Steve Carr

One rainy November afternoon about 15 years ago, I gave up teaching for good. I sat down at the front of the class, defeated. I was done.I expected chaos – the kind of chaos that had been going on moments before I threw in the towel. But, as I sat waiting for the bell what I saw changed everything.I saw the children organise themselves into ‘learning groups’. Some were doing homework, others were discussing their lives, asking about family and friends, learning about one another and yet others were trading survival secrets about other teachers and upcoming lessons. Everything they were doing was about learning.They were innately curious, they created order and all across the classroom there was collaboration.So, the question for me then – the supposed teacher - as I sat there was this:If children are driven to learn, what was I bringing into the room, in my attitude, body language, tone of voice, the lesson outline, content and delivery – that drove that instinct into a ditch?For me, the answer lay in researching via two Masters Degrees the implicit emotional and psychological relationship between teacher and learner and applying that research to create classrooms where learning becomes a shared endeavour that happens naturally.This course is the result of that research and its application in over 15 years of teaching and leading in UK schools”