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View from the Classroom
The Initiative receives many fascinating emails, but few are as thought-provoking as the one from a seventeen-year-old English girl who had been at a discussion about Overschooled but Undereducated at the Mahindra United World College in India.
No Comments »Competitive or Collaborative?
It is an ages-old question; are humans predominantly competitive or collaborative? If we can be both what conditions how we behave from moment to moment?
No Comments »The Urgent and the Important
It is nearly forty years ago that, as a newly appointed Head, an older colleague gave me a piece of priceless advice. “Divide the morning’s mail into two piles, the urgent and the important. Immediately deal with the important and leave the urgent until later in the day when you will probably find that somebody else has sorted it out.”
No Comments »Citizen of the World
By using the life story of Peter Puget to illustrate the relationship of prepubescent learning to the nature of the adolescent brain, I may have lost interest of those readers with no affinity with the Pacific Northwest.
No Comments »Adolescents Crave Purpose
“When I told my 16-year-old son the title of your book,” said a teacher in Manchester ten days ago, “he responded with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, ‘that book must have been written just for me. That’s why I’m so frustrated. Endless hours of schooling seem to be giving me little preparation for the world I think I live in.’”
No Comments »Who will take Education Where
Like many others in recent weeks I have become something of a ‘party policy watcher’, comparable to those who watch the fascinating antics of dolphins so as to try and understand how their brains work. As the General Election gets ever nearer, the behaviour of these policy wonks seems to have become ever more erratic, eccentric and represents apparently hopeless organisation behind the scenes.
No Comments »A Book That Was Never Published
In the first three years of the last decade I struggled, amidst a diary full of speaking engagements and numerous conferences, to write a book with the title of Master and Apprentice: Reuniting thinking with doing. It was a good book, the MSS of which I still turn back to when I need to reclaim parts of an argument, but the publisher found it too long and, in his view, “too broadly based, requiring too much additional thinking on the part of a reader.”
No Comments »Assessing the Manifestos
Last evening’s (8/2/10) BBC’s Newsnight report on the Swedish Private (for profit) School system prompts the question as to whether any other country can teach English schools how to improve, without the English first rigorously and honestly analysising what is the essence of their educational predicament. Contrary to what I suspect their glossy Party Manifestos will say shortly there is no one panacea that can deal with the numerous, yet inter-related, problems which have placed English education in a difficult, unpleasant and often embarrassing situation.
No Comments »A Complete and Generous Education
As the General Election edges closer two Reports, “Liberal Education and the National Curriculum” published by Civitas, and the University of Bristol’s Transition from Primary to Secondary School are likely to catch the attention of politicians.
No Comments »Readers responses to Michael Shaw’s review of “Over-schooled but Undereducated”, TES, 22nd January 2010
Janet M. Lawley, former headmistress and an advocate for children. What a pity that Michael Shaw was unfamiliar with the concept of cognitive apprenticeship as ... Read on
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