reading for pleasure. Could it be that such a strong focus on literacy skills might mean that the simple pleasure of reading things for fun might be getting squeezed out? How can we as teachers help our pupils to be motivated to read for pleasure? In the last of our suite of episod...
Mar 20, 2020•Season 2Ep. 15
Our curriculum design panel mega-episode landed in your feed today, with nearly two hours of thought-provoking presentations and discussion about curriculum design and the new Curriculum for Wales. We actually ran this event twice on the day so that every one of our PGCE students could see it. The second run had a slightly different panel - Kathryn Lewis from Central South Consortium replaced Nicky Hagendyck and Lloyd Hopkin from the Welsh Government replaced Sonny Singh. We retained the service...
Mar 06, 2020
Today, we’re gatecrashing one of the lecture theatres at Cardiff Metropolitan University to join our student teachers as they grapple with some of the big issues in education today. In a special (very) extended edition of the podcast, recorded live in front of an audience of PGCE primary and secondary students, we’ve gathered together a panel of speakers who represent school senior leadership, government, the regional consortia and academia to present and discuss on the topic of curriculum desig...
Mar 06, 2020•Season 2Ep. 14
A slightly different episode for February half term - this is our reflection on a talk we attended in September which was presented by the Singaporean ITE specialist Professor Pak Tee Ng. An adviser to the Scottish government on their education reforms, the professor was making a quick trip to Wales to deliver a 'masterclass' entitled 'The Singapore Story'. Singapore is the world's highest-ranking education system according to the international PISA tests (with Wales considerably further down th...
Feb 21, 2020•Season 2Ep. 13
In an episode recorded in the final hours before we staggered into the sunset for our Christmas break (indeed, just a few hours before we recorded the Christmas special episode!), we travelled the short distance to the other university in Cardiff: the mighty Cardiff University, member of the Russell Group and now officially part of the Cardiff Partnership for Initial Teacher Education. While not involved in the training of school teachers, Cardiff University has an education department staffed w...
Feb 07, 2020•Season 2Ep. 12
If you've been with us since the start, you may remember our second-ever episode, in which we sat in Emma's house and discussed coaching and mentoring. We were inspired by a talk by a colleague from another university, Jordan Allers, to chew over the different ways we can help novice teachers (as well as more experienced colleagues) to improve their practice. Well, now we can return to the discussion because the wonderful Jordan Allers has jumped ship and joined us here at Cardiff Met! We manage...
Jan 24, 2020•Season 2Ep. 11
Happy New Year / Blwyddyn Newydd Dda to you all! We've gone back on the road, battling through torrential rain to the town of Caerphilly, where we tracked down what can only be described as edu-twitter royalty! Yes, it's the mighty Impact Wales, aka Finola and Jane, who provide tailored support to schools. However, for those of us without a school budget to play with, Impact Wales are probably better known for filling Twitter with wonderful sketchnotes, each of them informed by a solid bed of re...
Jan 10, 2020•Season 2Ep. 10
Merry Christmas from us both! For your festive pleasure, we present the 12 days of Christmas in the form of 12 items drawn from our regular topics of 'wellbeing', 'something interesting' and 'something to try' - four of each. It's a slightly more wholesome Christmas special than last year, but hopefully there's something in here for everyone, from substantial academic text recommendations to wellbeing tips and a vintage Tom item in the form of 'the bus factor'. Please do rate and review us if yo...
Dec 27, 2019•Season 2Ep. 9
For our final episode of the Christmas term, we welcome an award-winning researcher to our humble studio! Bethan Rowlands joined Cardiff Met from our friends at the University of South Wales at the start of this year, and promptly won a BERA award for a poster presentation on raising awareness fo dyscalculia. Dyscalculia is, as Bethan describes it, dyslexia with numbers, and is very much the poor relation of the much better-known condition of dyslexia. Bethan explains to us the personal journey ...
Dec 13, 2019•Season 2Ep. 8
We’re looking at literacy again today, and particularly what seems to be a perennial problem: the engagement of boys with reading. Our guest is Paul Warren, a former primary headteacher who now advises schools across a wide area of south Wales, and who is in the final stages of a PhD investigating this very area. His approach is to use comics to engage young pupils with stories, and he’s got plenty of interesting things to tell us about his findings, as well as about how rewarding it is to find ...
Nov 29, 2019•Season 2Ep. 7
We're back on the road, and have finally got some pupils on the podcast! For this episode, recorded back in July (hence the frequent references to the summer holidays, now a distant memory), we popped down the road to Eastern High School in Cardiff, taking over a room in their shiny new building to interview four special guests. Georgina Saunders was mentioned in one of the regular slots back in season 1, and now gets the chance to appear in person to tell us about how she pulled off the impress...
Nov 15, 2019•Season 2Ep. 6
Teachers should always practise what they preach, and we firmly believe that the holidays are a great opportunity to do just that! So we want everyone to make time for a break from whatever they do in the hard-working world of education. In true teacher style, we've provided you with a resource to assist! It's a small but perfectly-formed episode following the 'blogs, tweets and stories' format that was so successful in the Easter break last year, and we'd like you to listen while doing somethin...
Nov 01, 2019•Season 2Ep. 5
We've got a very special treat for you this episode - an exclusive half hour interview with none other than Professor Graham Donaldson, author of the Successful Futures report in 2015 that made 68 recommendations for reform of the education system in Wales. His name is used as a shorthand for the new curriculum that was finally published in draft in the summer of 2019, and somehow, we're still not sure how, we managed to grab an extended interview with the man himself. In it, we discuss how the ...
Oct 18, 2019•Season 2Ep. 4
Today we're joined by primary specialist Sian Davies-Barnes to consider a recent report by the Education Endowment Foundation entitled Improving Behaviour in Schools . We love the EEF because they crunch a lot of research, make it clear and accessible and give us several points of entry depending on how busy we are! This episode is particularly aimed at our student teachers who are just starting their first placements as it goes out, but is equally useful for early career teachers, or anyone loo...
Oct 04, 2019•Season 2Ep. 3
It's episode 2, and Dr Judith Kneen is still with us for the second half of this double-bill. We're discussing our ongoing research into how to combine subject disciplines in the expressive arts (though plenty of this will be relevant for those working in other subject areas too). In season 1 episode 5 we described how we jumped in with both feet, trying out some bright ideas with our students with mixed success, and came away with the strong impression that we needed to do some reading. Fast-fo...
Sep 20, 2019•Season 2Ep. 2
We're back! It's season 2, and we've decided that the best way to get over the fear of dusting off the microphones and recording a new episode is to call upon the ever-reassuring Dr. Judith Kneen, who is now approaching the status of regular guest and national podcast treasure. Judith has stopped by to discuss her recent research into how primary and secondary schools are faring with their work to pioneer the new curriculum for Wales, and especially the expressive arts Area of Learning and Exper...
Sep 06, 2019•Season 2Ep. 1
We're coming back to your podcast feed very soon! Emma and Tom's PGCE Podcast will return for Season 2 on Friday 6th September. We'll have all the deep discussions about teaching that you need to see you through your Friday commute or the weekend, plus regular tips for wellbeing, things to try and pointers to interesting things we've read, heard or watched. If you haven't subscribed already, you can catch us wherever you get your podcasts. Please rate, review and tell your friends. See you soon!...
Aug 23, 2019
Emma and Tom are here to interrupt your summer holiday downtime with a public service announcement: there will definitely be a season 2 of Emma and Tom's PGCE Podcast! In the meantime, they've dusted off the microphones to bring you a quick reflection on season 1, some favourite moments from the series, and to look forward to what's coming up in season 2. We'll be back with episode 1 of the new season on Friday 6th September, so make a date to download, listen and enjoy. And if you haven't subsc...
Aug 02, 2019
It's the end of the road for the 2018-19 PGCE cohort here at Cardiff Met, and that means it's time to put our last PGCE podcast episode out into the world. It's episode 21 and we've somehow managed to send our ramblings out into the world every fortnight since the start of September! For our final episode we're back out on the road, visiting Katy Edwards and Sarah Cason, Headteacher and Deputy Head of Palmerston Primary School in Barry. Their passion is tackling the thorny problem of teacher wor...
Jun 14, 2019•Season 1Ep. 21
We’ve reached episode 20 of the podcast with a certain amount of amazement that we’re still here! After the excitement of episode 19, we’re back in Emma’s office to chat to our friends and colleagues from Teach First Cymru. Dr Julia Jenkins and Rhian Davies-Jones (Damehood surely just a matter of time) have popped in to talk about one of the strategies that underpins the Teach First philosophy: deliberate practice. What is it? What isn’t it? And why would you want to run bits of lessons in a roo...
May 31, 2019•Season 1Ep. 20
