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How can your teaching be remarkable?

Are you a teacher, trainer, lecturer or home educator seeking to become more creative, more dynamic, and to get better results ? Could you benefit from fresh ideas? My mission is to enable you as a teacher to be remarkable.

Become the catalyst for deeper, more creative learning and teaching. Use your passion for education (or rediscover it) to find new ways to motivate your learners. You might be seeking new ways to teach to bring greater creativity and enjoyment into play alongside, of course, achieving great results. This is what I offer – the tools to transform your approach. The tools and inspiration to be remarkable.

There’s something in the air

When I trained to become a lecturer in further education 22 years ago, the target culture was just beginning. Teachers and lecturers were free to follow their own path, and were trusted to know about their students. They were able to keep their teaching in harmony with the moods of learners, and after meeting the learners on their territory lead to a place of greater knowledge and flexibility of thinking.

Increasingly education at all levels has become target driven. Increasingly the freedom to be creative – which remarkable teachers take the opportunity to be – has been stifled.

And now there’s new thinking in the air. If you only look at one other area of this site click through to the resources page and watch Sir Ken Robinson speaking at TED.

It is too soon to say that the freedom to teach is back. There is a groundswell of opinion that change is needed. How can you change within the system as it now stands and still find the space to – as Seth Godin says – Be Remarkable? You can do it. And I have the wanton desire to inspire you. Together let’s create a tribe of remarkable teachers. Are you up for making a real difference to one of the most important areas of human development?

So what’s remarkable about me?

Briefly, very briefly my, story. Because you might be asking who I am to dare create this tribe?

I left my role as a lecturer in further and higher education in 2001, partly because I was frustrated by the contraints being placed upon us. I was training teachers and finding that the gap between my creativity and the passion I wanted to inspire in my aspiring teachers was becoming ever wider. I could see their initial enthusiasm disappearing into thin air as they realised to survive – never mind thrive and certainly never mind be remarkable – was outside of the contraints of the target culture.

So my career culminated in an MA in Education from the Open University, a rapid move into teacher education and into management, and then a midlife crisis which took me in a new direction. It lead to extensive and advanced training in neuro-lingusitic programming (NLP) which transformed my life. And now it’s time for me to do more with my thinking about education. It’s time for my ideas to ship.

Oh and NLP? There’s a lot from that field that can make a real difference, which is why I’m so passionate about this approach and why I recommend adding these processes to your skill set. Keep thinking and your mind open. NLP enables you to do just that.

My aim is for these pages to grow into a resource for anyone involved in teaching and learning, of course including parents and home educators. You can benefit from the workshops I run (public and as staff development events), the trainings I support (currently there’s a great opportunity to see Dr. Richard Bandler in Amsterdam) and find new ideas (or at least some questions to inspire your journey further into remarkable teaching) in my daily blog. I’ll be gathering the best videos I can find from TED and elsewhere, the best guest bloggers, and the best articles.

There’s something in the air. How remarkable a teacher can you become?