What’s in a name? Although I have used the term “Teacher Educator” to describe myself on my Home page, my work at different times in my career in education has had a range of labels,. The description that I feel happiest to use though has always been “Teacher” and I have taught children and adults in schools, universities and many other places of learning. Since I began working with teachers, “Teacher Educator” has been a better description of my work, particularly as that job description still leaves open the connection with teaching children, the source of my interest and commitment.
So, a brief autobiography or, as one of my favourite authors, J D Salinger, puts it “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”! I grew up in the North East of England and I retain a strong association with that region, even though I have lived most of my life in the North West. A year or so after graduating as a Philosophy major, I began my teaching career, which I see as having had three phases. Phase One was spent teaching English as an Additional Language and other subjects to adults. I then retrained and became a primary teacher and primary subject coordinator and I remained in Phase Two, as I’ll call it, for more than a decade. During that time, I continued to develop my skills in areas I had worked in earlier, such as Oracy and Literacy, and I also developed expertise in other curriculum subjects, particularly Mathematics. In addition to being the Mathematics Coordinator for the large urban primary school in which I worked, I became a school-based Leading Teacher of Mathematics with my LEA Advisory Team in the early stages of the National Numeracy Strategy. Following on from that work, Phase Three of my teaching career began in 2000 when I became a Senior Lecturer in Primary Education at the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Faculty of Education and, from that point onward, my main focus has been on teacher education.
Since that time, I have specialised in both Mathematics Education, Thinking Skills and Oracy and I have led and contributed to many courses for both trainee teachers and experienced teachers. This work has mainly been undertaken in Greater Manchester, where I have lived for more than forty years and where I have worked with many hundreds of teachers in a great many primary schools, but some of my work, including presentations at conferences and other events, has taken place further afield. During that time, I also became a SAPERE Trainer in Philosophy for Children (P4C).
I have also been involved in school and curriculum development work and in research and writing about classroom enquiry, children’s dialogue and children’s reasoning. I have also been a school governor at a large urban primary school. Throughout my career, I have always been extremely interested in the process of education and particularly in the ways we bring together work to help children academically and work to help them “grow” as people. This has culminated, in recent years, in my development of the model that I call Learning and Growth Communities, which is the main focus of this website. In developing this approach I have drawn upon many of the experiences outlined above.