Education Bookcast
206 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 months ago - ★★★★★ - 35 ratingsEducation Bookcast is a podcast principally for teachers and parents who would like to know more about education. We cover one education-related book or article each episode, going over the key points, placing it in context, and making connections with other ideas, topics, and authors.
Topics include psychology, philosophy, history, and economics of education; pedagogy and teaching methods; neurology and cognitive science; and schools and school systems in historical and international perspective.
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Episodes
46. Self Compassion by Kristin Neff
September 22, 2017 07:52 - 1 hour - 60.2 MBWe've seen in the previous episode how trying to increase one's self-esteem is a dangerous proposition, and how having high self-esteem is not necessarily a good thing. Now it's time to look at another approach to the self which is a lot more promising. Self-compassion is an idea taken originally from traditional buddhist psychology, but now studied fairly extensively with the scientific method. In a word, it's being nice to yourself. It is trying to be your own "best friend" by thinking a...
45. The problem with self-esteem
September 20, 2017 19:32 - 54 minutes - 49.6 MBSelf-esteem is a psychological concept that has penetrated everyday language. In many Western countries, it is generally understood that high self-esteem is essential to health, happiness, and success. Is this really the case? And how did this idea spread? So much was the excitement about self-esteem in the early 90's that the California state legislature set up a Task Force to Promote Self Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, with an annual budget of over $700,000. All it took w...
44. History as citizen-building
September 20, 2017 18:31 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBI spent a month in summer in Lithuania on a language course. Some events while I was there prompted me to realise something about education that I had heard before, but never quite understood. The music played in this episode is Lietuvos istorijos repas by Šventinis bunkuchenas. Enjoy the episode.
43. Night School [on sleep] by Richard Wiseman
June 25, 2017 21:21 - 1 hour - 36.8 MBIt reduces productivity, prevents learning, reduces effective IQ, disrupts relationships, undermines creative thinking, and saps self-control. It increases the risk of depression, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and ADHD. What is it? Lack of sleep. Sleep is essential for learning. We spend around a third of our lives in this state, and yet we take up much less than one third of our time thinking about how to make it better. In Night School, not only can we learn a...
42. Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Sir Ken Robinson
May 05, 2017 10:37 - 1 hour - 45.8 MBSir Ken Robinson's TED talk Do Schools Kill Creativity is the most popular TED talk ever given, with just under 45 million views at the time of my writing this. It is so influential that Robinson has a page on his website devoted to feedback forms about how the talk changed people's lives. It is also nonsense. And yet, somehow, I was also convinced by it when I first heard it. The weakness of Robinson's arguments combined with the powerful effect he seems to have on people are testament to...
41. What Reading Does for the Mind
April 13, 2017 11:12 - 1 hour - 36.9 MBI thought it was about time to cover something about books on this book-related podcast! Keith Stanovich and Annie Cunningham are two researchers who have spent their careers working together to understand the effects of reading on knowledge. Their research aims to answer a few questions in particular: 1. How much does reading matter in increasing people's knowledge? Is amount of reading irrelevant, since amount of information absorbed depends so much more strongly on innate intelligence...
40. ADHD Does Not Exist by Richard Saul
April 08, 2017 19:23 - 37 minutes - 17.2 MB11% of children and 4% of adults in the US are said to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Dr Richard Saul has been a specialist in attention and learning problems in children and adults since the 1970's. He says that there is no such thing as ADHD. What, then, are all these children and adults suffering from? Dr Saul answers this question very thoroughly. It could be any of the following: Vision problems Sleep disturbance Substance abuse Mood disorders (bipolar...
39b. The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett [continued]
April 08, 2017 11:02 - 1 hour - 33.6 MBThis continues the episode about The Geography of Thought, looking at more ways in which the cultural differences manifest themselves in differing psychologies of people from different parts of the world. Themes include: Visual perception; Descriptions and understandings of the self; Attitudes to choice; "Fitting in" versus uniqueness; Attitudes to the law and contractual agreements; Factors affecting motivation; Preference for different types of reasoning; and Approaches to b...
39a. The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett
March 05, 2017 16:42 - 1 hour - 34.6 MBUnlike many books that I cover, this is one that I read recently and felt an urgent need to share its contents even before I got to the appropriate theme in a series of episodes. It hit me right where it hurts - in my fundamental assumptions about human nature. As I research the field of education and produce this podcast, I have been generally assuming that people are more or less the same everywhere in their fundamental modes of thinking and feeling. I presumed that the topic of motivati...
38. Uncle Staś' advice column [RTTP, homeschooling, and the dangers of social media]
February 19, 2017 00:28 - 1 hour - 29 MBI've received a lot of messages from listeners (as well as from an author!) in the past few days. Several of these messages are things that I would like to share, and there are two in particular that I would like to talk about since I imagine there may be many listeners who have the same questions. Firstly, I talk about my interactions with the folks at Reacting to the Past, and in particular with Mark Carnes, who emailed me within a day of the release of the episode about his book (Minds ...
37. A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
February 19, 2017 00:26 - 54 minutes - 24.7 MBThe words "theory" and "fun" in such close proximity may make you suspicious. Or, they may make you curious. "Fun" is one of those ideas that is so natural and intuitive, and yet for that very reason is so hard to pin down. Raph Koster has a somewhat peculiar view of what fun is: "Fun is just another word for learning." As the head of Sony Online Entertainment, I'm inclined to believe him. If fun is learning, how do we ensure everyone in education gets more of it - and the right kind? Th...
36. What is fun? What is play? What is a game?
February 17, 2017 21:57 - 52 minutes - 23.9 MBIn recent episodes, we have been discussing games and play, and their relevance to education, as well as to an improved understanding of human psychology. In this episode, I approach some central questions of the field: What is a game? What is a toy? What is play? What is fun? It is by their very naturalness that play, fun, and games are hard to define. We can sense what they are, and that's exactly what makes them hard to put them into words. Jesse Schell surveys the literature and puts t...
35b. Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes
February 17, 2017 08:12 - 1 hour - 33.8 MBThis is a continuation of the episode on Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes. The main idea of this part of the episode is the effects that Reacting to the Past, and role-play in general, have on the "self", i.e. the psychological construct of our selves. Enjoy the episode.
35a. Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes
February 16, 2017 11:48 - 1 hour - 39.9 MBLast episode, we looked at the various ways in which games can both improve our theoretical understanding of human psychology and of learning, and also at how they can be used practically to improve people's lives. In this episode, I want to discuss a particular practical application of games, and that is in so-called Reacting to the Past. Reacting to the Past is a type of live role-playing game where each participant plays a character from a particular historical time and place. For examp...
34b. Which is broken: reality, or Jane McGonigal's mind?
January 02, 2017 14:27 - 1 hour - 41.3 MBThis episode serves two purposes. On the one hand, I want to go over some more ideas from Jane McGonigal's book, as it is so rich in fresh and original ideas (they're fresh to me, anyway). On the other hand, I would like to go through a pointed criticism of the book entitled Jane McGonigal's Mind is Broken written by Edward Champion. Given how much I got from her book, I am surprised that there are people who are so strongly against it. I think it is good to go through it in the name of ba...
34a. Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal
January 02, 2017 14:01 - 1 hour - 42 MBJane McGonigal is a game designer who believes that, in many ways, games bring out the best in people. The reason for their popularity, she claims, is that they satisfy fundamental human needs. This leads, for example, to the highly insightful and completely counterintuitive notion that a big reason for people playing games is that it makes them feel productive. She peppers her book with reality "fixes" - comparisons of games with reality, where games come out on top, and lead the way to a...
33. Interview with Malke Rosenfeld of Math in your Feet
January 02, 2017 12:33 - 59 minutes - 27.2 MBMalke Rosenfeld is the creator of Math in your Feet, a program to teach students mathematical concepts through the medium of dance. (Really!) She does school workshops and teacher trainings, and now has a new book, Math on the Move, describing her approach and the theory behind it. We talk about interdisciplinary learning, embodied learning, liking vs. hating maths, and attitudes to "alternative" teaching methods. Malke herself, like many people, never really "got" maths while she was at s...
32. The Visual Edge by Sargy Letuchy [interview]
January 02, 2017 12:06 - 53 minutes - 24.7 MBToday we have an interview with Sargy Letuchy, a public school teacher from Chicago, who has produced some materials to help other teachers with standards-based learning. The Visual Edge is a workbook of graphic organisers for K-12 teachers in the United States. Along the way, we also discuss some other pertinent education topics. Enjoy the episode.
31+. How I learn languages
January 02, 2017 11:56 - 1 hour - 34.4 MBDepending on what counts as knowing a language, I speak anything between 7 and 12 languages, namely: English, Polish, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, and Persian well; Hungarian to a lesser extent; and Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian, and Tibetan in the past, now mostly forgotten. Besides this, I have some knowledge of classical languages (Latin, classical Chinese, and ancient Greek); one constructed language (Esperanto); and there are a couple more languages that I've had a...
31. Lessons learned from 50 years of language teaching at the Foreign Service Institute
December 20, 2016 19:51 - 1 hour - 35 MBIn this episode, I review a paper from the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) about language learning and teaching. The key insights are eleven: Mature adults can learn a foreign language well enough through intensive language study to do things in the language (almost) as well as native speakers. "Language-learning aptitude" varies among individuals and affects their classroom learning success (but at least some aspects of aptitude can be learned). There is no "one right way" to teach (or...
30. Cultural Learnings of America for make benefit glorious podcast of Education Bookcast
December 20, 2016 19:18 - 1 hour - 45.5 MBI wanted to share some things I learned from my trip to the US this summer, and what my own experience of running maths circles has been like so far. This episode includes: Discussion of the Summer Math Circle Institute; Tips and techniques learned from the Institute; My own experiences of running maths circles; Potatoes with added sugar; What you should and shouldn't assume about students; Why Math Circles (sometimes) work; Why Bloom's Taxonomy is upside-down; and The role ...
29+. Interview with Robert Kaplan of The Math Circle
November 12, 2016 11:58 - 44 minutes - 20.3 MBInterview with Robert Kaplan, co-author of Out of the Labyrinth (the book we looked at in the previous episode), co-founder of The Math Circle, and the man behind the Summer Math Circle Institute course (which I attended this summer). Robert Kaplan tells of his colourful background, his experiences starting and running The Math Circle, and the recent explosion of interest and growth in maths circles in the favelas of Brazil. Enjoy the episode.
29. Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free by Robert & Ellen Kaplan
November 12, 2016 11:30 - 1 hour - 31.7 MBThis is a book that I have more of a connection with than many of the others I cover on the podcast. I first bought a book by these authors when I was 17, and didn't read it until literally ten years later. It was a fascinating recreational maths book. I then discovered that they were involved in alternative maths education, and that they had even set up an organisation for this called The Math Circle. This book relates their experiences of running Math Circles, their philosophy and approach...
28. Why do kids give stupid answers to simple maths questions?
October 26, 2016 10:32 - 1 hour - 30.2 MBHave a go at some of these: An athlete's best time to run a mile is 4 minutes and 10 seconds. How long would it take him to run 5 miles? It takes one orchestra one hour to play a symphony. How long would it take two orchestras to play a symphony? On a ship, there are 13 goats and 12 sheep. How old is the captain? Among schoolchildren, the most common answers to these questions are: 20 minutes and 50 seconds; half an hour; and 25 years old. Hence the title: where are these thoughtle...
27+. Interview with Dr Amanda Serenevy
October 24, 2016 09:23 - 41 minutes - 18.8 MBDr Amanda Serenevy is a mathematician and mathematics educator, focussing on outreach through the medium of Math Circles, and on teacher training. This episode appears as number "27+" because the previous episode, Consider the Circle, was about how Amanda rescued a young girl from a terrible time with maths at school. She is the founder and director of Riverbend Community Math Centre in South Bend, Indiana, which works to improve mathematics education within the local community. She runs ...
27. Consider the Circle by Eliza Vanett
October 24, 2016 08:55 - 15 minutes - 7.2 MBA very short episode about an article written by a young girl concerning her experiences with maths. At school, she is faced daily with the same worksheet, always refusing to do it. Her teachers continue to give her the sheet every day for months, keeping her out of the normal classroom. She becomes resentful and angry at maths and at school, and continues her protest of inaction. When she discovers Math Circles, a different approach to maths education, then she stops feeling neglected a...
26. A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart
September 05, 2016 12:05 - 2 hours - 63.8 MBWhat do you think of mathematics? Is it: a sterile tool for accounting? boring, mindless, and annoying stuff your teacher makes you do? an anarchic, psychedelic adventure? If you answered 1., mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart vehemently disagrees with you. If you answered 2., then Lockhart understands your plight. If you answered 3., then you really know what maths is. A Mathematician's Lament is a short book all about misconceptions, and how the system propagates them into an ...
25. Chess, gender, and intelligence
August 29, 2016 17:30 - 37 minutes - 17.3 MBOver the past century, women have been gaining rights and prejudice against women has declined. Although many would argue that there's still a way to go, the progress is undeniable. Why, then, do men still outperform women in a number of intellectual domains? In this episode, we look at several articles that try to answer this question for one cognitive domain in particular: chess. Chess is a good domain to test for a number of reasons: There is little subjectivity or ambiguity in decidin...
24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
August 15, 2016 21:11 - 1 hour - 49.6 MBI write a little blurb like this for every episode, but I feel that some books hardly need any introduction. This is one such example. Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most celebrated journalists and writers of the early 21st century, and his book Outliers caused a splash in people's thinking about success. Why? One answer is that it popularised the idea of the so-called "10,000 hour rule", initially discovered by K. Anders Ericsson, concerning how much "deliberate practice" it takes to beco...
23. So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport
July 30, 2016 21:20 - 1 hour - 44.3 MB"Follow your passion" is bad advice. It seems an almost blasphemous thing to say. And yet in this book, Cal Newport argues that it is, indeed, generally a bad idea to try to base a career on a pre-existing passion. Firstly, as blunt and uninspiring as it may sound, most people don't *have* a passion to begin with. Hence the need to "find yourself" or figure out what you want to do with your life. People who do have a passion are usually passionate about something that can't provide them ...
22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
July 18, 2016 12:42 - 1 hour - 35.5 MBWith The Talent Code, we have another perspective on the development of expertise. Daniel Coyle looks at "talent hotbeds" in music, sport, and academics in order to piece together a theory of how people get good at things. In the process, he discovers different types of teachers, necessary for different stages in the process of achieving mastery.
21. The Defining Decade by Meg Jay
July 04, 2016 17:49 - 1 hour - 37 MBIn Genius Explained, we saw how people considered "geniuses" build up their skills over many years prior to their production of great works. Although this training usually happens in childhood and adolescence, we saw at least one case - that of George Stephenson - where the key knowledge and expertise were built up in early adulthood. This prompts me to cover a book about adult development to supplement our series on expertise. Meg Jay writes not just about adolescents, but directly for th...
20b. Genius Explained [bringing up geniuses, genius writers, and the fallacies of talent] by Michael Howe
June 20, 2016 20:14 - 1 hour - 39.6 MBLast episode, we got to see the lives of three exceptional individuals in depth: Charles Darwin, George Stephenson, and Michael Faraday. In today's episode, we take a look at how people have tried to bring up children to be prodigies, and to what extent they succeeded. We also look at genius writers so as to get a view of a more "artistic" kind of high achievement. Finally, Michael Howe explains explicitly why he thinks that the idea of inborn talent being necessary for genius doesn't have a...
20a. Genius Explained [Darwin, Stephenson & Faraday] by Michael Howe
June 06, 2016 21:16 - 1 hour - 36.6 MBIn Genius Explained, Michael Howe takes us through biographies of many people with great achievements, who we might consider to be "geniuses". It is an investigation into what makes geniuses so great, chiefly through looking at their upbringing. I'll refrain from sharing his conclusions in this brief description to keep up the suspense :). In this first part, we will look at Charles Darwin, George Stephenson, and Michael Faraday in depth.
19b. Seven Myths about Education [myths 4-7] by Daisy Christodoulou
May 23, 2016 09:38 - 56 minutes - 25.9 MBA continuation of last week's episode about Daisy Christodoulou's book.
19a. Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Chirstodoulou
May 16, 2016 13:30 - 1 hour - 40.3 MBThis should be a controversial episode! I cover this book in the interests of looking at the cognitive science it refers to. However, this is also the sort of book that tries to undermine, or even overthrow, what might be interpreted as a failing ideology among many educators. It is therefore not possible for me to talk about it without at least paying some heed to a long-standing debate in education circles: progressivism versus traditionalism. Progressivism is hard to pin down exactly,...
18. Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice by Matthew Syed
May 09, 2016 22:38 - 1 hour - 42.8 MBWe are now moving on to a series of episodes answering the question: How do people get good at things? In Bounce, Commonwealth champion and Olympian table-tennis player Matthew Syed shares his research into this topic.
17. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
May 02, 2016 10:43 - 42 minutes - 19.6 MBThe funny thing about Malcolm Gladwell is that everyone seems to enjoy reading him, but few remember many details of what he actually wrote. I had a conversation with a parent of one of my students not long ago about the overestimation of the importance of IQ, referencing some studies done by Lewis Terman. She listened with rapt attention and deep in thought. The information seemed new, original, and surprising to her. I mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in his book Outliers, ...
16. Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney
April 25, 2016 12:26 - 1 hour - 34.7 MBA natural continuation from last week. Habit formation, and breaking habits, takes willpower. So how does willpower work? Like a muscle. Willpower gets tired. You have a limited "store" of it, and it gets drained over the course of a day. So, if you had a stressful day at work, then you are much more likely to cave in and have that chocolate cake / cigarette. (Sound familiar?) Willpower gets stronger with use. People who adopt strict exercise regimes, for example, start eating healthier, ...
15. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
April 18, 2016 09:34 - 1 hour - 44.4 MBUp till now, we've had several episodes looking at the question of "why do people do what they do?". Most recently, we asked and answered that question from the perspective of persuasion, in a sense addressing the sub-question "why are people persuaded to do what they do?". Now we get a chance to look at it with the lens of habit: "why do people do the same things so often? How do these habits form? And how can we get rid of them?" In case you think that habit is unimportant, my first prior...
14. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
April 11, 2016 13:05 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBSo far in the podcast, among other things, we've looked at the topic of motivation. In the last few episodes, we've also started to look at human irrationalities and their consequences. In this episode, we look at a topic that combines "why people do things" with human irrationality: persuasion. Robert Cialdini spent most of his working life searching for the answer to one question: what is it that persuades people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do? In this classic book, Cialdini...
13. The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen
April 04, 2016 13:18 - 1 hour - 31.9 MBLast week, we saw the destructive effects of a psychological phenomenon not many people would have heard of known as "stereotype threat". This week, we look at some ways of mitigating the effects of stereotype threat. How can we stop children and students from stereotyped groups from underperforming in exams because of their knowledge of their own backgrounds? David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen summarise the results of recent research showing that a technique called "self-affirmation" can be u...
12. "Picture yourself as a stereotypical male" by Michelle Goffreda
March 28, 2016 17:29 - 1 hour - 32.4 MBEthnic minorities and women are disadvantaged enough as it is. When considering why members of some ethnic groups tend to do badly in school, and why girls tend to do worse than boys in mathematics, people present all kinds of arguments, including economic, cultural, and sometimes even (very controversially) genetic reasons. A contributing factor that one seldom hears about is the pernicious psychological effect known as stereotype threat. Stereotype threat describes the unconscious tendenc...
11. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
March 21, 2016 17:55 - 1 hour - 42.1 MBA classic book on people's irrationalities. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and cognitive scientist. Together with his late research partner Amos Tversky, he co-founded the field of cognitive heuristics and biases in psychology, and that of behavioural economics. This all stems from his investigations into the irrationalities of human thought. In this book, he explains his findings from a lifetime of research. NOTES In the introduction to the episode, I mentio...
10. Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
March 14, 2016 08:31 - 1 hour - 36.7 MBWhat's the best kind of experience you have? When do you feel happiest? Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced me-HIGH CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH) shows us that the conditions for optimal experience are also those of when we have our greatest learning. Flow, a psychology term coined by the author, refers to the feeling of utter concentration and complete absorption in what one is doing, when it feels as though the world has melted away and all that there is is this moment. Rock climbers often experien...
9. The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey
March 07, 2016 15:35 - 53 minutes - 24.3 MBWriting in the 1970s, Timothy Gallwey comes eerily close in The Inner Game of Tennis to what modern cognitive scientists have discovered about the nature of the mind. He reminds me of medieval Buddhists whose descriptions of certain mental processes, particularly those to do with meditation, have been confirmed to be highly accurate by modern neuroscience*. Forty years isn't a thousand years, but it's still a long time in cognitive and brain sciences. Gallwey's basic point is that, when we ...
8. Goals Gone Wild: the Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting by Lisa Ordóñez et alii
February 29, 2016 19:18 - 56 minutes - 26 MBPsychological "urban myths" come in a few flavours. Some, such as the idea that high self-esteem leads to less violent behaviour, are so completely, hilariously, overwhelmingly, unambiguously wrong* that you'd be hard-pressed to make up something so deliciously ironic. Others, such as the idea of "motivating" people with contingent external rewards, are deeply flawed, though not utterly wrong under all circumstances**. Then there are the cases where the popular thinking may be more or less ...
7. The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life by Thomas Sterner
February 22, 2016 11:56 - 1 hour - 28.7 MBSo far, we have seen a several books with messages relating to the psychology of motivation, particularly to the conditions under which people have greater motivations to do difficult tasks (Drive, Punished by Rewards), as well as what kinds of attitudes lead to greater learning and improvement (Mindset). In The Practicing Mind, we get a look at the phenomenology of these conditions, i.e. what does it feel like to be intrinsically motivated and have a growth mindset? Thomas Sterner is a...
6. A Russian Teacher in America by Andrei Toom
February 15, 2016 14:06 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBFinally! An episode with the word "teacher" in the title. What kind of teacher is Andrei Toom? And what interesting comparisons does make between education in Soviet Russia and in the USA? Andrei Toom is a mathematician, and "teacher" here refers to his teaching of undergraduates. The fact that he self-identifies as a teacher should already strike many as strange. In the US, and to some extent in the UK as well, university research staff generally see undergraduate teaching as a burden ...
5b. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes (Parts 2&3) by Alfie Kohn
February 08, 2016 13:42 - 1 hour - 49.1 MBWell well, the grand finale. We've seen in the previous episode how laboratory studies have shown that extrinsic rewards lead to reduced motivation and lower-quality work, as well as a priori arguments for why it's a bad idea to incentivise behaviours with rewards. For those of you who are still unconvinced, I'm losing hope a bit since I've spent a total of about 3 hours so far over two episodes (last episode and episode 2) talking about why rewards are a really bad idea. Here goes my last c...