Deus ex Machina
Presentation to the Sunday Times Festival of Education, exploring the "God in the Machine". The notion that it is through setting up a class environment that concentrates on the imperatives of authenticity and agency, the aspects of learning that we care about...
Presentation to Teachmeet BETT 2014
You can also read my "It Takes a Village" Post
Agency through Authenticity
Presentation to the #i2ipartnership teachmeet, held on 24 October 2013
Build a New English Department: Step One – The People
He aha te mea nui? He tangata. He tangata. He tangata. (What is the most important thing? It is people, it is people, it is people.) I start a new year in a new role, Head of Department for English. As part of my application process for the position, I was asked to...
An Explanation: Romeo and Juliet – Fate and Interpretation
This month's #blogsync calls for "an example of a great classroom explanation". I must admit that I have thought twice about the following contribution as there's a sense that it really does put me in the firing line - and with a recent damning judgement by an...
Four Successful Homework Strategies
Homework is one of the most fraught areas of secondary teaching. We know it's important, its impact is visible and its routines don't offend common sense. Yet in the daily reality of the classroom homework is so often reduced to an after-thought, a misery and a...
Presentation to Pedagoo London
This is the information that accompanied my two presentations to Pedagoo London on 2 March 2013. The event was a grass-roots un-conference run by teachers for our own professional development. It brought together a group of about 200 practitioners from all over the...
Presentation to Teachmeet BETT: From Intention to Effect
In this presentation, delivered live to Teachmeet BETT 2013, I introduced the intentions behind the development of EDUTRONIC and then provide evidence, in the form of a snapshot of a single interaction with a Year 8 Student, Henry via his online English journal
If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes
Albert Einstein defined insanity as: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet, inescapably, the English education system ignores this logic, and repeats the same tired strategies and the same ill-informed notions in and out of the...