20
2022
Teacher Well-being: Applying the PERMA model.
I gave an online talk at Mortimer Community College this week. In it, I was exploring the steps teachers can take to both teach effectively and build the resilience needed to thrive in our wonderful but demanding profession. I have been fascinated by this question for a number of years now: what helps people to achieve their potential and sustain themselves in teaching? It has...
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06
2022
Introducing: ‘Is Anyone Listening? A Communication toolbox for teachers’
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place” George Bernard Shaw Teaching is communication. How we speak, how we act, how we express ourselves in the classroom is absolutely vital. It can be the difference between building positive relationships and inspiring a deep love of learning, to a complete breakdown in how our classrooms and learning function. What we...
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12
2021
Learning from mistakes
‘Teacher Resilience: Managing stress and anxiety to thrive in the classroom’ came out a year ago today. This is a chapter for anyone who, like me, feels they have already made a hundred mistakes since this academic year started! Anxious anecdote As the class rampaged out of the door, a huge sigh of relief escaped from Darrol. To say the lesson had been a disaster...
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30
2021
“Yes we can”: the language of optimism in the classroom.
My six-month year-old has decided his day should begin at an even more unsociably early hour over the past few weeks. In the spirit of optimism, there are some perks: we have managed to sit through three-two hour documentaries on Barack Obama’s rise to the American presidency over the past month. Early morning bonding indeed. I have been writing about applying minimalism principles to the...
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28
2021
Teaching Creative Writing on Teams
I am a strong believer in the benefits of writing in supporting mental health and wellbeing. I know how much it has helped me, particularly over the last five years. Oliver Sacks captures the immersive power of it poignantly in the final paragraph of his autobiography ‘On The Move’: “The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike...
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20
2021
Slow Teaching: Efficient Teacher Talk
If you are anything like me, you have been asked to repeat yourself about a thousand times in this new online teaching world, and you are talking more than ever before. I am hoping sharing this chapter from my first book ‘Slow Teaching: Finding calm, clarity and impact in the classroom,’ (which somehow came out almost three years ago) might help make this exhausting process...
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13
2021
Online English Teaching: Tone in non-fiction texts
The motivation for resurrecting this weekly blog this year is very simple: to reflect carefully on how to be a better English teacher. Is that a possible aim in our new online teaching world? Last week, as I sat with a computer wrestling with Teams and becoming more and more enraged, I would have offered a resounding no. Some teachers chuckle and modestly claim to...
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07
2021
On Teaching Reading.
“There will always be another book to read, or guiltily to reread. And that is a joy for all of us.” Stig Abell ‘Things I learned on the 6.28.’ One book. That, dear reader, was the sum total of my Christmas gift stash. One book. My status as a mid-thirties male, however, was firmly entrenched: legions of socks; more ties than I could possibly...
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20
2020
On Toxic Schools
This is a sample chapter from my new book ‘Teacher Resilience: Managing stress and anxiety to thrive in the profession’. Anxious anecdote 8.15am. Zane’s door opened without warning. Thomas, the school’s deputy headteacher (a man who had been teaching for a grand total of five years), stood with a clipboard and one of the colour-coded spreadsheets that seemed to be an extension of his extremely...
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13
2020
Teacher Resilience
I’m delighted that today is the publication of my third book ‘Teacher Resilience: Managing Stress and Anxiety to Thrive in the Classroom’. As much as a I love the process of writing, I didn’t expect to publish another book this year. To be fair: I didn’t expect much of how this year has turned out! In an attempt to maintain some sanity in between wrestling...
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