PODCAST · education
Education Bookcast
by Stanislaw Pstrokonski
Education 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.
Episodes
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Announcing Panglot World Languages
There are around 7000 languages in the world, and we know so little about them. On my new podcast, Panglot World Languages, I speak with a guest about 1 new language per week. We get into both the social side (the language community, history, how the interviewee feels about the language etc) and...
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Goodbye :)
Hello everyone, I have not been recording podcast episodes for over a year. This is because I started a company this year, Panglot Labs Ltd, and I've had to put all my energy into it. This looks like it will continue for at least the medium term, so I've decided to formally state that I'm not…
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156. Entrepreneurial expertise
In order to understand learning, we need to understand the result of learning - expertise. This is much easier to approach in so-called "kind" domains, such as chess, where the rules are fixed and all information is available. However, there exist more "wicked" domains than this, such as tennis...
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155. How experts see
There has been a ton of research on how experts see things differently than novices. (Like, with their eyes.) Everything from where they look, how long they focus for, and their use of peripheral vision, to their ability to anticipate what is going to happen through picking up subtle visual...
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154. Mindsets everywhere
Mindset was the first thing I spoke about on this podcast. I even did a separate episode going into the controversies surrounding replication of Carol Dweck's original work. Then there were stress mindsets, introduced by Kelly McGonigal in her book The Upside of Stress. (I happen to have also...
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153. Comparing learning different dance styles: Argentine Tango vs. Ballroom & Latin (Dancesport)
I haven't spoken on the podcast yet about my personal experience learning dancing. At university, I took part in dancesport, which is competitive ballroom and latin dancing; and in the last few years I have been learning to dance tango. I am struck by the differences in philosophies, skill sets,...
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152. [VIDEO] Education and generative AI: conference video for STEM MAD Melbourne, October 23
This is my first ever attempt at a VIDEO podcast. If you just listen to the audio, you should be fine. This was a video produced for the STEM MAD conference in Melbourne in October 2023. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the conference, so I made this video to introduce the panel discussion on the...
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151. 8 years, 150 episodes
This is a quick review of where I am now after 150 episodes and just short of 8 years of Education Bookcast. Thanks for all of your support! Feel free to leave a review of the podcast, or, if you wish, support me on https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast . Enjoy the episode.
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150. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
Since I've now reached episode 150, I've decided to do something I've never done before - discuss a fiction book. (This episode contains spoilers.) A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel from 1968, a time when the genre was still not very well-developed. Ursula Le Guin deliberately wanted to...
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149. How Popular Musicians Learn by Lucy Green
A lot of the classic expertise research, especially the research about deliberate practice and the "10,000 hour rule", is inspired by K. Anders Ericcson's study of violinists at the Berlin Conservatory. However, we have seen before how misleading sampling a particular culture and generalising the...
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148. You Know the Fair Rule by Bill Rogers
Any teacher in a Western cultural context knows that classroom behaviour is the most challenging part of the job. A lot of the time, it seems like crowd control is the main issue, and "teaching" is secondary. Unfortunately, teacher training courses don't do a good job of preparing teachers for…
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147. Large language models (LLMs) - interview with Dr Guy Emerson
Dr Guy Emerson (a.k.a Guy Karavengleman) is a computational linguist working at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In this episode, we discuss issues surrounding LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, and Google Bard. Guy is concerned about misinterpretations of what the technology does…
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146b. Lessons from EdTech - The 90% Rule
In the second part of this two-part episode about lessons learned from my time working in the education technology sector, I wanted to share a very significant quantitative finding to improve learning: what I call the "90% rule". Desirable difficulties is a concept that many know about and try to...
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146a. Lessons from EdTech - the Fundamental Duality of Educational Materials
I've now been working as a data scientist in educational technology for over four years. In that time I've thought a lot about various educational concepts within edtech, and I want to share some of what I've learnt. In the first part of this two-part episode, I want to talk about what I call the...
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145b. How to be a better lecturer (practice) - a message for Guy
This is the second part of the message for my friend Guy about becoming a better lecturer. In this part, I go over 27 practical techniques and tips for improving lecturing (as well as improving the way homework exercises are designed), referring to the principles and theory outlined in the…
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145a. How to be a better lecturer (theory) - a message for Guy
Another in the series of "really long voice notes from Staś". My friend Guy is a lecturer in natural language processing. He asked me if I could give him some tips about how to lecture better, so I told him I would record a podcast episode about it. I've divided the episode into two parts. In…
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144. Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom
Benjamin Bloom is best known for Bloom's Taxonomy, a scheme for categorising ways of thinking about or interacting with learning content on a scale from less to more sophisticated. However, the project he led investigating the lifelong development of expertise should be much more famous. The…
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143. Talent, revisited
Cover image: horse and rider by Nadia, age 5. The nature of talent is something that I dealt with near the beginning of the existence of Education Bookcast, reviewing books like Genius Explained, Outliers, The Talent Code, and Bounce. The general consensus was that talent is an illusion - people...
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142. Season 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is out now! Taster: Music and Learning
Season 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is here! The Pedagogue-Cast is a separate podcast project I share with Justin Matthys, founder of Maths Pathway. We discuss the kinds of questions that teachers might have about good practice which touch on cognitive science, making sure both to make the most of the...
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141+. Feedback on constructivism
After my last episode on behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism ("A Message for Zoë"), I heard back from Zoë herself, and also heard from Malin Tväråna, an education researcher in Sweden. I decided that it was worth recording an episode relating what I heard from them, and my thoughts…
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141. Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Constructivism - a message for Zoë
My friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what...
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140b. Political economy pt. II: The Invisible Hook
In the previous recording, I was speaking about political economy using the example of prison gangs, taken from David Skarbek's book Social Order of the Underworld. In this recording, I give the example of 18th-century Atlantic pirates, as discussed in Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook. (It's a…
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140a. Political economy pt. I: The Social Order of the Underworld
Please be advised that this episode contains mentions of violence and may be unsuitable for some listeners. I'd like to flesh out what I've been saying before about the power of economic analysis in explaining people's actions. Whereas when we normally think about motivation we think in terms of...
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139. Reflections after 7 years
Education Bookcast released its first episode on the 1st of January 2016. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the big things that I think I've learned in that time. I speak about: Psychology is overrated - the replication crisis and the bias in cultural sampling, and therefore...
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138. The science of self-belief, part II: self-efficacy
This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem. Self-esteem,...
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137. The science of self-belief, part I: self-concept
Among the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic...
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136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture
In this interview, I have the honour to speak with Professor Christian Lebiere, researcher in cognitive architecture, co-author of The Atomic Components of Thought, and one of the main developers of the ACT-R architecture. We talk on a range of topics relating to cognitive architecture, cognitive...
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136. Cognitive architecture and ACT-R
I have recently discovered the field of cognitive architecture. I have been reading around the area for the last couple of months, and I would like to introduce it to my audience. It's an area of study with incredible achievements which revitalises my belief in psychology as a field, but which…
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135. Professional writing expertise
One of the patrons of the podcast wrote to me on the forum that while I have covered the research on learning to read in a fair amount of detail, I'm yet to speak about learning to write, and he would really like to know more about this since he teaches writing day to day. I happen to have been...
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134. Philosophy for children
In this episode, I have Judith Millecker on as a guest. Judith is the author of the Philosocats series of books, which aims to help children ages 4-10 to engage in philosophy. It is an outgrowth of her work running philosophy for children sessions in London. We discuss her most recent book…
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133. Patterns are fast, rules are slow
I was reading the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson yesterday, and after going through a chapter on medical experts, something struck me about the nature of expertise, automaticity, and Kahnemann and Tversky's System 1 vs. System 2 (also known as...
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I have a new podcast!
I now have a new podcast, the Pedagogue-Cast! Together with Justin Matthys, co-founder of Australian education technology company Maths Pathway, we discuss how education research can be applied in the classroom. It's designed to be an easier listen for busy teachers, with a more immediate…
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132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence
In this part of the episode, I will discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction, drawing from Project Follow Through, but also from 50 years of studies that have been published since. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and...
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132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through
I've spent a lot of time on the podcast so far discussing discovery learning, but not had any episodes explicitly dedicated to what might be considered its antithesis, Direct Instruction. In this episode I finally get round to this worthy topic. First of all, uppercase "Direct Instruction", or DI...
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131. Mindset: does it replicate?
[By the way, the cover image is of the proportion of children in different countries who have a growth mindset (darker red is more). The data was taken from PISA 2019 and I constructed the image using Python. Grey countries are those for which I didn't have data.] I was initially a huge supporter...
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130. How children learn that the Earth is not flat
I stumbled across a fascinating paper looking into how children conceptualise the world around them. Mental Models of the Earth: A Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood shares an experiment where children were asked questions about the shape of the Earth, and the authors found six (!) different...
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Support the podcast & join the community forum!
You can now support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, where we discuss all things education. Visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast to learn more.
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129. A Transfer of Learning bombshell
This episode has such huge implications that I didn't know what to call it. Efficiency and Innovation in Transfer, the actual name of the book chapter, seemed far too dry to put across the fundamental shifts in thinking about pedagogy, assessment, education research design, and cognitive theory...
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128. Nuance
I wanted to talk a bit about some areas in which my thinking about education has improved with the addition of nuance, and about the ways in which thinking can be more nuanced. Desirable difficulty - a case where quantification and the awareness of countervailing forces / costs improved my…
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127. Necessary Conditions of Learning by Ference Marton
A listener of the podcast by the name of Malin Tväråna (senior lecturer at Uppsala University's Department of Education) requested in a review of the podcast that I cover this book, and so here it is! Ference Marton is a professor of Education at Göteburg University. His big idea is about...
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126. The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGillchrist
"Are you left-brained or right-brained?" Brain lateralisation has been known about in neuroscience since the early days, but it has been a taboo over the past few decades since pop science sources distorted the literature and made the topic disreputable. Neuroscientists could detect differences...
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125+. Interview with Rasmus Koss Hartmann
Dr Rasmus Koss Hartmann is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of the article that I covered in the first part of this episode, entitled Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur. In this interview we spoke about...
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125. Entrepreneurship education and conspicuous consumption
Entrepreneurship is an important part of a thriving economy, and entrepreneurship education is intended to make sure that those who have the potential to succeed in this way have the resources and knowledge to do so. But the opportunity for innovation, being one's own boss, and making money are…
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124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences
I picked up The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences hoping for a longer term project of enrichment from a volume published by one of the most prestigious universities in the world. However, it only took reading the introduction by editor R. Keith Sawyer to see that this book is suffused...
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123. How the Brain Learns by David Sousa
How the Brain Learns is one of the first books I bought about education, all the way back in summer of 2014. It sat on my shelf for seven years before I finally got round to reading it. Now, with the benefit of knowledge gained from so many years of investigation, it is much less impressive to me...
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122. Hive Mind by Garrett Jones
In my episode on Stuart Ritchie's Intelligence: All that Matters I spoke about IQ and intelligence, after a long silence on this issue. In Hive Mind, we get a look at how IQ affects the fate of entire nations, rather than just the individuals living in them. Jones' argument rests on data showing...
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121b. Attachment Theory around the world
This is the second part of the episode on the book Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Fundamental Human Need. In this section, we will look at three societies - the Beng (Ivory Coast), Nso (Cameroon), and Makassar (Sulawesi) - to see how children are brought up there, and the...
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121a. Attachment Theory as cultural ideology
The title of this episode might ruffle some feathers. Attachment Theory is developmental psychology's shining star, the theory with the greatest predictive success, and one which has become popular among child psychiatrists. You can now hear it spoken about wherever child psychology is the main...
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120. Aztec education
Which country was the first ever to have universal, free, compulsory education? Zero points if you said "Prussia". The correct answer is the Aztec empire, almost four centuries before the oft-cited German state. I happened to find out this bizarre fact from an aside in a YouTube video, and…
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119. Stages of learning
I realised I missed something, and I kicked myself. For a while I've been toying with the idea that learning occurs in two stages, which can be mapped between cognitive science and neuroscience: Exposure to new material -> neuronal connections Practice and repetition -> myelination ...with...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Education 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.
HOSTED BY
Stanislaw Pstrokonski
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Education Bookcast have?
Education Bookcast currently has 208 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Education Bookcast about?
Education 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...
How often does Education Bookcast release new episodes?
Education Bookcast publishes regularly with 208 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Education Bookcast?
You can listen to Education Bookcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Education Bookcast?
Education Bookcast is created and hosted by Stanislaw Pstrokonski.
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