Challenging the narrative of teacher wellbeing. Kat Howard @SayMiss is a woman on a mission: to stop the patronising wellbeing advice often offered to teachers, and instead have a real intellectual dialogue about what we can about teachers being driven out of the profession. Kat, a deputy headteacher and an English teacher is the first guest on ‘The Well Teacher podcast.’ She is the author of...
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Five years ago I had a complete breakdown, which left me with bed bound for weeks and emotionally and physically drained. I was living life at a relentless pace, working ridiculous hours and juggling lots of early responsibility in management in a school in central London. I did eventually return to that employment, but at the end of that school year I moved schools, back...
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Schools are anything but quiet. Their walls reverberate with noise, with a hubbub of activity that begins long before the bell loudly dictates the start of the day. The interpersonal demands are huge: talk and communication dominate every space. For those of us who are more inclined to quiet, it can be an exhausting experience. To the untrained eye it may not appear...
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For the past two months I have had a social media and, for the most part, educational break. I haven’t read anything on education, I haven’t seen a single Twitter feed and I have, as far as possible, tried to live a mobile phone free existence. I won’t bore you too much with the rationale for this, and fear not – this is not another...
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I have spent this week obsessing and fretting about delivering this at the wonderful Teaching and Learning Leeds Conference. This was the initial ‘script’, and while I gave learning it a good bash, what I spluttered through in fifty minutes might not have sounded exactly like this! “The best laid schemes” and all that… I appreciate that this is a slightly terrifying list for...
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“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.” Epictetus A short journey through the remarkable life of the philosopher Epictetus can begin to justify why his words open a chapter on the mystery that is effective behaviour management. Born around 50 A.D he arrived in Rome without family as the property of the rich and powerful Epaphroditus, a man...
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“We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep” William Shakespeare ‘The Tempest’ In our relentlessly fast modern culture, there is one thing that is left tragically ignored. It is a spurred outsider, certainly not embracing our twenty four hour ‘always on’ lifestyle. Carl Honore in ‘In praise of Slow’ describes this incessant need for activity, pace...
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Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece after all. — Nathan W. Morris It is an image familiar in educational environments throughout the land: the red faced, exhausted and agitated teacher, surrounded by streams of student books, paper strewn haphazardly around their desk. The walls are covered in faded, yellowing posters – with the obligatory superfluous rules of the classroom dog-eared and tragically ignored...
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“Throw those curtains wide! One day like this a year would see me right.” Elbow: ‘One Day Like This’ Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’ ends with a gloriously optimistic two and a half minutes, with Guy Garvey’s impassioned repetition of the above refrain building to a crescendo. Never has a song so wonderfully and obviously juxtaposed the act of waking up at the start of a new term....
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Introduction to ‘Slow Teaching,’ which will be published by John Catt Educational on March 2nd 2018. It is available to order from Amazon here. The Slow Teaching Philosophy You have taken the first step: hesitantly opening the pages of this book. There may be elements of doubt in your mind as you recall the repertoire of more fashionable and effective teaching behaviours, a speed-induced cocktail with...
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