8 Years ago, Bagley's daughter Scarlett died, age 7. We take some time in this episode to examine how this deep loss strengthens her work in the classroom. Rarely does anyone gain an insight like this into the privacy of another person's grief. As a listener to this...
23 years ago Chris wrote an entry in his online journal that described his time at Otago Boys' High School. This was subsequently published in a history of Otago Boys' High School that was published for its 150th. We'd been searching around for a text to analyse on...
Our last episode attracted some really interesting feedback, so we've used that to cue us into this week's discussion. After setting out our stall last week with apocalyptic statistics about boys' education - we're now embarking on our mission to explore what we do,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Teaching writing is one of the greatest joys and challenges of the English domain. Along the way, you encounter, acquire and discard many approaches and strategies - but there are always some that stick. Unlike the teaching of reading, for which I entered the teaching...
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...
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...