This piece was written as a contribution to Rory Gallagher's "Who I am, What I do" teachers' personal testimony blog. My path to the classroom started for me on the impossibly isolated South Island of New Zealand. It’s a story of how I was saved by literature and...
Research in Action: Presentation to ResearchEd 2013
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
What I do when the Government isn't watching.
An intrepid group of educators are headed off to Brighton to run a teachmeet on the fringes of the Labour Party conference, here is part of my contribution to the event – I’ll upload the full speech after the event. The presentations in full will all be...
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...
Presentation to LATE Summer Conference
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
Grant More Freedom
This journal entry was written as part of the first #blogsync, an initiative in the synchronisation of online journals by UK Educational professionals. The first shared topic was “The Universal Panacea? The number one shift in UK education I wish to see in my...









