Bags explores how she creates rich discussion in her English classroom.
Good Chat
Sep 13, 2024 | Advice, Anecdotes, Open Classroom, Opinion, Podcast
Good Chat
Open Evening
Around this time of the year, across the Motu, teachers in secondary schools crack out their very best craft skills and upgrade the displays in their classrooms and departments in readiness for the school Open Evening. Bags and Chris talk about this phenomenon (and...
Thriving after Loss
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...
Appendix 6
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...
Manage Your Wriggling
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,...
Our Presentation at Northern Rocks #NRocks
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...
Who I am, What I 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...
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
Presentation to LATE Summer Conference
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...