EdBlogs

Best known for: In 1999 Mitra carried out a series of Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiments about children's learning. The first experiment involved children being given free access to a computer embedded in a wall between his office and a Delhi slum. The experiment aimed to prove that children could easily learn from computers without any formal trai...

Have you known excellent classroom practitioners who have failed to make the transition to successful school leadership – as middle leaders, senior leaders, or headteachers? Have you known indifferent teachers go on to be skilful and effective leaders? I've been thinking about the relationship between teaching and leading in education recently. It ...

When you have a leadership position within a school, at any level, there are two aspects of wellbeing that need your attention: your own, and that of those you lead. The two are related: if you do not safeguard your own wellbeing, you are less likely to be fully professionally effective, and you are not modelling the approach to wellbeing you want ...

Optimism: it's all about whether the glass half full or half empty, right? Wrong. It turns out that most people have the wrong idea of optimism. So what exactly is it? How important is it? And, most crucially, can you learn to be optimistic? Let's start with a quick test. You can choose only one answer per question. 1) You get lost driving to a fri...

I recently taught a PSHE lesson to a year 8 group on the assumptions we make about people. I started with the word "Australian" – students said common judgements were that they would say "g'day", wear cork hats, like beer, wear shorts, have barbecues all the time and be good at rugby. Then we moved on to "American" – apparently they like burgers, a...