“It takes no compromise to give people their rights…it takes no money to respect the individual”

The US politician Harvey Milk’s call for equality for the LGBT community – and all minority communities – still resonates more than 40 years after his death. In my career throughout that period, a time that has been spent in schools on different continents and in communities from different religious traditions, I have seen the […]

The Earth is Flat, Kissing Makes You Pregnant, and Everything on WhatsApp is 100% True…

When Hamlet says that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” he isn’t too wide of the mark. We can think ourselves into all sorts of nonsense if we work hard enough. There are still Flat Earthers, people who think global warming is a myth, and that JFK was killed by […]

[The] Play’s the Thing…

I’d like to take a few moments to share a few thoughts about play…

Do your children play at home? I mean, really play. I don’t mean ‘do they do activities that are organized and structured that they enjoy’. I mean the kind of free, unstructured play that requires neither adult supervision nor software. The kind of play that Boston College psychologist Peter Gray describes as being essential to combat the rising tide of anxiety and depressive disorders that we are seeing in our children.

It is a well-documented phenomenon that we are seeing in schools not only here in Brazil where I live, but in all countries where there has been a decline in opportunities for free play and an increase in protective parenting practices. If you are not familiar with Peter Gray’s work I would recommend you read his blog post The Play Deficit He makes a compelling case for us all to re-evaluate how we create time and space for our children to really play – as well as the worrying consequences if we continue down the path that we seem to be headed if we fall into patterns of overprotection and reward.

So, do your children really get to play?

How Long is Long Term?

There is an often-told anecdote that politicians should make their decisions based on the effects those decisions would have on their children’s children’s children*. This is something that could easily apply to the work of schools, and of educators. So, what would our schools look like if what we taught, how we taught, and what […]

On World Teachers’ Day…

October 5, 2018 To all my fellow educators here at EARJ, to all the teachers I have worked with in the past, and to all the amazing educators I have not yet had the privilege to meet. World Teachers’ Day is a day when I feel immense pride in being an educator. On this day […]

“You can’t do that with a flame thrower …”

A great deal has been written over the past decade or so about keeping children safe, and the trend in some societies toward overprotective parenting. Once upon a time parents saw childhood accidents (falling down in the playground, a skinned knee, a bust lip) as an everyday part of growing up. But something happened: something […]

On the Kindness of Teachers…

Imagine if you had the power to transform a person’s world in a second, in a minute or in an hour. Now imagine if you had that power every single day, over 20, 30, even 40 or more people. That is the power a teacher has when she walks into school.

Intentional Learning

Explorations in the international school world…