Every now and again, I meet some special people who remind me in the most delightful of ways why I have spent the greater part of my life involved in education. Such people somehow manage to take me back to why I chose to go into teaching almost four decades ago rather than try to become the songwriter […]
Continue reading →This post belongs to an occasional series on teacher professional development. Previous posts include The Reflective Teacher as Reflective Learner and Teacher Professional Development in the UK: North & South. If philosophy is the quest for wisdom then every teacher who respects the import of their vocation needs to be a philosopher as well as a teacher. The two […]
Continue reading →I have visited South Africa many times in the past, but my most recent trip, just last month, in August 2016, has undoubtedly given me a wonderful experience that no previous visit allowed me. Columba Leadership is on a mission, and that mission is to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in South Africa the […]
Continue reading →This is the fourth in an occasional series of posts highlighting some of the books that led me into education or that have greatly influenced me as an educator over the years. In this post, I want to look at the book that first excited me about the possibilities offered by the ‘microcomputer’ in education, an interest that has […]
Continue reading →I’m sure that my Christian and Jewish friends see it differently, but from my secular and humanist perspective, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel is an interesting one, since it seems to be a tale of a god who feared human knowledge so much that he visited a confusion of tongues on the people of […]
Continue reading →A number of years ago, I gave a talk entitled ‘The Joy of Learning’ to the Australian College of Educators in the impressive setting of Geelong College, a few miles south-west of Melbourne. In my presentation I spoke about Convivial Learning, an idea that I had derived from just a few short phrases offered by Ivan Illich in his […]
Continue reading →While geopolitically, England and Scotland appear to be on quite different trajectories after the Brexit referendum, at least we seem to be of one mind when it comes our respective approaches to teacher professional development. The Department of Education in Whitehall today published a much-awaited document: “Standard for Teachers’ Professional Development“. This offers a detailed description of […]
Continue reading →…..and gets it completely wrong! Peter Wilby, whose Guardian writings on education I usually have some respect for, seems to fall heavily into the trap of believing that right can only be distinguished from wrong in education through academic research. On Sugata Mitra and his work (the Hole in the Wall Project and now his School in […]
Continue reading →In just a few weeks from now, in August, I have the great pleasure, and no little honour, of travelling to South Africa, a country that I have visited often, and one that I have great affection for. I have been invited by Columba Leadership to speak to their annual gathering of partners and sponsors in […]
Continue reading →Pedagogical theory is not only technical but cultural, ideological and political. If it is to have any impact, it must be self-consciously all of these. So wrote Jerome Bruner in his book, Relevance of Education. He died last weekend, on 5th June, aged 100, in the same city in which he was born: New York […]
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