Build a Brilliant Teacher

Build a Brilliant Teacher

When a teacher fails, it's "mea culpa"; when we succeed, it's "didn't the students do well?" Something that struck me when listening to John Hattie speak at the recent London Festival of Education was his exhortation for teachers to speak up in defence of our own...

Winning Hurts

Winning Hurts

Most of what I know about learning I discovered through running on mountain trails. This journal entry represents my manifesto for teaching and learning in my classroom. I want to make something perfectly clear from the outset: while experimentation with technology...

The Real World – A Meta-Letter to My Pupils

The Real World – A Meta-Letter to My Pupils

Picture this: a classroom inhabited by a class preparing for a "functional skills" English assessment. The students are clear about what was expected of them. They are working with focus and the atmosphere in the room is calm. What these boys are earnestly doing, in...