Lesley Murrihy writes a response to some of the comments made in response to her opinion piece, “Let’s talk about teachers’ holidays - the BIG elephant in the room”.

In this opinion piece, Lesley Murrihy (with some trepidation) opens up a conversation about the changing expectations of teachers, and questions whether the current holiday entitlement for teachers supports their wellbeing as they try to meet the needs of every student.

COACHING LEADERSHIP is a hugely powerful approach to the growth and development of leaders and to transforming your school/organisation. In this article, Lesley Murrihy shares the outcomes of a two year Coaching Leadership project at Amesbury School. Her final statement says it all: “I am simply overwhelmed by the growth and development I see in the people around me. How did they get to be so wise?”

In this article I make plea to embrace the spiritual dimension of the world as an integral, essential aspect of what it means to be a teacher and a student. If we don’t, we will, in spite of all our efforts, fall short of the educational task of arousing, through our teacherly gestures and the development of the  (uncertain) knowledge that gestures make possible, the desire in our students for wanting to exist in and with the world in a grown-up way, as subject….

Why are we talking about 22nd century learning already? The advertisement that we loved so much back in the day, “Good things take time” may still be true for cheese but cannot be true of education today. We cannot, must not allow any more generations to pass without cracking the hard nut of change in education – the hard nut of equity in education.

“We cannot go on running schools as though the “other” does not exist or does not matter. To say students should learn in a particular way because this way we might get the best overall outcomes, ignores the “other” for whom this does not work as well.” In this article, Lesley Murrihy explores her understanding of MLE and why these environments might not all be the same.

“For too long the education system has been propped up by the goodwill and self-sacrifice of its teachers, creating an unsustainable education system. This gift of care has been freely given by teachers, but must not be used against teachers to justify continued under-resourcing.”

The ideas in this article are not new. But we are excited to be discovering them anew and to be embarking on a more explicit exploration of “subjectness” and the role of gestures in opening up the space for students [and teachers] to appear as subject. This raft of ideas may assist the rejuvenation of education and it may help education to rescue itself.

A plea to change the conversation about Modern Learning Environments to ensure that the teachers who work within those environments do not become victims of the debate and are not marginalised by it.

It is time for those of us in education to stop simply commenting and to start creating proposals, to test models and to look to hybrid solutions that take account of the complex nature of the 21st century and of education and create positive sum outcomes.  Let's not be like all the king's horses and all the king's men. Let's stop sawing sawdust. 

The miracle of 2017 is that in stepping aside from the day-to-day and the urgent, we don’t lose time, we gain it. So, how do you make that leap away from the business-as-usual and create space for more expansive thinking? Follow Lesley's journey of discovery in 2017, and find out how she made it happen for herself.

Imagine yourself with time and space to think and dream, explore the past, present and future and be productive...in a less manic way! Dr Lesley Murrihy describes how she made this happen for herself in 2017 in the hopes of inspiring others to carve out a similar space for themselves.

In an article first published earlier this year, Dr Lesley Murrihy examines the stark realisation that she was close to burnout, and how this revelation led her turn over a new leaf in her life.

As the principal of a Modern Learning Environment, I have ignored the constant disparaging of Modern Learning Environments long enough. Why have those of us who lead these environments largely kept quiet and allowed it to continue as a mostly one-sided conversation?

The outcome of the election has delighted many in education, who are celebrating the end of National Standards and, perhaps, Communities of Learning. The celebrations are ongoing. My response is a little more measured...

Many years ago, a Norwegian criminologist, Nils Christie (1970), published a book with the title Hvis skolen ikke fandtes (If there were no school). He concluded that if schools didn’t exist then it would be necessary to invent them.

I published an article recently – Personalising learning: A wicked challenge! As I read some of the comments, I realised that people did not see “Personalising Learning” through the rich lens of a humanising education as I did. Many saw it as an individualised, technical process and even neo liberal in intent. Hence, this article is, at least partially, a reframing of “personalising learning” into the more political Equity-Mindedness.   

Personalising learning (also known as targeted teaching or differentiated learning) has been much talked about but is still seldom done well in schools. It's a hard road but Amesbury School is definitely on the right track!

Richardson and Dixon (2017) were right when they suggested that schools were originally set up as efficient ways to deliver education to more people. They said, “Schools have represented an imperfect construct for learning, one driven by efficiencies rather than effectiveness.”

“Personalised learning” rolls off the tongue so easily.