Chalk Dust

Welcome to Chalk Dust, the podcast that gives you a front row seat into some of the best classrooms in the world. There are lots of great conversations about teaching and education happening around the world right now. There are already so many fantastic podcasts out there about evidence based practice, and we're so excited to bring you one more, but this one has a distinctive difference. Each episode, Rebecca Birch and Nathaniel Swain break down real classroom footage to illuminate the moments that make great teaching great. Teaching is both a science and an art. There are proven techniques that we know to work, but applying them in real classrooms is where the complexity lies. Our goal? To help you develop the eye of an expert observer, so you can see what makes lessons effective and apply those insights into your own teaching or coaching practice. chalkdust.media

Chalk Dust is a education podcast hosted by Nathaniel Swain, with 20 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Nathaniel Swain hosts Chalk Dust, a education show with 20 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Chalk Dust

  Season Two, Episode 6: The Knowledge Rich Classroom of Laura Stam

  May 31, 202644 minS0

  <p>Summary</p><p>In this episode of Chalk Dust, Rebecca Birch and Dr Nathaniel Swain are joined by Laura Stam, a third grade teacher in Wyoming, writer of The Knowledge Exchange on Substack, 2024–2025 Goyen Fellow, and founding board member of The Reading League Wyoming. Laura takes us inside a knowledge-rich history lesson on the earliest Native American peoples of North America, with a particular focus on the Arapaho and Shoshone peoples of Wyoming.</p><p>The episode explores how a text-based lesson can be highly interactive, precise, and content-rich without becoming fragmented. Using a knowledge organiser, document camera, shared re...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Chalk Dust

  Season Two, Episode 5: The choreography of learning

  May 10, 202639 minS0

  <p>Summary</p><p>In this episode of Chalk Dust, Rebecca Birch and Dr Nathaniel Swain are joined by Hannah Pointon, a Year 3/4 teacher at Woodstock School in Hamilton, New Zealand. Hannah shares how her school has moved towards structured literacy, structured maths, explicit teaching, and teaching behaviour as a curriculum in its own right.</p><p>Using early-year classroom footage, the episode explores how clear routines transform classroom life: lining up, entering the room, organising materials, whole-class reading, whiteboard responses in maths, and even collecting lunchboxes. Hannah shows how routines that look simple on the surface are deliberately taught...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Chalk Dust

  Season Two, Episode 4: The power of precision

  Apr 19, 202620 minS0

  <p>Summary</p><p>In this second part of their conversation with Adam Boxer, Rebecca Birch and Nathaniel Swain move from behaviour and presence into the micro-detail of questioning, participation, and formative assessment. Using a retrieval practice clip, Adam unpacks how tightly structured classroom talk—particularly through “name at end” questioning, deliberate wait time, and systematic student selection—ensures every student is cognitively engaged.</p><p>The discussion highlights how seemingly small choices in questioning routines shape accountability, attention, and the flow of classroom thinking. Adam reframes familiar ideas such as “cold call” and “no opt out” into more precise, actionable langu...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Chalk Dust

  Season Two, Episode 3: Getting nitty gritty with it

  Mar 15, 202636 minS0

  <p>Summary</p><p>In this special episode of Chalk Dust, Nathaniel Swain and Rebecca Birch sit down with Adam Boxer to explore the thinking behind Carousel Teaching’s new video library. Rather than simply showcasing polished classroom clips, Adam explains how the platform is designed to pair tightly curated footage with explicit professional learning, commentary, and guidance so teachers understand not just what works, but why. The conversation focuses on one deceptively small but powerful domain of classroom craft: behaviour, transitions, and teacher presence.</p><p>Using clips from Adam’s own classroom and from colleagues Abby and Jack, the...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Chalk Dust

  Season Two: Episode 2: Expertise Goes Global

  Feb 22, 202634 minS0

  <p>Summary</p><p>In this episode of Chalk Dust, Rebecca Birch and Dr Nathaniel Swain are joined by Jo-Anne Dooner and Geoff Ongley from Get Reading Right, Training 24/7 and Learning 24/7. The conversation explores how high-quality, knowledge-rich literacy instruction can be made accessible at scale — including in remote and international contexts.</p><p>Using training videos rather than live classroom footage, Jo-Anne models a structured morning routine designed to build factual knowledge, grammatical metalanguage, and sentence construction over time. The episode unpacks how deliberate instruction in parts of speech, schema-building, chanting, live scribing, and gradual release culminates in a “quarantined” writin...

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Chalk Dust. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.