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Jo Earp: Hello and welcome to this podcast from Teacher magazine. I'm Jo Earp.
Dominique Russell: I'm Dominique Russell.
Andrew Broadley: And I'm Andrew Broadley.
JE: It's actually a very special episode this month. We're celebrating 10 years of Teacher magazine this year, and that also means 10 years of podcast making, which is a bit weird to think about. I guess that's the beauty of being a digital publication, that when we were setting Teacher up in 2014 – so we went live actually with our first content in May, 2014 and when we were sort of thinking about the formats that we wanted to do, we thought ‘oh, actually this this opens up podcasting’ which, obviously was really rare at that time. I was just having to think, the Serial podcast, the really popular one, the Season 1 of that came out at the end of 2014 and for me that was when there was a bit of an explosion in podcasts. But certainly I don't think a lot of places were doing it at that point, were they.
DR: No, not at all. We're definitely glad that we did it when we did, aren't we?
JE: Yeah. So, one the first things that we launched, actually our first episode, was The Research Files and that's a monthly series. So, we decided that we wanted to give as well as sort of the outlet for principals and teachers we also wanted to give education researchers an opportunity to talk about their work and the implications for schools. So, the idea of The Research Files was that, you know, somebody who’s just published research would come on talk about, you know, why should we care about this particular topic, what was their study about, and what are the implications for schools. And Brendon Hyndman was our first interviewee for that one. And it's an episode on using found equipment, or recycled equipment, for playgrounds rather than sort of structured playground equipment. So, I just want to start off by playing a little snippet from that, and here he is reflecting on the implications of his study for schools.
Brendon Hyndman: It's definitely a low cost, low burden strategy to really enhance school playgrounds and especially for those schools that do have shrinking budgets and are looking to save money - rather than spending thousands of dollars on fixed type school playground equipment. This actually shows that there are a range of additional benefits that we found to introducing everyday objects that are quite cheap and feasible to implement, and it actually engaged children by increasing their physical activity levels over a substantial time.
JE: And so, I got in touch with Brendon a few weeks ago and said, ‘look, we're doing this special episode, do you want to talk about your reflections on being the very first guest?’ And, fortunately, he said yes! So, let's have a little listen to what he thinks about that first podcast.
BH: Back in 2014, I had just finished my doctoral studies, and I was looking to really try and get the reach of those insights and findings to a bigger audience. And at that stage, you know, that there might have been a little snippet in the news, or you might have done a radio interview. And often like things were lost and things were hard copy very much back then with the media. So, to have a podcast like The Research Files, it really allowed me to have a something that didn't go away. So, it was a fixed podcast and it's been there for 10 years now. And you've also got the transcript of everything that went ahead with my research over a couple of years, and the intervention that I undertook. So, it was absolutely fantastic for me to be able to get this out there. It's been reshared years and years later – all that blood, sweat and tears and that work that went into the doctoral studies is talked about still and it's still there. What a great way for researchers to paint the picture of all the work that they've undertaken so that it's not lost, and it can be shared with audiences that have an interest. So, thank you so much.
JE: Brendon enjoyed it, we enjoyed it, the listeners did too. So, we decided to make it a regular format and we've done another 330-odd episodes since then, Dom?
DR: I wonder how many podcast shows can say that they have over 300 shows when it's a weekly episode. Yeah, it's fantastic. I can't believe it's been that many. And The Research Files particularly – I think that was such a great series to kick off with for the audio format and the podcast medium, because it takes a sometimes 50/60-page research report, which can be really dense when you want to get down and read it. And to have a conversation about it and talk about the really important aspects of it, it's just a much better way of being able to digest that information and bring that information to people who wouldn't have really been aware of it otherwise.
AB: Yeah, I remember when I joined the Teacher team not too long ago, I was shocked that, you know, back in 2014 you were doing this because myself, I was actually really late to podcasts. I've always been a really big reader and kind of my friends were telling me to get into them, and I just wasn't that into it. And then probably about one or 2 years ago, I kind of started and just haven't looked back. Because, like you say, Dom, it's just such a great way to get that information really quickly when you're cooking dinner, when you're commuting. They've been fantastic. So, no, it's a format that I'm all for now.
JE: Yeah, absolutely. So, we started off on that journey then, like I said in May 2014 and we were kind of up and running. We'll talk about sort of how we put it together in a bit because it's quite weird to think about it now, but anyway. So that was one of the researchers and academics that we interviewed, Brendon. We’ve also interviewed lots of teachers and leaders. The School Improvement series, then, I was having a look, we've done more than 50 episodes of this one. And the idea behind that is to speak to a leader or a leading teacher, somebody driving some kind of school improvement, about you know what the issues were for them, why they decided to do something about it and what they actually did, and then the impact of that. So again, you know sort of really trying to give some concrete examples to listeners and maybe give some prompts to teachers and leaders out there listening to not, you know, pick up and do this in their own school, but just think about ‘OK’, reflect on ‘right … what are the issues in our school? What could we do about it?’ Let's have a listen to a School Improvement episode from 2020, then. This one's Tasmanian educator, Steve Harrison, he's from Huonville High School, he's talking about the success of its Trade Training Centre in terms of developing different student pathways.
Steve Harrison: So, industry see this place as a place where they know that they can get quality in potential employees. We had one of the major auto dealers from Hobart, which is our capital city about 45 minutes away, actually come down here last year and targeted 4 of our students that they wanted to employ and put through apprenticeships in motor mechanics. And I think it's quite unique that instead of schools going out and trying to contact employers and trying to find opportunities for their students, employers are actually coming to us and they're using us as a recruitment place for their industries. So, it's been really beneficial.
DR: Yeah, so when I think about the past 10 years of the podcast and doing School Improvement, this series, for so long, I think the thing that jumps out in my mind personally is how we have a bit of a tradition, you might say, of speaking with the annual winners of the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Excellence in Science Teaching. That is a highlight for me personally every year because it's a primary teacher, a secondary teacher, we're speaking to them specifically about how they've improved outcomes in science or mathematics or STEM areas in their school. And I always like to ask the prize recipients what their favourite learning activity in the classroom is, which is just a wonderful one for that series, isn't it? And it's something that hopefully over the years, people have listened to, they've thought it could work for them in their own classroom, and maybe they've given it a go themselves.
AB: Yeah, it's a series I've really enjoyed listening to. I think it's just super beneficial, right? I mean, school leaders can be, I guess, famously short on time, so to have an opportunity to kind of hear some insights from other school leaders who are in similar roles, what they're doing, how that's working. And it kind of just gives you an opportunity to, yeah, reflect on your own practice or maybe see what can work in your own context. And I think it's just an awesome opportunity for other leaders.
JE: Yeah. And I was looking back, it's also interesting that there's such a variety of topics in there; so, it does illustrate that, you know, you might have a completely different priority in your school. Hopefully there's something there for everybody to dip into. Another series that I wanted to highlight, then, is Global Education. I think I'm right in saying that that one's been with us right from the start as well. That just gives us a chance to get an international perspective. It also includes interviews with the winners of the Global Teacher Prize. So that's the Varkey Foundation, it's often called ‘the Nobel Prize for teaching’ and it's the $1,000,000 prize for teachers who've made a significant difference. And, so Global Education, you know, it's taken us around the world talking about a lot of different things, but one of the things we do is interview the winner of the Global Teacher Prize. This little snippet here, then this is from 2018. It's an interview with Art and Textiles teacher Andria Zafirakou, from London. And, yeah, just really interesting about what she's doing to support students outside school, actually.
Andria Zafirakou: So, we go out of our way to say ‘right, okay, you want a dance Bollywood club? Okay, let's see if we can find somebody to lead that on you, but it will be after school. Bring your 10 people, have you got 10 people? Right.' So, we give them the leadership of saying ‘what is it that you need? What is it that you want?' Recruit your group, your team, and then we'll see what we can do. We'll put it on for you. I think it's important now for schools to remain open beyond school time. It may not be easy in terms of staffing them by having teachers do that, but that's when leaders have got to be creative. Because the more we keep the students in school, then we know, number one, they're safe, we know, number 2, that we're providing them with opportunities, opening their eyes, increasing their toolkits. A lot of our children come to us because they know that there are these extra-curricular provisions available.
DR: Yeah, so the Global Education one, that's probably historically one of the more trickier episodes to record, because you're dealing with time differences and everything. And before COVID especially tricky. We didn't use Microsoft Teams. We didn't really use Zoom. So COVID probably helped us out a little bit with being able to have more access to people who live in all areas around the world. One episode that I really loved from this series, and I've listened to myself a few times since we've published is your episode Jo where you spoke with the director of UNESCO's Global Educational Monitoring Report (it's also known as the GEM Report, so you might know it as that). It was Manos Antoninis who joined you all the way from Paris to talk about the report. And you really, that's another example of where you're taking such a dense report and bringing it into a really easy to digest conversation. So Global Education, it's such a range of topics that we've spoken about. That interview with Andria was one that I did, and it's stuck in my mind ever since; it’s probably about 5 years old now, I think. But yeah, it's always a great opportunity to be able to cast a net a bit wider than Australia and get different contexts and different perspectives, isn't it?
AB: Yeah. And I think, you know, most of the time you are really just thinking about education in Australia, you know, in your own context. So, the opportunity to just hear from other countries and education systems and what they're doing is always super interesting regardless of the topic, right. One that really caught my attention and stood out to me was quite a recent one. Jo, you spoke to Geoff Masters, who was ACER CEO at the time, and he was speaking about some of his research into world-class learning systems and kind of looking at different education systems around the world and some of the initiatives and things that they're doing to achieve really amazing results. And I just found that so interesting, you know, thinking about how some of those things could apply to an Australian context. And yeah, like you say, just hearing about all the different things happening around the globe is always super insightful for teachers and school leaders back here in Australia.
JE: Yeah. And I think that on that one with Geoff, that was a 3-episode special and there was an awful lot to get through. And like you were saying, Dom, there's a lot to distil into that. And so, I was thinking, yeah, if we did a 3-part article, fair enough, but you're often then, you know, as a journalist, as the writer, you're often a lot of it's kind of your words rather than their words because you're not just going to do a massive quote from somebody and that's going to be the entire article. But with the podcast, you really get that voice from the expert. So that's what I love about the format as well. Okay then, so that's international wise. Back to Australia then. The Teaching Methods series – that was one that we added in a couple of years in I think it was (I may be wrong, might have to check that). But yeah, a couple of years in. We've covered things like blended learning, team teaching, we did an episode on teaching in a multi-age classroom, there was one on taking a problem-solving approach in maths. This one though, I thought just an example of the series, it's from April 2019. It's on co-teaching with Gail Smith, who was the then Principal of Rosebery Primary School in the NT. She's talking about the difference between co-teaching and team teaching.
Gail Smith: But you do have to have the structures in place. I think co-teaching is fantastic. Team teaching is one part of co-teaching, but a lot of people get them confused. Co-teaching, for me, is definitely the way to go. This might not be entirely how everyone sees it, but for me, co-teaching is that you co-collaborate, you co-work through everything so it's done together. And you know what each other is going to be doing, and you know where you're at with your lessons, you know what you need to be doing next. If you are a team teacher, you still have your class, you still have your own planning, you just do some things together. It's quite different in the sense that co-teaching is you're responsible for all of these students, and this is how we work as 2, as a pair.
DR: I do remember this was another interview of mine actually, and I remember specifically I asked Gail this question because it was something that had come up from our listeners and our readers previously, that we had some varying definitions of co-teaching and, you know, team teaching, and how they actually can be quite different. And this, still to this day, from Gail Smith, this is still a definition that I come back to because she put it perfectly. So, that's something else that's probably worthwhile mentioning, isn't it? That our listeners and our readers really do inform how we continue on with the podcast and the types of episodes that we do, what we cover, the new series that we bring out. I've just been looking at the past 10 years of our Teacher Reader Survey that we've run, for (spoiler alert) an upcoming article that we'll be publishing on 10 years of the Teacher Survey. And, pleasingly, most years everyone says how much they love our podcasts. Some people say they prefer shorter episodes, some people say they prefer longer episodes, so we do try to provide a variety for everyone, and everyone's different interests. Yeah, we're always open to that kind of feedback, aren't we? It's something that we really look for.
JE: We've done 10 years of podcasts. There's an awful lot there. It's gone like a flash, I can tell you – as somebody who’s been doing it from the start, it's gone like an absolute flash. But if you had told me at the beginning, you know, you’d get coming up for 2 million listens, that's just amazing to think about. So, thanks to everybody that's listened over the years. The most listened to episode is Dylan William on effective questioning in the classroom from March 2019. Here he is explaining what a hinge question is and why you need to plan one in for every lesson.
Dylan Wiliam: So, if you've got a 45-minute lesson, 20 minutes in check that the students are still with you. The idea is, you write a question that you include as part of your design of the lesson and ‘at this point I'm going to check that the students are still with me' – and I carefully plan the question I'm going to ask at that point, so I can get some kind of response from every single student. It could be finger voting, it could be ABCD cards, it could be mini whiteboards. It doesn't really matter what technique, the important point is the teacher plans the quick check for understanding into the plan of the lesson, and then you get the evidence, and then you make a decision. So, the whole lesson ‘hinges' around this point. There's a hinge in each lesson, and if the students get it correct you move on and if they show that they don't yet understand it you might go back and teach it again or, if half of them get it right and half of them get it wrong, you might pair them up to actually have a discussion. The important point is, every lesson becomes almost like a contingent process – you don't know where you're going to go until you get some evidence.
DM: Yeah, that was a great clip from that one, but I am slightly upset that you didn't share my favourite clip from that episode, which is where Dylan talks about the Parking Lot questioning technique. Such a great technique and it's something that I've thought about ever since. That idea of a student in a classroom asks a question, that it's a relevant question, but it's not relevant enough to avoid you going off into a rabbit hole, going off on a tangent and derailing the entire lesson. Or, it may be a question that the teacher's not sure quite sure about how to answer, and so his suggestion of putting a parking lot in the whiteboard, in the corner of the whiteboard in the classroom, and saying ‘great question, we'll park this for a little bit and we'll come back to it’. So simple, but so effective, isn't it? There were so many things in that episode that were amazing. And it's great you were able to end up recording that one because it wasn't easy, was it!
JE: No, it wasn't easy, so I remember it was while he was in Melbourne. It was, as you can hear, it's one that we recorded in person. So, some are by Teams. Oh, when we started, we did them over the phone line. We've done them various methods, mobile phones, getting people to record on their end. So, there are all kinds of different tricks that you can do to try and get the audio as good as possible. This one, fortunately, was in person, but it was in the middle of Melbourne. Stupidly decided to go there by car, so first I had to park, he's only got 5 minutes to do this episode, 10 minutes. He's in the hotel in Melbourne. I remember we rushed in there, we're in a little corner of a hotel lobby or something, I think it was, or a meeting room. It was the worst set-up ever, but really, actually, in terms of sound, it was good. And we were sort of huddled in this corner. Did the episode. He was an absolute professional as you'd expect, he was like ‘how long do you want?’ I was like, ‘yeah, if we can keep it to this…’ – I think he got it within about 30 seconds, so he’s like an absolute professional, really excellent stuff. And it just shows you that from all of that kind of melee and nearly not happening, that's the most listened to episode.
You’re with us as we're discussing 10 years, believe it or not, of Teacher podcast-making, we'll have some more discussion after the break.
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JE: Okay, so from Dylan Wiliam, then, who's the most popular one, another series that's super popular is Behaviour Management. We started that in January 2017 – that, as you were saying Dom, we ask people each year in the survey, you know ‘what would you like more support on?’ – that's something that came out of the survey, starting that particular series. In this little snippet then that I've chosen, we've got lead researcher Professor Paul Caldarella. He’s from Brigham Young Uni in Utah, in the US. He's talking about a study into the praise to reprimand ratio, which is something that you do hear about in, you know, sort of in your professional learning (you know, give more praise than reprimands). He's talking about that and the impact on student behaviour.
Paul Caldarella: Praise is one of those interventions that doesn't require a lot of training in order to be able to praise – we can all display praise statements to students. Now with coaching, the quality of our praise could probably improve, we could go for more general praise like, ‘hey good job', to ‘good job following along with the class today, that's going to improve your learning'. So, if we add that additional rationale about why the behaviour is important, more behaviour specific, we'll get even better outcomes. But, even without training, if teachers could just create a more positive classroom environment through increasing their praise and decreasing their reprimands, this study suggests we're going to see improved classroom behaviour on the students' behalf. And so, it's a simple intervention, it doesn't require a lot of training, it doesn't cost anything, and so there's really no reason why it couldn't be more greatly used in schools.
DR: The Behaviour Management series is a great one. It's another one that's so incredibly practical, and it's something that again comes from what our listeners want to hear about. There's one – I hesitate to call it a series – but it was a few episodes with some experts from Monash University in our Behaviour Management series, with Dr Erin Leif and Russell Fox. There was one episode in particular where it was just filled with questions from our listeners. And so, it was a great opportunity to be able to, you know, kind of bridge that gap between classroom teachers and things that they really, really need more support and help with. And we've got these connections with these amazing experts, and we can bring the questions to them and then go from there. So, I think the message from me is, over the past 10 years, if any of our listeners ever have any idea for an episode, if they have a question they're desperate to have answered, please get in touch with us; and chances are, we'd love to follow up on it. Because that's what we're all about, isn't it?
AB: Yeah, I mean it's a great opportunity for listeners to get those kind of burning questions they've got off, and it's also great for us honestly – helps with the planning, doesn't it, when we have some help on the questions to ask and who to interview and stuff. So please do get any of those questions through to us.
JE: Yeah, that's true. Just on that one with Paul Caldarella. I did mention it earlier about how the recording methods have changed over the years. And like I say, when we started off, it wasn't a thing. It just wasn't a thing, you know, you couldn't download a platform where you could do podcasts on, there was no sort of, you know, little mics. You could have done it in a massive studio. We did actually do some in a studio with our friends at Joy, in the Joy studio in Melbourne for a while, and did that for a period. And we were even sort of recording it down a phone line in those very, very early episodes, a bit like an answer machine and cutting it, you know, and editing it from there. COVID really changed things because I think, as well, people were used to hearing things in a slightly different audio format. It wasn't as vital that you were there in the same room as somebody. Plus the technology improved, so… But we did actually do some in person, as I say, and we did actually do a live we started actually a live series Teacher Talks just before COVID hit – so that one’s just had one episode since then. But yeah, we can do conference recordings, panels and keynotes as I say. Teacher Talks, then, that was pre-COVID. September 2019 we're going to go back to; it's the only episode we've got of that one so far. We've got Lyn Sharratt on learning walks and talks, and we recorded it in front of an audience of 100 teachers and leaders. So, in that full episode, she talks about the benefits to teachers of learning walks and talks, but in this little grab then it's about the benefits to students.
Lyn Sharratt: Can students articulate what they’re learning? Why are they learning it? And can they articulate how they’re doing? And how can they improve? And what will be their next steps? And where can they go for help if they’re stuck? So, Learning Walks and Talks gives students an opportunity to articulate what they know about their own learning, and I think through that articulation, they own their own learning and their own next steps for improvement.
DR: Yeah, that was a really special night to be able to meet listeners face to face and hear Lyn talk on such an important topic and such an interesting topic. Hopefully we'll get back out there again soon. We'll see what happens. But yeah, like you say, COVID hit, there's not much we can do about that, is there? But the benefit was Microsoft Teams came available, Zoom got a lot better, people were much more open to talking on those platforms as well. They knew what they were, they understood what they were and instead of just being in our Melbourne bubble or in our Australia bubble or in our time zone figuring out bubble across a phone line like we were pre-COVID we can really speak to such a range of people now, and it is so much easier and so much more accessible for people.
AB: I commend Teacher for, you know being in the podcast game for so long, but perhaps a little selfishly I'm a little glad that I maybe wasn't there for those early episodes because all I've known is the nice modern set-up we have now. I can't imagine having to do it without all the bells and whistles we have. So yeah, good work on that.
JE: I mean, yeah, just from a, you know, multiple guests point of view, you can't do that down the phone line. We couldn't have 2 people ringing to the same phone line. You know, all those kinds of things. We also had a handheld recorder, the Zoom recorder, which was fantastic. But again, you've got to be in the place for that. So, yeah, now we've got a mix of things. It's great to have had that. The other thing was, like you said Dom, round about that time I think that kind of led to the real boom in podcast because everybody was doing it as a communication format. So, I mean, what's that 2019/2020? We'd been going for years before then, but I've seen in the last, you know, the last few years now just the amount of audio stuff that's out there – it’s great. Another educator-driven series, then, I want to just mention is Action Research. That's part of our strap line, isn't it? Evidence + Insight + Action. So, the ‘action’ bit of it is, is really difficult. It's really tricky. We talk about this, the evidence and the insight on it is one thing, but how do you actually act on that? This Action Research is more about, you know, teachers and leaders thinking about an issue in their own school and doing some research around that; and then that informs some action and then having a look at the impact of that. So, we launched this series in 2016. This was the first episode that we're going to go back to. It's Mark Sivils from Don College in Tasmania. So, Mark and his colleagues wanted to find out if peer assessment in year 11 and 12 maths would lift outcomes and pass rates. So, he has this tip for other teachers looking to do action research.
Mark Sivills: I think it sometimes can be quite hard to isolate the single thing you want to investigate or check. We're often trying lots of new things at the same time. The biggest piece of advice is probably, try to create a simple question that you want to answer. I think ours was probably still a bit too complex, but it was basically, ‘Can students in Foundation maths who have only ever achieved 'Ds' before engage in peer and self-assessment? And does it lead to improved outcomes?' And we were able to answer those questions, 'yes' and 'yes'. The other thing really is to make sure that you collect baseline data so that you have something to compare it to, otherwise it's really hard to interpret.
DR: So that might be our shortest episode that we have of all of our over 300 episodes, that there are now. It might not be, but it's quite short coming in at 7 minutes, which again is not a bad thing. Like I mentioned earlier, some of our listeners really love the shorter episodes. It's great to just have it in a short snippet like that. I think I'd be able to do a load of dishes in 7 minutes.
JE: You reckon?
DR: I think so. Yeah, I think that would be the perfect … that's the time where I listen to my podcasts, so I think that would be the perfect episode length for me. The 40-minute episodes can be more of a commuting episode – that can be a train journey episode I'd think.
JE: Yeah, different lengths for different jobs. Yeah, different chores. Yeah, you're right.
AB: I tend to go with a cooking dinner, so 7 minutes might be an extra speedy meal that night if I'm trying to squeeze it in.
JE: Or you know some people now they listen to it on, like, double speed, don’t they – double speed, 1.5 speed, triple speed. So yeah, we're just giving people a variety of options there. Okay, then, let's move on to – we've got a couple of different series still to mention before we wrap up for today. Teacher Staffroom. Right, so we brought this in in 2019. And as we mentioned earlier that was a real sort of boom time in podcasts. Again, it was feedback from the survey that there were a few people that were listening to podcasts that we noticed that weren't having time to do the articles, that weren't going to the website. So, they were saying, you know, the podcast is really good because, like, we were just saying there we can do something else while we're listening to it. But maybe they were missing out on some of those other articles that we were publishing. So, we thought, oh, you know, we'll do a bit of a wrap-up of the month. So, the idea of Teacher Staffroom is it's a chance to catch up. Like I said, we know some people just do the podcasts. But it's a way to actually pull everything together each month and then just pause for some reflection. So, the idea of this is that you can actually stop it and have it in the staffroom and have a bit of reflection and chat amongst colleagues. This one's from the end of 2023 – it's about topics from the survey. And if you haven't heard it yet, as I say, this this snippet just illustrates the format.
DR: This year, quite a few of you let us know you’d like more content on the topic of AI. You also let us know more about your concerns around the teacher shortage and managing your own workload, your wellbeing and the wellbeing of your students. So, in this episode, I’m going to highlight a range of stories we’ve published recently, that you might find useful, based on these areas of interest. And, like all episodes of Teacher Staffroom, I’ll be sharing some other highlights from content we’ve published during the month, and I’ll also be posing some questions throughout the podcast, so feel free to pause the audio as you go, gather some colleagues, and discuss together how these stories might be relevant to your school context. Let's jump in.
DR: Yeah, I've been – our listeners might know that I've been doing the Staffroom episodes this year. It's something that I really look forward to doing, to be honest, because it kind of gives me an opportunity to reflect on the content that we've published in the relevant month. And we do take the time to think about questions that we can ask our readers and our listeners to help them reflect on how it could be relevant to your own school practice. And I know that that's something over the years that readers have told us about our written content, is that they enjoy sharing the link with their colleagues and discussing the questions, and discussing the touch points of those articles. So, the Staffroom has been a really great opportunity to bring that into the audio format for people who will only be listening to our podcast channel, which are quite a few people, I would think.
JE: And Dom, you mentioned you're looking through the 10th annual survey responses at the moment, so we'll bring you more on that soon. We're going to end this special episode then with School Assembly, because that's our latest series. We've just met our Series 3 principal – Dan McShea from Notre Dame College. This clip though, this is from Series 1 and I've chosen it because it's Ray Boyd and Rachael Lehr who were the principal and assistant principal for Series 1; they're talking about the actual podcasting experience.
Rachael Lehr: Well, speaking for myself, Jo, I actually found it really great just to actually force me to reflect on what's happening. It's been a crazy busy time, so just having that time just to sit and reflect on what's going well, what we're feeling proud of, what our challenges are, it's actually been really great, just to help me with the whole journey.
Ray Boyd: And I tend to journal anyway, so reiterating what Rachael's just said, this provided an opportunity to not just reflect in a different way, but actually to have someone guide and dig deeper into that reflection, I found extremely useful and enjoyable too, by the way.
DR: This one is a bit different with how we record the episodes, isn't it, Jo? I mean, you're the host of the series, so you would know better than I – but instead of a 20, 30, sometimes 40-minute conversation, it's a quick 10-minute catch-up with them. We catch them wherever they are. In the Victorian episode, you were able to go out to the school a couple of times. It actually was quite far from where we are, which is funny. We're in the same city, but gosh, it took you a long time to get there.
JE: It was quite far, actually. And yeah, it is like a quick catch up. I think sometimes it gets a bit longer just because it's so interesting. The thing though that I was thinking about School Assembly – again, if you’d have said in 2014, right, this one-off thing that you're recording with this person (or even sort of in 2015/2016 … maybe it is that kind of podcast boom) that we would be following a principal for a full year, and that we’d be getting up to almost 2 million listens, I would’ve just been like ‘no way, no way’. So, that's amazing to think that this is how far we've come really.
DR: I think the School Assembly jingle theme music is my favourite so far.
JE: Oh, we haven't even talked about jingles, have we. They've all got sort of slightly different jingles. Some of them have got a slightly different jingle haven’t they.
DR: Yeah, the School Assembly one stands out to me. I love listening to that one.
JE: Yeah, I think that's my favourite one as well, the School Assembly one. I did have a thought about jingles in the early days that actually we could get the jingles supplied by music teachers at schools, right? So, I had this kind of thought that, you know, we could have, like a house band each year from a different school. And it would be like music teachers and colleagues, and they'd do like a couple of jingles. And we say ‘hey, our house band’s from so and so school…’ And that never really materialised. I didn’t share that with anybody. But I'm putting it out there now. If you are interested in supplying a little jingle to us, if you want to be our Teacher Podcast House Band, get in touch with us. Just send it to teachereditor@acer.org and we will be delighted to hear from you.
DR: My fingers are crossed.
JE: OK, then that's it! We've had a wonderful time having a look back at the 10 years, the 10 years of podcast that we've done with Teacher. It's been an absolute blast doing them. We have so much enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening to them, for all your feedback, for your suggestions. As we keep saying, get in touch at any point – doesn't have to be survey time, get in touch at any point – with feedback and suggestions. Let us know how you're using the podcast. Let us know what you need support on and anything else that we can help with. But yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. So, if you do want to catch up on any of the other episodes that we've published, as I say, there are 330-plus episodes in the archive just head to your usual podcast channel, and while there, if you could leave us a rating and review that would be fantastic.
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