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Education Bookcast

Mar 19, 2023

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 simply get better at...


Mar 11, 2023

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 research findings while...


Mar 10, 2023

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 about it.

Enjoy the...


Feb 25, 2023

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 these three...


Jan 30, 2023

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 pun on Adam Smith's...