Alan Thompson - Thoughts on Education

“Monseigneur Bienvenu had been formerly, according to the accounts of his youth and even of his early manhood, a passionate, perhaps a violent man. His universal tenderness was less an instinct of nature than the result of a strong conviction filtered through life into his heart, slowly dropping in upon him, thought by thought; for a character, as well as a rock, may be worn into by drops of water.”     ―   Victor Hugo,   Les Misérables   I hate generation theory. The very idea that a generation’s worth of unique souls can be pigeon-holed (and often caricatured) irritates me. It is an intellectual shortcut to generalize at such scale, and I do my best not to do it. That said, there are certainly significant differences in the way that I (and my generation) grew up compared to how a child would experience the world today.   And as tempting it is to get all curmudgeonly and reflect on the ‘good old days’ in a Gen-X kind of way, that is not the point of t...

As a young teacher who had dabbled in 'programming' - harbouring an obsession with evolving computer technologies (that persists still) - I have always been an early adopter of technology. Coming from an era when my first dissertation was researched in a library using microfiche, when my first school reports were type written (on an actual typewriter!) with comments written in black fountain pen - when tablet technology and ubiquitous connectivity emerged in the market place, I (and many others like me) recognised this as a pivotal moment in education. A moment where technology transformed the classroom through connectivity, clever Apps, online interaction, AI, ubiquitous knowledge, and gamification.    Classrooms were transformed into connected places where device use was commonplace, and a whole pedagogy emerged to harness the incredible new tools that we had at our disposal. And it was good - the notoriously slow evolution of teaching and learning took a quantum leap f...

Of all of the oddities that school leaders will encounter in their tenure, the concept of tradition in schools is one of the most unhelpful and divisive. It creates a completely false dichotomy (you are either a 'traditionalist' or 'a modern thinker') that hardens opinions and stifles discussion. Tradition is used to justify all manner of things that cannot stand on their own justificatory feet (beyond the 'it is tradition' argument), and can cast its cloak of mystery over practices and rituals that, in the cold light of day, are unjustifiably daft, or worse - damaging.     One of the strangest aspects of tradition is that it is so resistant to examination. It exists in the lore of schools as that untouchable truth which defies scrutiny - we dance around in almost biblical reverence, terrified of falling foul of the great gods of tradition - alumni and parents.   That is not to say that there is no place for beautiful ceremony, quaint practices, and meaningful r...