It was the first day back at school this morning, and we had all the usual restless apprehension in the car on the way in: half of us looking forward to the start of the year, the other half already looking forward to the end of it. Same old. We’ve also been doing the same […]
In the Army, we talked about two kinds of courage: physical and moral. Physical courage is often decided fast. There’s no time to talk yourself out of it. Moral courage is slower. And that’s what makes it harder. A classroom. A boy at a table says something misogynistic. He mutters it quietly enough that the […]
Field Notes from Bari, Italy, 2026 One of my children steadfastly holds that school is “the opposite of holiday.” This is mildly problematic when one happens to be a school principal. Unfortunately, she’s making a compelling case, and sitting by the pool in Italy this week, I’m still mulling that over. There is something rather […]
For over forty years, my favourite colour has been fluorescent pink. Or, to give it its modern marketing name… electric fuchsia. Back then, I rather enjoyed the fact that it wasn’t everyone else’s favourite colour. But judging by this year’s World Cup, that appears to have changed. Which is unfortunate for me, because the thing about […]
We are all collecting immense amounts of data on student wellbeing these days. The proliferation is well-intentioned, and it has been spurred by a $2 trillion global industry, but it has also generated more data than any of us know what to do with. I currently have data sitting across multiple platforms, sheets and tabs. […]
I was determined this year not to tell our graduates to be the best at something. Not the boldest, not the kindest, nor the first. My worry is that if we spend so much time telling young people to be exceptional (which I think we probably do), they might end up believing their education was […]
Living Among the Oxymorons “We live our lives filled with wild contradictions” David Berliner It’s fairly clear I’m an oxymoron. Or at least, I live among them. This morning, as we tried to leave the house, my daughter told me she was “nearly done”. Sadly, we were already late. And anyway, that phrase never means what […]
An old colleague said to me recently, with predictable exasperation, that students who do not hold the door open simply do not have good manners. “Manners maketh man” and all that. Forget our current crop of unhinged dictators; apparently, the real threat to civilisation is the child who lets a door swing shut behind them. In this […]
The point of any conference is not just to meet people, but to help us think better. I was lucky enough to attend the Global IB Conference in Mumbai last week. With more than 1,000 educators and speakers gathered from across the region, it had something of a Tatooine spaceport about it: a busy meeting […]
“Other people, with their differences, can also be right.” International Baccalaureate Mission Statement I’ve done a fair bit of school leadership training over the years. None of it led with a chapter on understanding your parents. Which is peculiar if you think about it. We spend considerable time learning to lead learning, staff, budgets, navigate […]
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