Allow me to tell you something that might surprise you – I hated secondary school. In 1977 I went to the local Grammar school and only really enjoyed lunchtimes. Now, everybody has a different learning style and you can’t keep all of the people happy all of the time. So I am aware that I must take some of the blame for that, for not buying into the methodology. There were no big problems. I wasn’t bullied, I passed my exams and it could have been much worse.

It was so uninspiring though. I mean really, really dull. We sat in rows while the teacher talked and we made notes. He (it was normally a he) read from a book, the same book that we had in front of us and then gave us homework based on the book and the notes we had made. Every lesson followed a roughly similar format. Perhaps some people derived a degree of benefit from this – being given information, writing it down and memorising it like a parrot. Click on the image below to see how I remember school.

We can do better than that though, can’t we? We can inspire people, generate enthusiasm, even passion for a topic. We can make learning so positive and enjoyable that students want to keep learning in their free time as well. To do this we still need structure and frameworks, but within that we need to be able to offer flexibility, creativity and mobility.

Let me know your views and memories – is it enough to feed students information about a subject or should we push them to find out more for themselves? What role should teachers play and is ‘teacher’ the right word to use? Can we adopt the same approach across different cultures successfully?