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...
Two days ago the long-awaited installation of internet-connected devices landed in my underground classroom. The buzz was palpable. My students, unable to contain their enthusiasm, started to burble inchoate (and largely unwarranted) references to my being "Their...
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...
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...