Welcome to my blog. If you’ve read the about section, then you already know about me. This blog is an attempt to give my students, and anyone else who is interested in educational thinking and discourse, more of an in-depth insight into some ideas prevalent in the educational domain. This is an alternative to my academic writing, which can be found in the ‘my research’ section of the website. Instead, what I am trying to do is raise some of the difficult and sometimes contentious issues surrounding education, and more specifically schooling, and trying to practicalise it in such a way as it helps us to think about the issues.
While at times I offer solutions to what I see are the bigger problems of schooling often times I just raise the issues and try to unpack it. I want to leave it to you, the reader, to decide what to do with it, or not. As I said, this is not academic research, nor academic writing, it is more musings on topics of interest. I add links where I think they are useful and sometimes will reference academic references, but only if I borrow heavily from someone in particular.
As is so often the case, these ideas and most ideas come from somewhere else. I don’t claim that these are all my original thoughts. I read prolifically and have included a page with some of the more influential books etc that I recommend. Assume that my ideas stem from those books, rather than being genuinely original. I also listen to a vast array of podcasts, some educational and some not, but all thought provoking, which helps me to see the world the way I do and leads to trying to apply those ideas to the world of education. I hope to publish a new blog every 1-2 weeks, but this will vary throughout the year.
The first post on constructivism will be out next Monday 15th March. I will try to keep each post to 2000 words or less – a bite-size chunk of a topic that should be long enough to go into some detail without being too long and boring, I hope. Often times my posts will follow the curriculum I teach, so as to provide extra thought to my lectures, but at times it will stray from this and focus instead on contemporary issues that are prevalent at the time.
If you have questions or topics you’d like to hear my thoughts on, please post or write to me and if the topics are interesting to me, I’ll try to include them in the blog.
I hope you find some of these thoughts and ideas useful and/or thought-provoking.
Sean
Maximising Student Potential 