How can podcasts support teacher education?

Since 2018 I have been involved in several education-focused podcasts as a host, producer, and guest. Over this period I’ve become increasingly interested in podcasts as a tool and medium for adult education, particularly for educators.

This interest really solidified as a result of my work as a school-based technology integration leader, where my focus was to support my colleagues to embed technology throughout the curriculum as a meaningful and sustainable tool for learning. This required me to look into research about a wide range of topics, from reading development, to homework, screen time, conceptual understanding in math, SEL and more, find the meaning in them, translate that into classroom practice, and share that information with my colleagues.

Through my Masters studies I’d become aware of the narrative that teaching is not sufficiently evidence-based, or “professional”, and some of the discourses around these concepts (1) (2) (3) (4) (5). However, this was an issue I understood only in the abstract until I began trying to engage more actively and independently with understanding and using education research as a teacher. It was only then that I was confronted with the realities of the task: I didn’t have access to journals so I often couldn’t get access to papers without paying up to $30 per paper, for a limited 24 hrs of access. Even with a Masters, I knew very little about research methods, I couldn’t understand the statistics, and I wasn’t sure how to interpret the findings. I couldn’t tell which papers were high quality and which weren’t, and I didn’t know how to work out which papers were relevant to my context. Most challenging of all, as a woman and a mother to two young children, it was incredibly challenging to find the time to sit and read tens of paper on each topic, try to find the commonalities and differences, and synthesize those findings into practice-based recommendations for my students and teachers, in that specific context.

I knew anecdotally that this challenge was not unique to me – the majority of my colleagues complained of lack of time. But since then I have come to understand the reason for those challenges in a broader way. First, in the U.S., over 70% of teachers are female and of child-bearing age, and these figures are reflected globally. Women in general, and in these demographic brackets especially, are disproportionately affected by time-poverty, meaning they have less discretionary time than men. Also, around half of all teachers aged 30-49 are likely to be parents, further increasing this issue. Second, almost 25% of teachers in the U.S. are considering leaving the profession, primarily as a result of stress and burnout. On the other hand, teachers care deeply about what they do, they are often highly-educated, with advanced degrees and many years of experience, and the majority of teachers believe education research should inform pedagogical decision-making.

In light of this, the gap between research and practice is not so difficult to explain. In reality, education research is not written for teachers - it’s written for other researchers and, because of that, it’s not accessible to teachers. It’s siloed in places they often cannot access, using language and information not designed for that audience, and with a less practical focus than teachers want and need, but it is the teachers who are expected to somehow take it off the page, or out of the lab, and bring into their classrooms.

My own experience of being a teacher, and a woman, and a mother, suggested to me that podcasts would be a good solution to this issue. While my hands and eyes may be too busy with tasks like driving, domestic work, and childcare to make physically reading papers possible, I could often find time to listen while I did that work. And while most teachers may not have the time to sift through many academic papers and find what is relevant to their practice, they may have time to listen to a synthesis of that information, presented in a format that could be accessible, or even enjoyable. That idea led me to work with a colleague to co-create a podcast for teachers with the aim of making education research more accessible through conversational, evidence-based podcast episodes around topics of interest to teachers, backed up by “deep-dive” blog posts about the research, and supplemental hand-outs to print and share with colleagues, parents, and administrators.

While the podcast didn’t live very long thanks to the arrival of COVID and the challenges of lock-down with five children between us, while teaching remotely, it continues to be listened to regularly by people around the world, suggesting there is a need and a desire for more resources like this. And I’ve been honored to be involved in other podcast projects including, most recently, producing the acclaimed Knowledge Matters Podcast with Natalie Wexler and the Knowledge Matters Campaign.

While there are certainly a huge number of podcasts for educators and by educators, on an enormous range of topics, the potential for podcasts as a more systematic and formalized tool for teacher education has not really been explored. But we can look to other fields – like medicine (1) (2)– where podcasts are becoming an increasingly embedded form of professional development, as well as research about what, in general, makes podcasts effective for adult learning (1) (2) (3) (4), for clues about how this might work.

In my own research, I’m excited to explore ways of making education research more systematically accessible to teachers through podcasting and other forms of media, as well as designing ways for teachers to be more equitably involved as partners in education research. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to collaborate, or share your perspectives!