Making the Most of ITT Lectures: The Saturday Breakfast Show with Darren Lester

0:00watching live or listening back to this show from teachers talk radio. You can catch up with all our shows by visiting our YouTube channel or by listening back at ttradio.org. Don't forget to like and subscribe to enjoy more live education conversation from TTR. We hope you enjoy this show. Good morning. It is Saturday 5th September 2026. This is the Saturday breakfast show here on Teachers Talk Radio. I am your host Darren Lester and this morning we are talking about making the most of initial teacher training lectures. We are talking about the importance of theory which is not a new topic for us on Saturday breakfast. We talk about theory quite a lot. I am hoping that the title won't put off those of you who have been in the profession for

1:05a while who are slightly removed from your ITT training. Because even though today's show is aimed at our new trainees, the cohorts who will have started their training this week. I think there will be something in it for everybody just as a reminder of why the theory of our job is important, why the actual pedagogical underpinnings of everything that we do is important. So that's what we are talking about today. We will get to that in just a few minutes. Before we do, I am going to ask the question that I ask every week because I think it's important to check in. How are you? How was your week been? My week has been good. It's been long. I must say it's been long. I can't not in a bad way especially, just in a case of, I can't believe it's only been seven days since we were last together and we were chatting about the holiday effect and

2:07the psychological impact of going back to work. That was last week's show. So if you missed that and you are now feeling a little bit rundown, I think being back to school for somewhere between two and four days, do go back and check that one out just to reassure yourself that it's completely normal. But yeah, in the week that has happened since, it's been long. And I can't even say that I've gone back to school because I never left. Because I like to mention all the time, I teach online, my school isn't online school, we don't have the traditional holiday structure. And so I kind of just kept working through the holiday, which I have been told off about by many people because it's bizarre how conditions you become to the routine of the school

3:10yeah. And I was talking about this with a colleague of mine who works in a different industry. We work together in a charitable capacity. And she is a former teacher, has kind of moved over to the university sector in this charitable capacity. And I was saying, I'm about to go into my third year now of teaching online and I still haven't got used to not having that routine of the brick and mortar school. And she was saying to me that she's been out of school teaching now for, I think she's had about 10 years and there's also not used to it. So it's quite scary, I think, how quickly we get used to and how dependent we become on that kind of routine of the school year, taking away some of the decisions for us.

4:18We know when our holidays are going to be because they are printed in our planners, we get no choice over them. We know what time the bell will ring to start our lessons and we know what time the bell will ring to end our lessons because it happens at the same time every single day. And then when your school decides to change at timings, it takes you quite a long time to get used to the new rhythm. That's happened to me, I think, twice and I did not enjoy that at all. I was confused for weeks on end. We get used to that kind of cognitive load, that kind of decision making, being taken away from us. So then when you transition out of it and suddenly you have to start thinking about, oh, I actually do need to take a break. It's very easy not to have that conversation with yourself, not to think about it. And yeah, find yourself in a place where it's been probably three years since you last

5:24had a holiday. But interestingly enough, kind of touching on some of the stuff we talked about last week and as I said before, don't feel like I need one, which is a testament to what those of you teaching in brick and mortar schools are continuing to go through and what I went through when I was teaching in one. There is a lot to be said for the exhaustion of the cognitive load that teachers carry, the hundreds of micro decisions that you are making or that we are all making on a daily basis, but that those of you who teach in person make more of because you have got bigger classes, because you have got behavior management issues that those of us in the online sector don't have to deal with because you have a kind of extra layer of safeguarding that those

6:32of us in the online space don't have to deal with because things just get automatically reported to our safeguarding lead at the touch of a button as opposed to having to go and seek them out and you know it's no less rigorous as safeguarding process. It is in my experience a bit more streamlined and just that removal of all of those micro decisions of the emotional labour that gets carried out in a brick and mortar school, it removes some of that exhaustion and then quite frankly there is the removal of the physical exhaustion, there is the fact that I sort of I have to sit down to teach these days so that I can be seen on my camera otherwise I am carrying my webcam around as if I am some kind of influencer taking perpetual selfies which nobody wants to see. So I am not up and getting hundreds

7:33of thousands of steps in every day because I am pacing around my classroom, I am not having to move between classrooms because I can just sit on my self down in the room that I am in right now, turn my computer on and my students then come to me which if you are somebody that has your own classroom and you don't need to move ever because nobody comes into use it and you don't have to go elsewhere to teach that's a micro what we are going to call it, micro exercise that you don't have to undertake but that some of your colleagues will and that will again add to their physical load of the day, there are all of these small things that add up together to create that end of term feeling, that end of term exhaustion which is why setting aside the debate about teacher in invertechomas holidays because we all know that we work through most of them, it's why those non-contact times are so

8:39required just to kind of get yourself back on an even keel. So if you are sitting there this morning being exhausted after just two days, three days, four days however long you have been back and you kind of put me on to chat on the background while you attempt to wake up on this Saturday morning, just know that that is normal and it is because of the myriad of things that you are having to do, a lot of them subconscious, a lot of them things that you don't even consider to be adding to your exhaustion but that absolutely are and that's why we need holidays, it's why we need to take a break, it's why we need to take weekends, it's why we need that refresher time. I wasn't planning on going on that little tangent, that's how you know that we are live here on Saturday breakfast is because I will

9:43just start chatting all kinds of rubbish before we actually get to the main topic of conversation. Yeah, considering I've not had that same shift back into work mentality, my week has felt very, very long. Some good things have happened, I've had a couple of additions to my timetable which very rarely get called a good thing I think in teaching but one of them ancient history is a subject that I have not taught for a very long time and so I'm kind of interested to get back into it to revisit the content, kind of do something a little bit different outside of my regular language teaching. Speaking of language teaching I've had English language added onto my timetable

10:44this year for A level which will be good, I love teaching A level English language, I said on on LinkedIn earlier this week it's the closest thing that we have in the UK to a pre-university level linguistics course and there are very few subjects that I think should be compulsory right up until 18, I think there are very few subjects that we should force our kids to do at A level but I do think English language is one of them because of that linguistics component that it has. In case you've never taught it, in case you've never studied it, English language at A level does what it says on the tin it teaches you about how English is constructed, it teaches you about how we use our language to inform, to persuade. You do a little bit of that GCSE, you learn how to do it GCSE, A level you learn how to analyse it and that is a huge benefit when it comes to

11:52media literacy, when it comes to understanding how newspapers, blogs, influencers, anybody basically with a platform is attempting to sway your opinion, is attempting to communicate with you because again, everything that we say, everything that we do when we are communicative is to attempt to get our thoughts out of our head and into somebody else's and quite often the reason that our thoughts are in our head is because we think they're right so a lot of communication is actually about persuasion, it's about argument, it's about trying to get other people to see things from our point of view and the way that we do that is through how we construct our language, the words that we choose, the way that we choose to piece those words together, the rhetorical devices that

12:53we use, the way we structure our argument, all of those things are designed to convince, persuade or at the very least to get our own points across. Languages evolved a long way from kind of the, some of the theories about why we evolved it to begin with, which was caveman saying, oh, look out there's a safe tooth tiger over there, it's very different now and we are more subjected to language than ever before, we're more subjected to different divisive opinions than ever before and I think it's really important that everybody, but especially our young people because they are impressionable because they are invincible, I think it's important that everybody is aware of our language works, why language does what it does so that they can spot these things,

13:55which is not to say that we are teaching people to look out for charlatans and snake oil salesman, because that's not the case, because like I said, everything is communication and all the communicative choices that we make, be they conscious, subconscious or unconscious, are all designed to do the same thing and that doesn't suggest it doesn't imply mal intent, it's just how language works, it's just how we talk to each other, it's just the reason that we communicate with each other, so studying English language doesn't teach you to be suspicious of everybody, it just teaches you to understand what is happening when people are trying to persuade you of something, to convince you of something, it teaches you how to take part in argument that sounds very plausible and spot any

14:58logical inconsistencies, it teaches you to spot speaker or writer biases that they may not have previously acknowledged, a media literacy is at an all time low, I very much admire media study teachers at the moment because I'm sure it must be a very difficult time getting them to get to our young people to understand how things are positioned, how camera choices are made for specific purposes and all that sort of thing, I'd never did media studies, when I was at school we could choose between media studies in German, so obviously I picked the other language I would regard as to what the choices were, if a language with one of them I would pick that, but yeah with our young people so exposed to so much media but not trained in how it's used,

16:00why it's used, what people are doing with it, they are very susceptible to being persuaded, they are very susceptible to being in the worst cases coerced and that's not what we want for them, it's a safeguarding issue and I think the more we teach our young people to understand how language is used to persuade to coerce to convince the better the world will be because the less likely they are to fall for things that on the surface seem like they're a great idea that if you do a little bit of digging are actually just people out to serve themselves at the expense of the wider population. Teachers have always played a vital role in shaping AQA qualifications, as assessment reform approaches, the questions being asked about the future of education matter more than ever

17:06and so do the voices helping to answer them, that's why AQA has launched the AQA teacher in-site programme over the next 12 months, the programme will bring together teachers views and experiences through research, engagement and AQA's partnership with Teacher TAP, building a comprehensive picture of classroom experience to help inform the future of qualifications, assessment and education, such AQA assessment reform and have your say today. This show is brought to you in partnership with Hashtit Learning, publishes a professional development books and resources that support great teaching and learning in schools around the world, level up your professional development today and visit hashtitlearning.com to explore the full range of titles. This is Teachers Talk Radio and this is Teachers Talk Radio News. TES Magazine says teachers weekly use of AI has doubled in the past year, but this is not led to

18:14a reduction in workload for most. According to a survey for the Better Education Technology Exhibition, only 35% of teachers say they work fewer hours as a result of AI. This is despite guidance from the Department for Education, which suggests AI could ease pressure. The survey also shows that since 2024, Teacher Enthusiasm for AI has decreased. A year ago, 68% of teachers said they expected to use AI more in the coming year. This year, it's down to 47%. As Pog's person for Bet said, teachers are using AI more than ever, but their enthusiasm for it is cooling. They tell us it saves them time on particular jobs, but more so, they aren't working fewer hours because something else fits it. The article also covers teacher fears about pupil use of AI and full details can be found online.

19:16The BBC says Scotland's University's face a funding gap of about £200 million a year after a new report says the gap could increase in the future. The picture is so bleak that total income is no longer enough to sustain core activities such as teaching and research. The report from funding gap analysis also highlights the increasing dependence on fee-paying international students to cross subsidise the tuition of Scottish undergraduates. Full-time undergraduates who live in study in Scotland do not pay tuition fees for their first degree, so the Scottish Government gives universities cash to cover the costs. The report says the amount they get is £288 million a year less than it costs to deliver the courses. A recent decline in international students has led to what the report calls immediate and severe consequences for the balance sheet. Full details can be found on BBC News, Scotland.

20:18Schools week report on the appointment of a former Whitehall official to the Church of England's Education Wing. Charlie Lang spent 20 years at the Department for Education, where he oversaw government spending free schools and send programmes. Mr Lang replaces Nigel Genders, who stepped down from the Church of England role earlier this year and took up a position as the Government's admissions watchdog. Mr Lang said, my prayer is that we will listen afresh to children and young people. At a moment when too many, particularly the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, are not experiencing life in all its fullness. The Church of England has more than 4,700 schools spanning 41 dioceses across England. Finally, the BBC covers a story on plans for primary one pupils in Scotland to be given a free school bag from next year. The Rucksacks pledged by the SNP will be made of recycled materials,

21:20have multiple pockets and contain school essentials such as pencil cases, water bottle and books. The plan is designed to cut costs for families and give children a good start to school. Critics have said chaos will arise from multiple children owning the same backpack, although the design does allow for personalisation. About 47,000 children are expected to receive the backpack next year. More details and reaction can be found online. This has been Teacher's Talk Radio News with Joe Fox. Thanks Joe. I'm not going to crow about the tied turning against AI. I promise. All I will say on the matter. Because I feel remiss if I don't say anything. Because if you've listened to the show before, you will know how anti-AI I am. I'm glad that we are seeing

22:24the tied turn. I'm glad that we are seeing teachers becoming more cognizant of the issues around AI, the fact that it's not delivering what it was promised. I hope that the tied continues to turn. We see the number of teachers using AI, reduce over and over until we send it right back to where it came from. We recognise that it was a fad that many of us fell for, but ultimately added nothing to our job and if anything made it more difficult. We are talking today about the talk component of initial teaching training. We're talking about the university component, but as I said at the top of the show in case you missed it, if you are a veteran teacher, I hope that there will be things in this show for you. Because what we're mostly going to talk about is the value of pedagogy

23:26and the value of that theoretical understanding. Even though today's show is aimed at those of you who have just started your training, because for reasons that we'll get to in just a second, I do hope there will be something in it for everybody. Speaking of those who have started their initial teach training, new friend of the show teacher fixer has messaged us a very good morning to you. I'm so glad that you came back to let us know how you got on. In case this is your first time at Sasse Breakfast or you've not been here for a while, teacher fixer has been a friend of the show for a few weeks now. He is stopping by leaving comments, which anybody who has listened to the show is welcome to do as a way of joining in the conversation. Last week we had a chat about how he was going to go into his first week of teacher training. I'm saying he based purely on

24:32the on your profile pictures, so forgive me for assuming gender there. We had a chat about what it's like to go into that first week. I'm really glad that you've come back to let us know how you got on. So, teacher fixer has said, I've had my first week in schools of training and I've been thrown into the trenches. I feel like I've been thrown into the trenches in ongoing war. Chaos, behavior issues, etc, etc. I feel shell shocked and my brain is clogged. Now, hear me out. I'm glad that you have said that. I have thought a few times sort of while I was planning this week's show about how you were getting on. I wondered how you were doing. And I kind of thought about what you might say if you came back to to Phyllisine, as you said, that you would. And my nightmare was that you would come back and say, I had a great week.

25:36Everything was fine. All of the kids behaved for me. It was a utopia. Because if you would come back and said that, I would have felt like either you were being dishonest or you were not self-aware enough to understand how the week had actually gone. It's a difficult job. And it's a culture shock, especially if you have been either in another industry or actually to be fair, even if you have gone straight through the education pipeline from university straight into the classroom, seeing it from the other side is a shock. And it is exhausting. And it is brain clogging. And everything that you are feeling right now, I would say are things that you are supposed to be feeling. We just don't talk about it very much. I mean, we do hear on Saturday breakfast.

26:38I don't shut up about how difficult the job can be and how important it is to safeguard your mental health. But generally, as part of the wider conversation, particularly when it comes to bringing people into the profession, because we know that there is a recruitment crisis. We know that there is a retention crisis. It's very easy to kind of rose tint what the experience is like to suggest that everything is going to be golden. And then when you walk into the classroom, or even to either teach for the first time or to observe, you feel like you're doing it wrong. Because nobody told you that it was supposed to be like this. I'm not saying that it should be like this. I'm not saying that this is the right thing for it to be. What I am saying is it's normal. So what I'm going to ask you to do, I'm going to give you some homework.

27:43I feel like we can be an extension of your training. Make sure that you take some time for yourself this weekend. Now that's going to be easier said than done, because I'm sure that you have got climbing to do for next week. You have probably a lot of marking to do. I don't know whether you've got reading to do or assignments to start writing or kind of what that side looks like, but you will have a lot to do. But the best habit that you can get into right now, right at the very beginning of your career, is to figure out what your outside of school work life looks like. There will be lots of teachers who tell you that they don't work outside of school. While I don't want to doubt them, I do. I think maybe we just have different opinions of what working outside of school looks like.

28:50For me, working outside of school is essentially doing anything outside of of directed hours. So if you are still sitting in your classroom marking up for a rock, I consider that to be working outside of school. Some people interpret it as just working outside of the school building. And so, you know, they will stay in school until 7 p.m. to get their marking done. They won't take their marking home and consider that to be not working outside of school. It swings and roundabouts. It's semantics. But you can start figuring out what that is going to look like for you to start safeguarding, protecting your own well-being right at the beginning of your teaching career. So are you going to be the teacher who doesn't work at all at weekends? Because there are some teachers that do that. There are teachers

29:53that do that very successfully. It means that you will spend your evenings working, probably quite late into the evening, to make sure that you can get everything done. But if you want to ring venture weekends, if you want to keep them protected, then you know, that's something that you can look at. Are you going to be the teacher that doesn't work if things? Maybe you've got kids of your own and you still want to be able to be there for bath time and bedtime and to read the story and to hear about their own school day. And that means that you need to leave your classroom at 4.30. In that case, you might work Saturdays or you might work, so lots of people choose to work Sundays, takes that day off from work Sunday. If it were me, quite honestly, I would work Saturday. I would tune in for Saturday breakfast at 9 o'clock to use that as a start to your day and then work through the rest of the day and then take off Sunday. Just because for me, it kind of

30:56makes more sense to take off a day at the end of the week rather than a the first day of the weekend. But again, that would depend on your family situation. For this, for your work-life balance, for protecting your well-being, lots of people give advice and lots of people will have opinions on the way that you choose to do it, but ultimately you need to figure out what is going to work best for you. I'm a massive hypocrite because in 19, I've just started year 19, I have never figured that out. And as I said at the top of the show, I basically work all of the time. So don't be like me. I'm an anti-example, but do think about what is going to work for you to make sure that you have that time, to make sure that you can unquag your brain, to make sure that you can kind of recover from

32:02your shell shock and be ready for what's coming next. Because while it's really easy to focus on the ongoing war, the chaos of the classroom, the poor behavior, and all of that sort of thing, there are also kids in those classrooms that need you to be at your best, that need you to be thinking clearly, that need you to have planned the lessons well, that need you to be on top of your game. And it's unfair to them if you don't practice that self-care to make sure that you can be there. So please, and there's nothing in your message that suggests that you are feeling particularly negatively about the time that you've had. It's just been a difficult

33:08first few days in the classroom and they always are. Please know it's not you, or it's not just you, and it's supposed to be this way. Oh, interesting. Okay, I'm a perfectionist. I think it's okay. Sorry, I had a slight outage there on my microphone. So I'm going to say that again, perfectionism is the enemy of teaching. I did a show on perfectionism back, I don't remember when, sometime in the spring term. And we talked about how perfectionism actually stops you from making progress. It is a proxy

34:15for doing a good job. Because what your perfectionist brain tells you is that you've got to keep working at something until it is in inverted commas perfect, because that's the only way that you can do a good job is if something goes perfectly, but actually, particularly in teaching, it will never be perfect because there are too many variables. You can sit for six hours and plan what you think is going to be the perfect power point and worksheet combination. But that's not going to take into account how the 32 kids, 32 individuals sitting in your classroom on that day are going to respond to that power point and that worksheet.

35:18It doesn't take into account how you are feeling on that day, whether you have the energy to get up and deliver that lesson in the way that you planned it. It doesn't take into account whether you actually remember what it is you would intended to do, because I've done that before, I've planned lessons a week, two weeks in advance, then I've come to look at my power points in light before and I think one earth was I talking about what was I intending this slide to be because I've forgotten. So there's all of that sort of thing. There's also the fact that we can kind of use perfectionism as an excuse and that's not what I'm saying you're doing right now, but I think it's a habit that we can fall into where we say, oh, well, if it's not going to be perfect, I'm not even going to try. And that's a very dangerous trap to fall into because it means you can come very complacent with

36:22your practice. It means that you teach one lesson that goes well and then you teach that exact same lesson every single year for the rest of your career, no matter how much pedagogies have changed, no matter how much new research has been conducted, no matter how much more we know about the brain, because you've told yourself that that was a perfect lesson. So you're right, perfectionism in teaching is a disadvantage because it doesn't exist and it can't exist. Also remember the thing that I bang on about particularly around results time, which is that you are at most responsible for 50% of this transaction. It's called teaching and learning. You do the teaching bit, you cannot learn for your students. You can facilitate the learning, but that's just teaching.

37:24You can give them everything that you think they will need, the revision guides, the monex, the copies of handouts, the extra homework, the blocks for counting, whatever it might be, you can give them all of that, that's still the teaching. They are responsible for the learning. Perfectionism will tell you that you are responsible for both and that is not true. It can't be true. If it could, or if yeah, if it could be true, then we would all only ever need to meet our students once. Because if we could learn for them, they would walk into our classroom, bathe in our aura of knowledge and walk out of the classroom knowing everything that we know, because we've already learned it. So keep in mind that you are half of this transaction, you're

38:31an important half, but you are only half. Your perfectionism can't control what the kids are going to do, how they're going to respond to an activity, how they're going to complete a lesson, how they're going to do a worksheet, but it will want to. And ultimately that is something that could take a toll on your well-being in general. I'm going to push back a little bit on this idea of I think I need to just manage it. And the reason that I'm going to push back on it is because that's how I spent about 15 years. Yes, you do need to manage it. You do. No one else is going to be able to manage it for you. You are ultimately responsible for your classroom. You are responsible for how you are feeling. There is a lot of control that you can take. But also, there is a lot of support out there.

39:39There's a lot of help. There should be a lot of help from within your school, from within your ITT provider, but failing that, there's a lot of help in the teaching community. Teachers, by and large, are very generous with our time, with our resources, with our support. We can be, particularly those of us who are kind of chronically online teachers. We can be a really strong source of community. And that community is really important. It's one of the reasons that I'm so glad that you came back this morning because I feel like here on Saturday Breakfast, we have a really nice community. We've got a really supportive community. We've got a really engaged community. And so talking about what you're going through, getting advice from other people, not worrying what

40:41other teachers are going to think of you, not worrying that someone's going to judge you because you had a lesson that went wrong. Was that that saying? The people who mind don't matter and the people who matter don't mind. So anybody who is going to judge you for having a more lesson, probably is probably not a person that you want to take advice from anyway. And those who will sit there and go, yep, I've been there. This is what I did. This is what I suggest you can do. They're the ones who you want to seek out. They're the ones who you want to listen to because they're the ones who understand the reality of the job that we're in. So yes, you do absolutely need to manage it, but you don't need to manage it on your own. Even if you find it difficult to find that community in the setting that you are in,

41:44you've got a community here at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning. And I say this about the show, but it's kind of true about any aspect of teaching. I'm very active over on LinkedIn. I'm very active, no, to be fair, I'm not very active on Blue Sky, but I can be. And I'm not saying that I'm the front of all knowledge. I'm not saying that I know everything, but I am saying that I'm willing to sit and listen and to offer advice if you ever want that or need that outside of this hour and a half on a Saturday morning, you can just get in touch and ask. And it doesn't need to be me. You can find anybody who is active in the online teaching space and just reach out and ask for some advice. Because by and large, at least the people that I spoke into are always willing to help. And worst case scenario, they just ignore your DM. And so you find somebody else and ask them.

42:52So yeah, thank you for coming back. I hope that something I've said there has been useful. And I hope that kind of the next 45 minutes of the show as we pivot into the topic will also be useful because it might signpost you to some different ways of thinking about and framing your experience. I will just pull up what Tim has said. Good morning to you. Tim is a long-term friend of the show. I've not made this introduction for a little while. So in case you mind you, Tim was actually my first guest way back when I started at TTR. He was also my second guest because that first week we had many technical difficulties. So we just did it again. So Tim has been here right since the beginning. He says, I may recover in perfectionist. It's amazing how many people who are drawn to working with children because Tim is not a teacher. Tim is a children's literature specialist and they write to four children and young people. And it is amazing how many people who are drawn to

43:57working with children are perfectionists. So I think it's something to do with being in the helping careers within the idea or with this idea that we can help to shape the next generation. But he's got some really good advice. Like Darren was saying, it's really good because basically he's reiterating what I said. So obviously it's going to be good. Like Darren was saying, you can't control every condition, consequence or outcome. I'm retraining my brain to learn rather than it focusing on being the best. Curiously striving is more satisfying. I love that. I love that idea of curiously striving because I think that frames it really nicely. We can't be perfect. And even if we were, wouldn't that be boring? Shouldn't we want to learn? Particularly as teachers, shouldn't we be interested, curious about our pedagogies, our subject,

45:00our young people, everything that we have in front of us? We've got so many different avenues for learning in our career. And if we were already perfect, we wouldn't need to take them up. And yes, that would make our job much easier. But we probably in turn wouldn't, we'd be really bored. Because I think if you go into teaching at any level, before any reason, what ultimately belies that is an interest in learning and interest in knowledge and interest in whatever subject you are teaching or whatever your specialism might be. And we have a perfect excuse just to kind of live in that little bubble of learning pedagogy, of learning about our subject forever, if we want to, if we just remain curious to it. So yeah, I like that idea of curiously

46:03striving. I think I have no designs on being a head teacher ever. But I think if I were going to be a head teacher and I needed a school motto, curiously striving might be what I would go for. So thank you Tim for giving us that this one in. Teachers have always played a vital role in shaping AQA qualifications. As assessment reformer approaches, the questions being asked about the future of education matter more than ever, and so do the voices helping to answer them. That's why AQA has launched the AQA Teacher Insight Program. Over the next 12 months, the program will bring together teachers' views and experiences through research, engagement and AQA's partnership with Teacher Tap, building a comprehensive picture of classroom experience to help inform the future of qualifications, assessment and education. Such AQA assessment reform and have your say today.

47:07This show is brought to you in partnership with Hashtag Learning, publishers of professional development books and resources that support great teaching and learning in schools around the world. Level up your professional development today and visit Hashtag Learning.com to explore the full range of titles. Another phrase that the teacher fixer might hear when talking to other teachers about his experience this week is all it's a baptism of fire. That's what you have to go through. You don't really learn anything about teaching until you are actually in front of a class. I'm pushing back on that this morning. I'm not going to dismiss it entirely because classroom based practice is really, really important. Getting to know what it's like to stand in front of the

48:10in front of your class to know what it is to face 34 teenagers who don't want to be there is incredibly important. But it's not the only thing that is important. Teaching as a profession really privileges lived experience. And you will hear that a lot again, particularly when you are sitting through insert. People will dismiss insert speakers because they will say that's not my experience. That's not what it's like in my classroom. Our world privileges lived experience. There's this idea that you can't talk on any topic unless you have lived it. I've seen that a lot in the online space just this week actually not from teachers but in the influencer space. There has been a lot of discussion.

49:13I won't be vague about it but I won't mention names because that's not fair. But there's been a little bit of controversy with a British influencer who has been talking about how they think MAGA is amazing and Donald Trump is the best president that the US has ever had. And this is not the place for us to discuss politics and I'm not going to. But essentially American influences were pushing back and saying well you don't live in the US so you can't speak on this matter. And while I do find it interesting that this particular influencer seems to have a more informed opinion of American politics than the politics going on in their own country. I also disagree that she cannot have an opinion at all because she doesn't live in the US. I think that her opinion particularly in something like politics shouldn't

50:21overshadow what people in the US are saying. I think as long as she is media literate to go back to what we were saying at the top of the show and is aware of whatever biases she might be consuming either positively or negatively and can then come to that conclusion she can have an opinion. Everybody can have an opinion on everything. The the privileging of lived the experience started in a really positive place. I'm thinking now about my own history as a performer. So before I went into teaching I acted I sang and one of the big discussions that used to be had in the performing space was about who could perform what roles. And particularly in the actors with disabilities community there was a big push against able-bodied actors playing disabled roles.

51:26And the idea behind that was that there were not enough actors with disabilities in the theatre on TV. They were being discriminated against in favor of able-bodied actors. And so the mentality kind of became let's allow actors with disabilities to play roles or to play characters with disabilities because then we're bringing them into that space. And that was a positive thing. It was the same with LGBTQ plus characters and roles. Let's have LGBTQ plus actors playing those roles because ironically enough in theatre there are not enough LGBTQ plus actors taking center stage. They are quite often pushed out for actors who present as heteronormative. The issue there

52:32became assumptions about people's sexuality and this idea that in order to play an LGBTQ plus character an actor had to come out. And then there became a lot there came and this also happened in the writing space. There came a lot of uncomfortable conversations about what people in the public eye owe to other people in order to privilege lived experience. But we've kept with this idea sort of in the broader world. We've kept with this idea that your lived experience is more important than theory because it feeds into the hyper individualization of our society. We live in the Western world. We live in a society where it is very important to be an individual, to stand on your own two feet, to make your own way in the world. That's the kind of

53:32message that we are fed over and over and over. And what that means is that we will privilege, and I will stop using that word in a minute, I promise, our own experience over that of other people. And again, to be clear, I'm not saying that our own experiences don't count. What I'm saying is that they are not more important than the experiences of other people. And this is the other thing that I think people misunderstand about theory and about the pedagogical reading that you will do in your lectures or that hope for the you did over in set. Theory is not one researcher's opinion of whatever the topic is that must be taken as fact,

54:33that must be taken as gospel. Theory is not the writer of the paper saying here's my lived experience, you have to adhere to it. And I do think that's how a lot of people interpret theory. What theory actually is, as long as the research has been done correctly, is a synthesis of lots of people's experience. And what the researcher has done is reached out to lots of different people or read lots of different papers or whatever the research might involve, synthesized all of that information in a way that then makes it easy for you to read. In theory, there's a whole conversation to be heard about the density of academic language and the accessibility of journals and publications and things like that. But the idea is that we are

55:42looking at a wide range of people's experiences. Yes, filtered through a writer or a team of writers, a researcher or a team of researchers, yes, filtered through whatever lens, whatever bias they might have, but bringing together lots of experiences and saying these are the commonalities or these are the differences. And so this is what you need to think about. And if I'm being very honest, I would feel very arrogant if I were to say my lived experience super seeds is more important than the lived experience of the 25 people who were interviewed for this piece of research. But that's just me. And this is, you know, acknowledging my bias, I am an educational researcher, I'm doing my doctorate, this is clearly something that is very important to me. You know, all of our shows are based around the education research here on a Saturday morning. This is something I think

56:45is very important. But this is also why I think that when you have your ITT lectures or when you have your research informed CPD, your research informed in set day, it's important to engage with it. It's important to take it seriously because it's not one research as opinion, it's not one research has lived experience presented as fact. And if it is, I mean, there are arguments for what we call autoethnography, kind of researching yourself and researching your own experience. And, you know, that's a whole discipline. And I'm not saying that there's no value there. But if there's not even any research, if there's not even any reflection, if the research that is being presented to you in your CPD is basically a blog post about this one lesson that this one

57:50teacher had, then yes, that's dismissible. Because that's one person's lived experience, which is equally valid to your own. But if you've got research that has 25 different people's lived experiences and that's all synthesized and that's all being presented to you and given to you, then, you know, that probably is worth listening to. And again, there's nothing wrong with autoethnography. There is nothing wrong with having a blog where you talk about your own day-to-day experiences. All of these things are valid. Always of transmitting knowledge are valid. But I think when we start to say that one is more important than the other, which, you know, is the crux of today's show, this idea that people will say that lived experience of the classroom is more important than the theory, that's when we start to go wrong. Because that's when we start

58:54to assume that nobody else's experience can match our own, that nobody else's experience has value or impact on what we can do. So the paper that's day show was built around and I'm going to apologize in advance because, you know, very famously, I don't speak Spanish. So quite why I decided I would go to a Spanish journal I don't know. I am thinking of doing my Spanish GCSE, though. Let me know if you think this is a good idea. I'm interestingly enough. I'm thinking of doing it as an autoethnographic piece of research. I'm thinking of teaching myself Spanish GCSE using a specific language teaching pedagogy and seeing how effective it is for me as a learner. I'd be interested if people think that that's a ridiculous idea. But yeah, this paper is from the journal RebiStar

1:00:02Complutense de Educafion and it's written by Juan Alejandro Enriquez, Hale and Perines Pedro, sort of Mayor Soloaga, and Maria Auxilia Dora, Odoñez JimiNes. And it's called Learning Transfer in Initial Teacher Education, a systematic review of evidence and key factors. So this is a study that pulls together a whole bunch of different papers that have been written. It uses what's called the Prisma method, which is essentially a methodology for analysing other papers. And all the papers that they gathered together ask the same question, which is basically, when a training teacher learns something at university, what actually determines whether or not that learning survives the journey into the classroom. And so for the next how we have time, half hour, we're going to kind of pull this apart to think

1:01:07about what the literature has to say about pedagogical training. And ultimately, my opinion, and again, this is my opinion, that good pedagogical training is not classroom experiences poor cousin. It's actually classroom experiences twin and both should be given equal import. So what the researchers essentially did was they sat down and they looked across four of the big educational research databases. So just in case you don't know, and because I'm all for giving people access to research, the databases are called WeblifScience, SCOPUS,

1:02:07that's SCOPUS, Eric, and Dionnet. And you probably use them in your undergraduate degree, or you know, if you have a master's, if you have a doctorate, you've used them there. But those are the big four that these researchers used. And they used what's called the Prisma 2020 guidelines. And that's a very rigorous, internationally recognized standard for conducting what's called a systematic literature review. And I think it's important for me to point that out, because again, sometimes if you've not been involved in research before and you are a teacher who consumes a lot of research, reads a lot of literature, but hasn't conducted any of your own, it can be really easy not to know how rigorous so many of these methodologies are. So it's not just the case of these researchers sat down in front of Google, other search engines are available,

1:03:10typed in, should we learn about pedagogy or not, and then wrote on the first 50 articles that came up in the AI overview. There is a whole bank of research itself into how to conduct these types of reviews so that they are rigorous so that they stand up to scrutiny. So that's the other reason that research is very important is because there is a lot of scrutiny, or there should be a lot of scrutiny. If you're doing it correctly, there's a lot of scrutiny, let's put it that way. So they searched these databases, they went through, they removed any duplicates because of course, sometimes you will get papers stored across different databases. They applied specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. So the papers needed to actually address this concept of learning transfer, they needed to be set in higher education in the ITT classroom and they needed to specifically

1:04:10concern initial pre-service teacher training instead of in service CPD. They arrived at a set of 14 empirical studies that were published between 2013 and 2023 across the world. Now that concerned me. I'm worried about the fact that they did this, they've done this massively systemic review, so it's very rigorous. It basically finds everything that is out there on this topic. And they found 14 papers. We need to do more research into the importance of research and pedagogical training for beginner teachers. And I do think that this is another way that our reliance and our privilege of lived experience actually constricts knowledge creation. Because if people are saying,

1:05:15oh, well, my lived experience is more important than my initial training, then no one's going to do the research into the initial training. And so we're never going to know whether the lived experience is more important. Because no one's interrogating it, no one's asking that question. Or well, 14 people are in those 10 years between 2013 and 2023 in a very important topic. Now they defined learning transfer because it's very important to find your terms. And to do this, they drew on work by Bloom, Ford, Baldwin and Huang. And essentially they said that transfer is the degree to which learning that is acquired in one context, such as in a university lecture theatre. But actually in a classroom, in an activity, out on a trip. And how that influences a person's response to a task or situation in another context.

1:06:15So how taking what you've learned at university transfers your time in the classroom. How taking what your year 11s have learned in their revision session in your classroom. And transferring it, applying it to what happens in the exam hall. Transference is a really interesting concept and it's a really important concept. I think we actually need to talk a lot more about that might be a show in the future. They used analysis software to code these studies and then they grouped what they found together into four thematic families. So essentially they came up with these four ideas to answer their question. And that's kind of what we're going to spend the rest of our time talking about because these four different families, I think, are incredibly important. The first family that they encountered

1:07:22is the differences between school and university. So a lot of the research that they read documents this gap that trainee teachers experience between the theory that they learn on campus and the reality that they meet in the classroom. One of the studies in the review was studied by a researcher called Chan draws on what is called boundary theory to describe this. So trainee teachers as people have to physically and metaphorically cross a boundary before but between their two different working domains between university and school. Now don't get me wrong because I understand that this is a point that's really easy to misinterpret. I'm not saying that training doesn't matter because there's a gap between training

1:08:24and practice because that's not what the research says at all but there is a gap between training and practice. What we can't do is decide which domain is wrong. It's very easy to say, oh well it's the training that's getting it wrong because it's the practice, it's the school, it's the actual job that is doing what you're being trained to do. But that then assumes that everything that we're doing in school is right. And I'm not sure that it can be if we've got our trainee teachers like teacher fixal telling us that it feels like I want to make sure that I quote this topic, it feels like you're being put into the trenches of an ongoing war because that's not healthy, that's not how a school should be. And maybe universities need to do more to prepare

1:09:28their trainees for that. Maybe there do need, there does need to be more lectures on behavior management on the current psychology of our gen alpha pupils. Maybe we do need more training in whether or not we should lock down toilets during less than time and all of the debates that we have. But clearly we're not getting it right in school because it continues to be a problem. And the only actual way that we're going to get it right is if we sit down and we have these conversations and we talk to each other and we still are findings and all look, that's research. Research isn't stuffing, research isn't removed from reality, research is answering real questions that we have such as how do we tackle this behavior crisis.

1:10:32The important thing is to make sure that we have teacher voices involved. So if you are a researcher researching how do we tackle the behavior crisis, sitting down and talking to teachers is going to be the first place that you go to so that you find out what other people are experiencing. Even if you're a teacher you still need to talk to other teachers to see if their experience is the same as yours. Then you talk to kids, then you talk to parents, then you talk to stakeholders, you talk to everybody and you synthesize that information and you use all of that to try and answer the question. Because that's what research is for. It exists to answer the questions that we have. The second family that the researchers found were elements that facilitate transfer and this is really helpful. So these are things that allow trainees to take what they've learned

1:11:37in the classroom, in the lecture theatre, into their own classrooms and actually do those things. Because if you have read a book on behavior management by whoever the current behavior experts are and you've understood everything that they've said that you have to do but you actually don't know how to do those things in your classroom then it's no good. So you need to be taught how to implement the theory that you are learning. The third family that they found is that there are lots of elements that hinder transfer. So there are lots of barriers that stop you from actually being able to do what you have learnt in the lecture theatre in the classroom. And then the fourth family are the key roles enhance that transfer. So the importance of school-based mentors because their influence according to this review can make or break the entire process.

1:12:45And again we hear that from lots of people's lived experiences. Lots of people will say I had a fantastic mentor during my teach training on my placements and they supported me and they helped me and I had a great year. Other people say oh when my mentor was very busy they didn't ever have time to meet with me. It was quite a negative experience and then won't follow through and go into the profession. The role of the mentor is incredibly important and hats off to all ITT mentors out there. What you do is amazing and please never underestimate the importance of your role because your role is essentially what hooks people into the profession and can really help to stem that tide against our retention issues. So let's focus on that first family, that gap between university and school,

1:13:51that gap between the theory and practice because I think if we've probably only got time to talk about a couple of them and this is probably the most important one. So several studies in this review describe a friction between theory and practice. Work by Sendoora, which was examining pre-service IT teachers, found that training teachers at your classroom practices tended to remain teacher centered rather than student centered despite the fact that their training emphasised a more progressive student centered approach and there was actually very little overlap between the beliefs that were taught to them at university and the practices that they put into use in this one particular study. Ding and Heffanon did a similar study that found that training teachers achieving only

1:14:53partial success in transferring specialized mathematical content knowledge into their classroom teaching struggled specifically to generate new examples or to generate reflective questions on the spots. And Herbert and Tunk's found that future teachers with limited prior exposure to specific intervention methodologies were unable to transfer their limited learning effectively into real intervention projects despite otherwise demonstrating very solid understandings of assessment and monitoring practice. So all of these issues where there is this disconnect between what pre-service teachers are learning in the university classroom and then what they're doing in their own classrooms

1:15:57isn't because the theory is wrong, isn't because the theory doesn't work, but it's because they're missing that step of how to apply that theory into practice. It's really easy, if we go back to this idea of teacher centered versus student centered, it's really easy to be a teacher centered teacher and I think that's why there is this gap because when you are learning to teach and when you feel like you're firefighting, you feel like you've been put into these trenches of an ongoing war. And if you're a little bit of a perfectionist as we've established many of us are, focusing on your own practice, focusing on your role in the teaching and learning partnership makes you feel like you've got some control. It makes you more confident

1:17:04because you were able to script your lesson, you are able to come up with examples that make sense to you and that you know really really well and you can work through and you can demonstrate. And it's really easy and I know because I did this in my early career to end up lecturing at your young people instead of teaching them for a whole hour to pass and they haven't actually done anything. You did it all as the teacher and when this was my experience there was part of me that felt like I was doing the right thing because I felt like I was the teacher so I had to teach. I was the one being paid so I needed to earn my money by giving as much information as I could at once. But what students and to teaching actually does is it recognizes the fact that it's our

1:18:07students who need to learn, it's our students who need to have this knowledge created for them, they need to create this knowledge for themselves. They are not and again I was taught this at university. We were given this specific example and I ignored it. They are not as the Victorians believed empty vessels into which you can pour knowledge just by talking to them because again if that were true our job would be really easy. But taking a true student centered approach where they do the majority of the work in the lesson and your role is circulating and answering questions and adjusting misconceptions that's hard for a beginner teacher. And it's much safer, it feels much safer you've got your security blanket if you are just

1:19:10delivering from your PowerPoint. And so it's really easy for those of us who have been in the profession for a while and so it started to do the research to say yes everything must be student centered and it is right that things must be student centered. But to say that to a pre-service teacher ignores the fact that they don't know how to be student centered. Maybe you lack the confidence in your subject to be student centered and maybe you don't want to admit that because teachers don't like to admit that we lack confidence in our subject knowledge in particular areas. But if we don't have these very honest difficult conversations then that knowledge transfer from university to school is much harder because we're not being honest about those barriers that stand in the way because what the university is saying students and to learning is or students and to

1:20:14teaching is the way to go because it's the students who are the ones who are learning that's correct. And by ignoring that and putting up the barrier and saying well that doesn't align with my lived experience it doesn't actually get rid of the fact that student centered learning is the way to go is what we ought to be doing. All it does is sort of make excuses for why we're not doing it. And what we need to do is explain that we don't need excuses. We just need to have honest conversations about what is happening in the classroom so that we can be equipped to deliver student centered teaching. And that's just one example. It's the same for everything. Every piece of theory that you read, that you hear about has been tested. Again the rigor of the testing is variable depending on all sorts of things you should always go back and read the studies yourselves.

1:21:20Don't just rely on your lecturers summary of the study. If you are hearing a CPD person deliver research from a book that they've written read their book. Don't just rely on their cliff notes. Take the time to actually engage with the research. And then figure out how that transfers because the research is correct. It might be disproven later on when we know more when there has been other research that builds on it. But we can't dismiss the research just because it doesn't align with our lived experience. It's possible that our lived experience is wrong. That our lived experience comes through some kind of bias, some kind of barrier that we either don't recognize or that we are afraid to admit.

1:22:26There's a foundational piece of transfer research that the review itself draws on, which is Gagan Furtus 2011 meta analysis. And that came out of the educational research review. And it examined the moderating effects of that knowledge gap and of instruction and of assessment conditions on motivation and transfer in professional training in general. And what it established is that transfer isn't a binary switch that training either flips or it doesn't. It's not a case of you can take what you've learned in your training in your lectures in your CPD and apply it to your classroom or you can't. It's actually a set of very specific, very identifiable design choices. And that when those choices are made well, transfer measurably improves. So basically the existence of a gap between training and practice is exactly what you'd expect to find

1:23:31when the training design hasn't fully closed to the gap. It's not evidence that training itself is the wrong switch to flip. And I think sometimes this is why people start to badmouth research because you go into it at university, believing what the research is saying, you are not then equipped with how to apply that research into your own practice, you're just expected to be able to do it, you struggle to do it. And so what you then say is, oh well, then the research was wrong. But the research wasn't actually wrong, you just weren't given that final bridge to apply it to your classroom. And maybe you weren't not confident enough to ask the question, how do I apply this to my classroom? Or maybe if somebody did ask that question in

1:24:37the lecture and they did it in bad faith, I don't see how this applies to my classroom, how do I apply this? You will automatically turn off of the idea because somebody else has said that they don't see how it works. And I think there's a lot to be said for good faith versus bad faith engagement with research and how we can position ourselves for or against it. So what I'm going to kind of suggest, my advice, my personal advice, and again, this is all just my opinion as somebody who recognizes that I am very biased in favor of educational research. Is to ask the question and ask it in good faith, ask it with that spirit of curiosity that Tim kind of led us to before. Say to your lecturers, say to the CPD deliverer, I understand the theory

1:25:40and I know my class and how do I apply it? What are the practical steps that I need to apply this? Because the theory doesn't always give you those practical steps and it's not always supposed to, it's not bad theory because it doesn't give you the practical steps. The point of it is that it's theoretical. The point of it is that it tells you the underlying thinking, the underlying ideas behind the practices that you are supposed to be delivering. And so if you need to ask what does this look like in practice? Can I see somebody, can I observe somebody who does this really, really well so that I know what this looks like? Can I talk to a teacher who engages in deliberate practice, who writes lesson plans and annotates them on what pedagogy they are using and why? Can I see them? Can I look at their planning? Can I talk to them about their practice? I know how I apply this. Then you're taking responsibility for your own progression, you are taking responsibility

1:26:46for your own career path, you are taking responsibility to push back against this idea that lived experiences, the only thing that matters, individual experiences, the only thing that matters. And draw on just over 100 years, we talked about this on a show not too long ago, just over 100 years of education in England at least, looking like it does now. And all of those teachers, and even going back further, the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of millions of teachers who have come before us and their own experiences, their conversations to work out what is best for your classroom. So if somebody says to you that being in the classroom is more important than

1:27:48being in the lecture theatre, my advice would be not to believe them. And my advice to you is that they are equal. Your lived experience, all of our lived experiences are important. You know your own classes, you know the makeup of the classes, you know the children who are sitting in front of you, or at least you know what they want you to know, you know what they present to you, you know what they project to you. But so does everybody else. They know that about their classes. And the more we can come together with our knowledge about what is happening in classrooms, in corridors, in canteens, the more we can find the commonalities that we have, the more we can speak to each other, which is essentially what research is, it's a conversation with the people conducting the research.

1:28:54The better we are going to be as a profession because we can draw on each other's lived experiences instead of solely relying on our own. And it loops back to what I said to teacher fixal before. You know there's a lot of sharing goes on in the teacher community. Teachers by and large are very happy to talk to each other, to help out. And research can be part of that conversation if you let it. And if you're brave enough to have the conversation that goes actually I'm really sorry I understand this theory. But please can you show me how I apply that to my classroom. So there we go. That's how I think you can make the most of your ITT lectures. Take the research on

1:29:55asking good faith for practical steps for applying it to your classroom. Apply it. Reflect on it. Sometimes you'll go, oh, that doesn't work for me. I need a different pedagogy. I need a different strategy. I need a different activity. Because we are all different as teachers. We all have different comfort levels. We will have different interest levels. The idea of theory is saying this is what works for the majority of people. This is what works for the majority of kids. And as much as we are all individuals and we all like to support our individuality, there is also something to be said that our brains have all evolved in the same way. Our brain chemistry kind of works in the same way. It's why medicine works. It's why SSRI's work. I took mine just before the show. It's why that works for me is because even though my brain is or it doesn't work the same as everybody else's,

1:31:00it does work in a similar fashion to somebody else who needs SSRI's. And so the the medication was tested on them. But we have more similarities than we have differences. And that's how we make the most of our ITT lectures is by leaning into those similarities and going, okay, if that work for these people, then it will probably work for me. And if it doesn't work for me, I can go in that for another strategy that worked for other people that is more aligned with my values, my teaching, my comfort. And that's where we will leave it for today. This has probably been one of my most opinionated shows for a long time. I'm trying not to get drawn in too much into what I'm talking about because as part of my own anxiety issues, I do worry about being misinterpreted quite a lot. And so I, you know, when I feel very strongly about something, I do worry about upsetting or offending. So I apologise if I have upset or offended today. This is just my opinion

1:32:04on something that I feel very strongly about. And if you feel differently, that's okay. Because I guess that's all of our own lived experiences. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great week if you are in your training period right now. If you're getting ready to go in on Monday and face those battles again, know that I'm on your side, know that I'm thinking of you. And I meant what I said. I'm over on Blue Sky at Mr. D. Leicester. That's M-I-D-L-S-T-E-R. I'm over on LinkedIn. It's the same profile picture so you know it's me. Get in touch if you've got any questions. If you want any advice, if you want papers or research on something, or if you just want to vent to somebody. And if you don't want to do it to me, because you don't like me that much, that's fine. That's okay. Find somebody else because

1:33:08the teaching community is generous. Have a great week. I will see you for breakfast next Saturday morning. Thank you very much and goodbye. You've been listening to Teachers Talk Radio. Tune in live and listen back at ttradio.org. We look forward to hearing from you next time on Teachers Talk Radio.