Transcript: The Staffroom S05E02

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Elaine Long 

We are programme leaders on the UCL Early Career Teacher programme. Why are we in the Staffroom? We are here because this is where the best professional learning conversations always take place. This is where problems faced by teachers and leaders today can be explored critically, and where meaningful connections between research and practice can be made. 

Mark Quinn   

Over the course of this series, we will hear the voices of different colleagues as they come into The Staffroom – from ECTs to academics and executive leaders. We will talk about all things education – the challenges and the joys. So why don’t you enjoy a coffee with us, perhaps even grab a biscuit, and sit down for an hour of Staffroom chat.

Mark Quinn  
Welcome to The Staffroom, Professor Julie Dockrell. We're very excited to be meeting you today in our festive edition, Julie, because this is the last day for many of us of the autumn term. We're getting ready for Christmas. So, rushed off your feet, as I'm sure you are. You can sit down in our staffroom. We always offer a drink and a biscuit. 

You did give us an early warning. That you had very particular needs at this end of the year. And Biscuit wasn't going to do it. So, I'm going to offer you some mince pies.

Julie Dockrell   
Oh, thank you. And thank you for inviting me.

Mark Quinn   
No, you're very welcome. I actually looked around for some mulled wine. I couldn't find any muld wine, but I did find some spiced mead, so we can crack open some spice mead. Is that Ok? We'll have some spiced mead and some mince pies nicely warmed will get us through our meeting this morning.

 

Elaine Long 
And can you pass some of that spiced mead my way.  Julia. I know you've got a whole lifetime of experience to offer our listeners today and I'm sure they'll be interested to hear about your role now and your experience working in oral language, so can you tell us a bit more about your role and what brings you the most joy from it?

Julie Dockrell 
Well, I'm professor of psychology and special needs in the Department of Psychology and Human Development, and a lot of my role is research and staff development around that. I also run our lead, the social Science Research Council doctoral training programme, which is across 6 institutions and that's been really interesting and challenging, I mean my view is it's always good to be challenged to keep your mind sharp and working forward.

So, those are things I do. What I get a lot out of the things I really enjoy are, at the moment I've been really lucky. I've got a couple of early careers researchers who are really interesting and hungry, and it's just a pleasure working and learning with them. So that's so that's one of the things I feel I'm very lucky about.

The other aspect of my job which I find don't do as much teaching as I used to, but when I do teach, I always value the questions and the input from the practitioners I'm working with, so it's the teachers, particularly you're in the chalk face, who say, well, why do the children do this? And you know, then it makes starts me thinking about. I wonder why that is happening. So those are the two, I think, exciting aspects of my role at the moment.

Mark Quinn
You’re obviously very at home in s staffroom Julie and, you know, enjoy talking to teachers and being around teachers. So, that's one of the reasons why we're really happy to have you as a guest today. And in particular, we want to hear you talk about your interest in oral language and classroom communication. Seems a kind of fashionable topic these days. Am I right in saying it seems to be on the political agenda more than it than it has been in the past?

 

So, I think it'd be interesting to hear your thoughts on maybe why that is the case, why it's become more of a priority, I guess in the policy area, but also tasks really give us your definitions of, you know, we're using these words or say and oral language, maybe you can start by defining first what those things?

Julie Dockrell   
OK, I'll start by defining and then I'll go to the question or try and tackle the question of why it's trendy at the moment to talk about oracy. So, in some ways, it's really difficult to distinguish between oral language and oracy. I mean there's a subtle difference that people use, but if I start with oral language, which is, I think most clearly defined and obviously researched that is effectively an individual's skills and competencies in terms of expressive language. What they can say, but also receptive language and what they understand, and within that the oral language dimension can be broken down into vocabulary, the grammar and morphosyntax of the language, and our ability to create a narrative or retail. Oracy, I think if it's used in a slightly different way is the way we use language in different contexts. 

So, the way I'm talking to you now is different to if I was sitting in a pub, it's different too, as if I was talking with a group of students or you know, you change the ways in which you use language. Perhaps the term that people might use is pragmatic use of language. And I say those two were if there's a difference, that's where the subtle difference is. But you can't manipulate or use those more subtle aspects of changing your language. If you don't have those core language skills to build on, I'd argue.

Mark Quinn  
So oracy or fluency within oracy somewhat depends upon your oral language skills more generally, yeah.

Julie Dockrell   
Absolutely. I mean I can't change my conversation if I don't have the vocabulary to talk about the situation or the appropriate grammar to use the sentences to create that that context.

Mark Quinn   

And when you and when you hear politicians as we are hearing politicians now talk more about this thing. Are they thinking about oral language or are they thinking about oracy in terms of those registers and those contexts that they think that young people need to be able to be fluent in?

Julie Dockrell   
I'd be a very rich woman if I knew what was in the minds of politicians, so unfortunately I can't say. But I think often they're talking about oracy because they drop in this notion of debating skills and so forth. So, I think they're talking about use of language, the flexible use across those different contexts. And it's interesting because often children, particularly haven't had the opportunity to develop those skills. So, at the moment I'm working with colleagues in Kent on a year 4 programme project that's looking at supporting children's conversation skills and just basic aspects of turn taking, responding to the question that's asked on something that interests you. So, in general, I'd say the politicians are talking about those more sophisticated uses of language without the other.

Elaine Long 
I think some of the politicians could do a bit of lesson in turn taking and having seen some of those debates in the Houses of Parliament. Julie, I was going to ask you, sorry, I'm an English teacher and I can't help it. I'm curious about this. What? What do you see as the link between all language skills and written skills for students?

 

Julie Dockrell   
OK. So it's a really good question. I think there would be quite a lot of research on oral language and reading and you know there's that early stuff about, you know, phonological skills and phonics impacting on decoding. So that's important. But on top of that, then you've got vocabulary helping, you've got projection of text. So, the reading is really key and well established the groups of children who have particularly problems with oral comprehension, who have who can read texts, but they don't get the full meaning, the inferences from the text that they're reading.

 

Writing, they're much less research done on this and it, and in fact it's only about 15, 16 years ago now we were doing a project on children who were struggling with language and communication. I was talking with it was about, the teachers, how they understood how the children were in the classroom, because most of these children are in mainstream classrooms, and one of the teachers said to me at that point she said, well, you know, I can understand about the language and I can structure my classroom about that, so, but I can't understand why they can't get their ideas out on paper.

Very insightful point, something I hadn't really thought about before and I went and looked at the literature and at that time there were only two papers on children who struggled with language and writing, and since then you know there's been much more work and we've had several grants here at the IOE looking at the way oracy underpins text generation.

Elaine Long 

It's a bit like what you were saying about oral language skills being the foundation of obviously in some ways you could make the argument that oral language schools are the foundation of reading and writing, or at least there's a really strong connection there, I guess. 

Julie Dockrell   
I've a colleague in at the University of Padava who's just recently published a really interesting intervention study. So, these were a group of children who are 10, another group who are 15. It's a typical control trial. And one group were given oral language sentence combining exercises, so being flexible, starting with two words. So let's start. Let's talk 2 easy words cat and dog.

 

Dog chased the cat. The cat. You know you can play around with that, but she built a whole series of these and they became more complex in terms of the oral get and what did they. What did she find? It impacted on the written language? They were much more flexible writers.

Elaine Long   
I think this this really obviously raises the importance of children developing these skills right from the foundations of their education in early years. And I know you've dedicated a lot of time to the question of how teachers can support children to develop these skills, and one of the ways that you've done that is through the C Scott communication supporting classroom observation tool. I managed to get that right despite my sip of spice made.

 

And that tool, correct me if I'm wrong here, but from my understanding my reading about it identifies the features of effective oral language environments and then supports teachers to think about how they might incorporate them into their own classrooms and teaching. Would you mind explaining a bit more about that? What's on the tool and why and what are some of the things teachers can take from that?

Dckrell, Julie   
Yeah, well, this is a freely available tool that was developed out of a very large research programme. We were involved a number of years ago. The better communication research programme, which was from the John Berkhoe's work.
And basically what we did was we created what I'm going to call an evidenced informed tool. So, these are the aspects in the classroom learning environment which have been shown to be important at suppose supporting children's oral language skills. So there's the environment. So, for example in in a year one class that might be a book corner.

 

There's the opportunities that children have. So, if you're sitting in a class with 30 children and you don't have possibilities, interact with your peers or the teacher, you don't actually have any opportunities to practise. And we can talk about those in a bit more detail. Then there are what we call the interactions, and actually, you know, in hindsight, I think it sees interactions that drive language. It's the ways in which we, as adults or teachers, are learning supported assistance, talk with children.

 

Now, obviously, talking with children does depend on the situation, and it does depend on having a class that's reasonably quiet where you don't get interference from external noise, but it's the ways in which we talk with children, a scaffold there oral language skills and teachers use this tool differently.

 

So, we trialled it and a number of studies looked at, it's been used in research, but also teachers have taken it away and in one school I know, they videoed each other. So SENCO videoed the teacher, the two teachers, I think it was a year one class can't be 100% sure. And then they went back and looked at the video and they thought this term let's focus on this.

 

So we'll talk, we'll focus on recasting what children say, and then they went back, you know, so it's their tool. The power is there is to choose what's right for their classroom because you know what's right for a classroom up the road from where I live might not be that what's needed in Brighton or Dover or Scotland, for example.

Elaine Long   
It sounds to me like integral to creating high quality talk environments is being responsive to the moment, so necessarily you can't produce a checklist for that, I guess because it is about being responsive to what the students are doing. There are a set of skills it sounds like that teachers are employing, looking for opportunities to deepen things.

Julie Dockrell  
Yeah. I mean, I think absolutely that's right. It's. But you also have to have the opportunities to do that. So, you know, if you're working with children in smaller groups or pupils in smaller groups, you have an opportunity to interact in that way. If it's activities that you know, the children or the young people have gone away and done themselves, you're no longer part of that. So, they don't have access to that opportunity.

 

Or if a child's really quiet and they don't say anything, what do you do with that?
So, there are a lot of challenges for teachers that, you know, makes me a little bit frustrated with this, you know, oracy hand waving, you know, because it's not a new problem.

Elaine Long   
No, and can I just ask, we're talking about the primary setting here and early years, but thinking up to secondary school, is this something you'd say be equally relevant to children as they progress through their school careers?

Julie Dockrell   
Absolutely. I mean the way in which you use those skills or embed those oracy skills within the classroom will differ. But you know, let's take a, you know, very simple example. I don't know what year in history they teach to talk about fascism, but imagine year nine. 

Mark Quinn 
Year 9. Year 9 mainly.

Julie Dockrell   

So year nine, we've got fascism. Teacher gives definition of fascism, off they go. Well, we don't learn the meanings of words, let alone very complex concepts in one example like that.

 

So, embedding those activities throughout, you know the year and in those contexts will help and also it will allow children to be able to use this in a fluent way in their written texts and what they've got to produce. Science terms are exactly the same. I mean science is very complex terms and the ways in which you use them in the language differs. So yeah, absolutely important.

Elaine Long  
It's interesting that you talk about teaching vocabulary, because that's often something that comes up on our ECT practitioner inquiries. There are always and hearteningly so, really interested in how they make, they can expand their students vocabulary in primary and secondary. What would you say are some of the best ways of doing that? You've already mentioned some of the importance of using and speaking that word in lots of different contexts and providing the opportunities to do that. Are there any more effective ways that you've seen of teaching vocabulary?

Julie Dockrell   
Yeah, one of another colleague who’s at the University, Royal Holloway. She's done some very interesting work. I think it was a year nine year, ten group. Very interesting study where in half the classes the key vocabulary items for that class were written on the board and in half they weren't. And guess what? The ones where they were written on the board are the children or the kids in the classroom learnt them or were able to use them flexibly.

I think for all of us, it's important to be challenged. So, if you think of yourself being challenged in a situation, you know going to an evening class to learn a new language, you know the chances that you're going to pick these things up by just being told whatever the word is and then use it flexibly in your language is about zero, you know.

Mark Quinn 
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I know you've written elsewhere, Julie, I think you don't favour or see as a kind of subject, but in its own right, you've been, you know, you absolutely see it needing to be embedded across curricula, which is, I guess, why you're picking up examples there from history and examples from science. I know that you've got a particular research interest in the in early years settings. And a lot of the people listening to this podcast work in earlier settings, so it would be remiss of us, not to give you a chance to talk particularly about that area.

 

And especially a study that you, I know you've been working on in Tower Hamlets, this is the CPD study around talking time. Is that right? So, what can you tell us about that study and what you're learning from that?

Julie Dockrell   
OK, so it was about 10 years ago where my colleague Morag Stuart, who's now retired, had been reading in Tower Hamlets, and she'd been doing phonics work with them research projects on phonics. And she came back and she was saying to me, phonics, I can get no problem. But they don't understand the words they're reading. They don't know what the, you know, they don't have that context to understand what they've just decoded really well, so Morag and I started a project there, which we developed from the research evidence that has three components within it. 

One is activities around making inferences from books, so this is not that you have to read a book to a group of children and the children are in small groups. It's that you talk about the text you're reading. What do you think's happening next? Why is that going to happen? So, you could spend your whole 10 minutes on one page of the book because there's a lot to interact with. So, you're helping children develop their inference skills. 

Another activity that was about vocabulary learning but around games, the best example I've seen probably about teaching vocabulary to children in these very socially disadvantaged settings with learning support assistant who was doing here we go around the Mulberry Bush. So, she had a trail of children behind her, out in the playground, and they would brush their teeth and comb their hair. And these were words the children didn't know. But by embedding it in with within the game, and there were a whole range of activities like that, acting out games so you can pretend you're going on holiday. 

And the third one was, we called it hexagons but it's a narrative text where we took pictures of the local environment and then you'd put one down and you'd start talking about it, maybe going to the doctor. Have you ever been to the doctor? So key principles were about being in small groups but also helping the staff ask these open-ended questions and at the time we had quite a lot of challenge with the early years, more higher up professionals and organisational people because they said early years is a time for free play and open access and you’re teaching them, and the argument was actually, no, what we're doing is playing games with them, and we're using language sensitively around that because I'd seen a number of settings where the early years teachers had created amazing displays. 

One was, I remember she did it about animals and who played with it in this disadvantage nursery.  Two little, very articulate girls and you know, everybody else was outside, running around shouting. So that meant you were building in disadvantage by not giving them the opportunity.

Mark Quinn   
And this particular CPD that it's got this talking time is that right? So, people can get access to this?

Julie Dockrell  
Right. So talking times the intervention that Morag and I put together and we published on that, then during lockdown unfortunately or just before lockdown, the Nuffield Foundation funded a trial, which we ran out and I worked with my colleague at Oxford, Sandra Mathers, who's an expert in CPD. And we worked a lot with professionals in that sense and we refined it and it's now a trial funded by the Education Endowment Foundation and over 140 early year settings, primarily disadvantaged ones, so the information you can see the videos and there's information and there's work published about it. 

Just want to highlight one thing. It's different about what we aim to do with talking time than some other types of interventions that are out there. Talking time is meant to be universal within the setting, so it's not just that staff pick out the children who they think are struggling, because actually we're quite bad at picking up four year olds who are struggling. 

It is a universal intervention which will be more appropriate in certain areas where there are red flags that children are likely to struggle with oral language. But it is not, you know, in the jargon, it's not a Tier 2 or withdrawal or anything like intervention. 

You know it's the way in which we help the children and should they have that opportunity. But, you know, staff are in very difficult situations and then another training.

Mark Quinn   
Well, in fact you I know that you this is another theme that you're interested in, Julie, which is the one of the barriers to embedding better oral language in classrooms is the skills that teachers maybe don't have and don't have and haven't had the training to acquire. And of course, you know, Elaine and I work on the early career framework, and so we're, you know, particularly interested in early career teacher development 

So, and one of the areas of course, lots of our teachers work in classrooms where there are many languages spoken and I know that you have an interest, particularly in those early language, the development of early language that you know for children who might have experienced their early language development in another language.

 

So, they're now being taught, let's say, in English, but their mother tongue is something different, and that affects the way they think and the way they communicate, and perhaps also the way they learn so. If you're a teacher in that context and that in multilingual classrooms. What do you think is helpful for teachers to know about how they can develop those classroom communication skills in those contexts for those children.

Julie Dockrell   
It's clearly a challenge and there are different types of multilingual classrooms that exist, and I think that's really important because, you know, people talk about trans languaging, you know, hopping between languages. But that's fine if there are two languages or even maybe 3 languages in your school. But if you've got 50 different languages going in the school, this is just not going to be feasible in terms of what you do.

 

I mean, of course, it is exceedingly important about what a lot of schools do is acknowledge the diversity of languages because all languages need to be respected in that right. But for the teacher I think it is particularly challenging. I think the important thing, there's sort of principles to do. So it's not that the children are going to learn the language differently. They may need things broken down. So, if you are a 10 year old but only have English language of a 5 year old then the way in which the language is used will have to be restructured if you like, but the concepts need to be there because just because you don't have the language doesn't mean you don't have the cognitive skills and ability to engage with that. So that's the first thing.

I think the other issue about it is to be aware of a distinction. So, there's a distinction.
It runs a quite across languages that they talk about in terms of transparent or opaque orthographies, so that's real jargon for you here. But a transparent orthography is one pretty much where you write the word the way it sounds. So, you get that in Italian pretty much, you know, as a transparent orthography.

Mark Quinn   
Mm hmm.

Julie Dockrell   
English, by contrast, is one of the worst in terms of orthography, so it's extremely difficult, you know.

Mark Quinn   
Yeah.

Julie Dockrell  
So you know, if children were brought up with a language where the orthography is more transparent, this will become a particular challenge that they need to address. The other side about that is that transparent orthographies often have again a little bit of jargon, more complex morphology. That's the way the word is made-up. So, within the word in more complex morphology. You can have a word that will give you plurality. It will give you gender. It might give you something about a verb, so it's got a lot more information whereas.

Mark Quinn   
All built into the individual word, yeah.

Julie Dockrell   
In the one word, yeah. Yeah, but you don't in English. English is very simple. So, challenging for teachers, but always interesting to think about why that error might be happening and how much it links back to you know, the original language and to use that as a learning point.

Mark Quinn   
What I've understood from that, Judy is English is opaque in its orthography. In other words, it's difficult to spell, and therefore it'll be difficult to sound out. It will be difficult to read if English is not your home language, and particularly so if your home language has what you've said is a transparent orthography, in other words.

Essentially, you say what you see so it you can sound it up pretty predictably. The letters will sound almost the same in any context, but so that that's one problem between English and some other languages. But another issue which is home to the reverse of that is the English is simple in other ways. So the word pretty much stands the same, more or less, wherever appears in a sentence,, we add an S when we want to make it plural. But pretty much every other time it sounds it's almost the same, whereas in other language which might be more you know, simpler to spell because they are transparent in their spelling. Might be more complex in other ways, which means that they build into words the gender of the word their tense, perhaps of the word, or their the meaning within the sentence of that word and all of that is built into the wiring of that young learner, because if they've developed their language skills in a different language, which a language which behave behaves differently to English, they're going to find the transition into English more difficult. 

Do I get points for explaining that well?

Julie Dockrell   
Yeah, you get 10 out of 10, but it's what make it makes language so exciting. You know, it really is. I mean I think you know it that is an opportunity in a classroom to think about language not become so English centric and explore whys and wherefores of these different aspects.

Mark Quinn   
But obviously it would be helpful if teachers just know that right, just to recognise that that's what English is like and other languages are not always like that.

Julie Dockrell   
Yeah, yeah.

Elaine Long   
I was just thinking that, you know, often it can feel like as a teacher, people are just increasingly adding things to your workload and we might have early career teachers listening, and I have to know about this and do that. But I think what I'm very much hearing is this isn't about an addition to your workload, this is the lens that you shine on all your teaching and awareness and ability to constantly look for opportunities to further children's oral language skills and think about what oral language skills they'll need to access the curriculum your teaching, so you're advocating a holistic approach, really.

Julie Dockrell   
And it's how you can problem solve it around. There are two aspects I'll drop in from my master's teaching. There are two examples that I use often. And these are two teachers either experienced teachers, they sit back and think, Oh well, I didn't know that. So, you might both know this. One of the first lectures I start by is describing, asking if anybody knows what the definition of a hoyden is. And they all look at me like, you know, I've come off the planet Mars.

And of course, Hoyden is a boisterous young woman and I explain that right, and then we get to three hours later at 8:30 at night, and just about everybody can remember that I mentioned that, but virtually nobody remembers what that word meant, you know, and these are highly intelligent, articulate, you know, and that's just one. And the other one about morphology. So, we've agreed that English isn't a very morphologically rich language. There's inflectional morphology, those S’s and the E-D-S and get in the past tense.

 

But there is a bit of derivational morphology. And one of the most interesting words about derivational morphology is how words come from or developed from other sorts of words, and we talk about, you know, we talk about blueberries because they're blue. And, you know, we do the berries like that, through that. Raspberries. Why they like that? And then why is a strawberry a strawberry? And people look at me like, you know, I go well. Well, of course, the strawberry is a strawberry because initially it was grown on straw so that it wasn't eaten by the slugs or go mouldy in the woods. So those are quite fun things to do and to learn about yourself, I think.

Elaine Long   
Yeah, and it makes me think about the experience of students in classrooms who find language harder to access for various reasons and what it must be like to be in a classroom and exist in the SC of words that your teacher is talking for a long time and you can't access them because you know you they don't make sense to you and then you're not going to access the learning either. And I think that that's so crucial for me because a lot is made about the importance of explanations in classrooms now which are really important, but within that I think it's even more important than no one's going to understand the explanation unless they understand the words you're using. Unless you're constantly giving them an opportunity to learn those words in different contexts as well, and to talk about them themselves, I think.

It's really really, really important, I think. It's having an awareness of that can improve classroom experience for a lot of students.

 

In terms of oral language skills, I think one of the things we should mention is they're not just linked to academic progress but also someone's progress as an individual and as a human and pastorally in schools, they become very, very important and we know that poor oral language and special needs social disadvantages are all characteristics associated with school exclusions, and it can be difficult for a teacher to remember that poor communication is not the same thing as misbehaviour, especially when they occur together. 

In your research and experience, have you seen any good examples where teachers have particularly broken this link?

Julie Dockrell   
With my psychologist hat on, I'll say links are associations, you know, so you have to think about what those links are between them? What those drivers are? But in terms of practicalities in classrooms, yes. I mean, I've seen teachers use, you know, very simple techniques just to help children. This is probably more primary children, but also understand, you know, how they ask a question if they don't know using, you know red, green and amber little stickers. Does he know where we are with things?
And bending things down so that they help you know, this conversation project that we're doing with Kirsten Albert Smith University of Kent.

I mean, if you don't know what a conversation exchange is. How are you ever going to manage negotiation with your peers or with a teacher? You know, and also good teachers check that somebody's understood what they've said because you know you can go off completely in the wrong way if you think somebody's being rude when actually they don't have a clue what you're saying and they're just agreeing with you, you know.

Elaine Long  
I think that's really vital actually in having worked in education for a long time and looked at a lot of incident forms of behaviour incidents, I think sometimes that that miscommunication or misinterpretation is vital as well.

Julie Dockrell   
Yeah.

Elaine Long   
Well, we are getting to the end of our bottle of spiced mead, so I guess it's time to bring the conversation to a close, but we always give our guests a post-it-note to write some advice on. So, I'm going to hand you over your post it note, Julie, what would you like to write on it and who would you like to give it to or where would you like to stick it? You can put it anywhere.

Julie Dockrell   
OK, so I thought a little bit about this and what I'd like on this post-it, is listen, reflect and check if understood or you've been understood., and then maybe I'll have a second one and say act and respond then. It's all very well listening, but you need to do something with that.

 

I'd stick it on my own computer before I say anything to make sure that, but I would also think that this is relevant for all of us, all of us, as adults, and I'm, and particularly, I think you know, I don't know whether you've encountered this, but I have, as individuals progress through the academic hierarchy. They tend to deliver rather than listen, and we should all listen because we can go to the next step.

Mark Quinn   
Do you know Elaine? Just thinking there. In all the times and all the guests we've had coming into the staffroom, I don't think we've ever had a guest who gave a post-it-note to themselves. And that is refreshing and it's true, isn't it that advice we give to others, we should, we might start by giving to ourselves.

 

I can hear some Jingle Bells in the background which tells me that replacing the normal school bell, which tells us we have sadly come to the end of our conversation. Julie.

It's been really great to listen to this morning. I've got crumbs all over me from the mince pies that I've been munching while listening. Elaine, we know is a little bit tipsy on that spiced mead. But it's been a great pleasure to listen to you and to talk to you today. And we wish you best luck in all the rest of the work that you've been doing. Happy Christmas and a great 2025.

Julie Dockrell   
Yeah. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and thank you very much for having me and listening and reflecting with me.

Mark Quinn  
Our thanks go to Professor Julie Dockrell, Professor of Psychology and Special Education at UCL for sharing spiced Mead and minced pies with us this week in The Staffroom.

Elaine Long  
Please do get in touch if you would like to be part of the conversation, click on the link at the bottom of the UCL staffroom web page.

Mark Quinn   
If you've enjoyed this episode, there's more where that came from. Search IOE podcast from wherever you get your podcasts to find episodes of The Staffroom as well as more podcasts from IOE.

Elaine Long   
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