Today's discussion focuses on our perceptions, as teachers, of failure. When as a teacher we watch our lessons back on film where do we see failure and how do we respond? Reflecting on our own relationship with failure could be important in informing our practice in the classroom. For example our personal relationship with failure will inform how we respond to student failure and this in turn could hinder or facilitate student growth and learning. In this episode Dr Amber Simpson and Dr Alice An...
Jul 16, 2024•40 min•Season 12Ep. 14
How students and teachers navigate and prioritise different learning processes after encountering impasses during learning can be complex. Recognising that failure moments can be multifaceted, today's episode explores how classroom discourse reveals varied valued learning processes, such as problem-solving, preventing future issues, and developing troubleshooting skills. The research being discussed identifies five valued learning processes in debugging: resolving the immediate issue, preventing...
Jul 09, 2024•40 min•Season 12Ep. 13
How errors are handled in the classroom is an important aspect of teaching and has a variety of consequences for students' own dealing with errors, their learning and their performance. In classrooms with a negative error climate, students are more likely to experience fear of making mistakes and feel alienated from their teachers. Teachers' unsupportive behaviours, such as negative reactions to errors, may increase students' alienation. Unsupportive teacher behaviours may also indirectly contri...
Jul 01, 2024•33 min•Season 12Ep. 12
In order to learn from errors it is important that pupils regulate their emotions. The emotions that they feel when they make an error is underpinned by their Error Learning Orientation - whether they see errors as positive and an opportunity to learn or as a negative thing that brings shame. In this interview Rahel Schmid discusses her paper about emotions pupils feel when they make errors and how this may be linked to error learning orientation. This episode includes lots of great tips to help...
Jun 25, 2024•31 min•Season 12Ep. 11
This week find out how you can encourage students to persist with learning and engage with metacognitive strategies when they make mistakes. Dr Maria Tulis talks about her experiments that aimed to find a causal link between beliefs about errors, how these beliefs maintain motivation and how students then adapt their actions to effectively analyse and correct errors. In study two during learning students were given encouragement to persist and prompts about what action to take immediately after ...
Jun 18, 2024•37 min•Season 12Ep. 10
This is the 3rd episode in the failure series of podcasts this term. We are staying with the theme of feedback to errors this week. Professor Janet Metcalfe discusses her paper on learning from errors and in particular how one teacher uses an interactive approach, encouraging students to work out why they made an error rather than simply correcting them, and the impact it had on the students' learning. But as always there is discussion plenty of wide ranging discussion on this topic. If you wish...
Jun 11, 2024•37 min•Season 12Ep. 9
When students receive error feedback it usually causes a negative emotional response, this in turn can impact learning. If we could somehow elicit a positive emotional response to error feedback, research suggests that this will increase motivation, enhance the desire to continue on a learning task and promote the use of efficient metacognitive strategies. In today's podcast with Dr Annalisa Soncini we discuss how using a simple smiley in written error feedback can nuance the feedback so that th...
Jun 05, 2024•41 min•Season 12Ep. 8
Failure - a word that is taboo in education and yet is part and parcel of the learning experience. As teachers, dealing with errors in the classroom can fundamentally change so much of the learning experience. The beliefs teachers and students hold about failure and errors changes behaviour and can cause students to persist and grow or to avoid risk and challenge. This term Psychology in the Classroom will be exploring Failure with the help of researchers and the British Journal of Educational P...
May 28, 2024•38 min•Season 12Ep. 7
Exam season is now in full swing and we are all really trying to encourage students to move away from the comfortable passive revision strategies such as reading and highlighting notes and get them to engage in more retrieval practice with flashcards and mindmaps. This week I talk to psychology teacher, Jonny Wainman about how he teaches his students study skills, we cover a wide range of topics and if you want do dive a bit deeper into the different concepts he mentioned you can find much more ...
May 21, 2024•27 min•Season 12Ep. 6
My guest this week is Dr Michelle Tytherleigh author of Positive Education at all Levels: Learning to Flourish , and we are talking about how we can use positive psychology in the classroom to students to flourish. Martin Seligman asked two questions: In two words or less what do you want for your children? In two words or less what do most schools teach? To answer these questions so that the responses are not contradictory or incompatible Positive Education recognises the need to incorporate we...
May 14, 2024•29 min•Season 12Ep. 5
Dr Charl Emmerson is an Organisational Psychologist who has worked in schools and researches wellbeing in schools. In this interview we are discussing teacher wellbeing at both an individual level and an organisational level. WIth top tips of teachers and leadership on creating a supportive culture. In addition we discuss how SEND impacts teacher wellbeing Key papers/links: NASUWT study findings on pupil behaviour: https://edexec.co.uk/verbal-and-physical-pupil-abuse-skyrockets-in-the-past-year-...
May 07, 2024•35 min•Season 12Ep. 4
This week I am joined by Professor David Daley from Nottingham Trent University to talk about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADHD is something that most teachers will come across at some point and managing it well in the classroom can make a huge difference to outcomes for young people with ADHD. In this episode we cover the main psychological underpinnings of the disorder and how these manifest in the classroom as behaviour. David also offers some really useful tips on how to help yo...
Apr 30, 2024•44 min•Season 12Ep. 3
The teaching profession is in crisis and whilst it can be an extraordinarily rewarding and it is also an exhausting profession so self-care is essential. As a regular diary keeper I was curious to find out just how this might be helping my own wellbeing. Dr Lucy Kelly is an Associate Professor in Education in the School of Education whose main research interest is reflective practice as a positive tool for educator wellbeing, and she is Principal Investigator for the 'Reimagining the Diary' proj...
Apr 16, 2024•40 min•Season 12Ep. 1
In this episode Dr Hannah Wilkinson talks about her doctoral research which focused on re-evaluating teachers' use of test-taking practices from a psychological lens; unpicking how students appraised these types of communications and how it affects their engagement in the classroom. Essentially we will consider the messages that we, as teachers, give to students when we talk about exam preparation specifically and the different ways that students might interpret these communications and how, hop...
Mar 27, 2024•36 min•Season 11Ep. 11
In this episode, and as we fast approach exams, we look at how to help student manage their nerves. There are lots of strategies that can be employed but learning to sit comfortably with the uncomfortable feeling of exam anxiety can be challenging. This episode looks at one way we can help our students to learn to bring their thoughts and feelings under control using a technique stolen from sports psychology, but equally effective for high pressure exam performance situations: visualisation. It ...
Mar 26, 2024•12 min•Season 11Ep. 10
This week we look at why exam technique matters - the more working memory students can free up to write good answers, rather than figuring out what they need to do and how long they have got left, the better. This episode covers 5 things that students should practice to help make an exam go smoothly: Knowing the rubric Overall plan of attack Managing timing (including extra time) Breaking down the question Spotting traps If you want to know more about working memory and cognitive load there are ...
Mar 20, 2024•15 min•Season 11Ep. 10
Despite all our efforts to teach students to revise using effective methods they often revert back to less effective methods such as copying and reading and rereading notes. Why is this, when we have told them that these techniques are less effective in the long term? This week's episode looks at 4 common reasons why students revision fails: Planning Fallacy Illusion of Fluency Misinterpreted-effort hypothesis Failure to reflect The link to the episode about Roediger and Karpicke's research is h...
Mar 06, 2024•12 min•Season 11Ep. 9
This week the episode will be based around retrieval practice - a concept most of you will be familiar with, and if you aren't then do take a listen to this episode which delves into the research underpinning the concept. Many students when learning, make the error of being passive recipients of information, reading, listening, watching or copying. Whilst a few bits may stick, more information will stick if they actively reconstruct the information through some sort of recall activity. Today we ...
Feb 28, 2024•18 min•Season 11Ep. 8
You know that thing, you're listening to the radio and minding your own business and a song comes on the radio and memories flood back (possibly embarrassing teenage ones!). That song is a cue to unlocking your memory - all sorts of things can be cues - smells, images, letters, words. In an exam the main cues are going to be words - specifically those in the question. If we understand that cues help us remember and that they are important at the time of learning then we can ensure that when we l...
Feb 21, 2024•13 min•Season 11Ep. 7
This week we move from the practialities of starting and planning revision to the learning itself. The focus is on how we can help students to build learning so that it is retained in long term memory. Whilst there are lots of ways to approach this today's episode focused on 3 key concepts: Levels of processing, spacing and interleaving. I mentioned that there are several podcasts that delve into these concepts in more depth. Further information can be found here: Levels of processing: https://c...
Feb 14, 2024•14 min•Season 11Ep. 6
I would argue that good planning is an art or at the very least a skill that needs to learned and perfected and yet we often cut our planning teeth on a revision timetable just before we do exams. How many student's plans turn out to be too vague, over ambitious or too rigid? This week's episode explores this skill and how we can best encourage students to become effective planners: understanding what they need to get done, what the time frame is in which they need to do it and how best they can...
Feb 07, 2024•19 min•Season 11Ep. 5
What is it that motivates students to study? A few lucky people may genuinely enjoy the process of memorising facts and preparing for exams, but this is probably rare. For most people studying requires effort and despite the high stakes, the reward of good exam results (or fear of bad ones) in the distant future is not enough of a motivation when there are far more exciting and immediately rewarding things to do instead. So this week we consider how we can motivate students to engage in independ...
Jan 31, 2024•15 min•Season 11Ep. 4
In this second episode we explore why study habits may help students with independent study and how we as teachers can support students to build effective study habits. Behavioural change is really hard, as anyone who had already forgotten their new year's resolution, can attest to! There are a few key things that we can help students with if they want to build in independent learning to their schedule. We consider the role of homework in building habits, habit stacking, cueing habits and reduci...
Jan 24, 2024•19 min•Season 11Ep. 3
Inherent in our educational system is the expectation that students will study independently to achieve at the higher levels. Some students are lucky and hit on strategies that work, others flounder whilst motivated to do well they don't know how to learn. As educators why leave the effectiveness of independent study largely up to chance when we have a whole host of excellent tools at our disposal, we need to share them with our students in a strategic and coherent way to give students the confi...
Jan 17, 2024•16 min•Season 11Ep. 2
Welcome back to the new term of podcasts. We are starting off with an episode about wellbeing with Dr Ros McLellan from Cambridge University. We take a deep dive into exactly what wellbeing means and its impact on educational attainment. Rather than taking wellbeing as a homogenous concept this discussion considers the difference between eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing and how they have differing impacts on educational outcomes. You can find the original paper here: Tania Clarke, Ros McLellan &...
Jan 10, 2024•39 min•Season 11Ep. 1
In this second 'takeover' Niamh and Summer, from Bootham School, ask you to think about autism and some common misconceptions - which peice of research is real and which is fake. Test your understanding in this fun podcast.
Jan 01, 2024•5 min•Season 10Ep. 18
It's Christmas Takeover time and today's episode is hosted by Oliver Sherratt, a year 12 student at Abingdon school studying A level psychology. He delves into the intricate and fascinating world of psychology approaches. These six approaches will lay a base for your understanding of what we know psychology to be as well as igniting a flame within you which will spur you onwards to learn more about the great subject. Today's episode will be a brief and concise whistle stop tour and thus I encour...
Dec 28, 2023•5 min•Season 10Ep. 17
There are many things that make this time of year special, one of which is music - whether that is carols or corny Christmas songs, they can prompt memories and get us together to sing as a community in ways that we simply don't at any other time of year. But there is strong evidence to suggest that singing has physiological, psychological and social benefits and we should not just relegate community singing to Christmas. Today I am speaking to two psychologists who believe that schools can and ...
Dec 20, 2023•40 min•Season 10Ep. 16
We know that many neurodivergent young people such as those with ADHD or autism traits develop depression during adolescence – but we currently don't know which individuals are at risk, what underlying processes increase that risk or, perhaps most importantly, the best way to intervene to increase resilience to reduce that risk. RE-STAR aims to address this by exploring the interplay between autism and/or ADHD traits, exposure to environmental stressors, and emotional responding in neurodivergen...
Dec 13, 2023•39 min•Season 10Ep. 15
As we come to the end of a very long term a few of you might well be considering which lessons you might be able to put on a film. So to ensure that this is a justifiable educational tool Dr Sheila Thomas talks about her use of film in the classroom: how to make it a really valuable experience for the students and get them thinking more deeply and in a cross curricular way about films. To get Sheila's website and get hold of the list of films and how to use them you can follow this link: https:/...
Dec 06, 2023•36 min•Season 10Ep. 14
