I'm currently attempting some "holiday" in France, but the downtime has had my brain whizzing with sights that are more or less unfamiliar, certainly not from the time when I lived here over a decade ago or from my wife's own upbringing. One such thing is what you can observe in the photo I took in a book shop in... Continue reading

Three years ago, nearly to the day, I registered my dream with Companies House: my new enterprise NoTosh was conceived on December 21st, 2009, with that magic serial number that, at the time, means so much. Of course, once the mortgage payments become due, the romanticism goes out the window: a company is only a company when it grows. Anyone... Continue reading

For the past six new years I've taken an interest in how much I'm sitting on a plane each year, destroying the planet that my children will inherit. Travel is an increasingly inevitable part of business, particularly in tough economic climates where, if you're not prepared to jump on a plane I fear one might lose any momentum worth talking... Continue reading

Bach's composition reflects many of the facets of the design thinking process. Continue reading

British Philosopher Alan Watts sums up an attitude that took me years to understand, and which underlines the attitude to life that all my colleagues sign up to. If you want to do something - defend the charged, taxi people through cities, teach children, grow wine, whatever... - then do it. I'm working at the moment with a group of... Continue reading

One of the schools my firm NoTosh is lucky enough to work with every week is Rosendale Primary School, in south London, UK. Its teachers, its students and its leadership team are a treat for Tom, who spends every week with them, and for Peter and me when we're lucky enough to come in as reinforcements. For nearly two years,... Continue reading

Just released on YouTube is a new campaign from Belgian agency Duval Guillaume, where they changed the operation of schools for a day. Boys went to school to learn. Girls went to school to clean out the toilets and undertake other menial tasks. It feels to me like a modern-day, marketers version of the Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes experiment from... Continue reading

Newcastle buddy now living in Oz, Chris Harte, creates a video to explain the SOLO Taxonomy from his school's perspective. Continue reading

This week I've been working with senior education folk in Brisbane to show, through a set of stories and discussions, how their own creative confidence is so important to bring about a sense of self-efficacy in their teachers and students. Self-efficacy is that feeling that whatever you do can have an impact on the world around you. Creative confidence is... Continue reading

Through a mutual friend of a friend of a friend on Facebook, in a very interconnected example of how the 'computer "web"' really has changed at least four lives, came this reportage in Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid, The Sun, in the 1990s. But all is not what it seems. It is, in fact, created by The Sun themselves as part... Continue reading

If you were to look at your school year ahead, and choose only ten things to teach, what would your top ten lecturettes be? Continue reading

I'm still astonished in this day and age of podcasts, videos, uStreams and Twitter commentaries that professional presenter colleagues feel that it is reasonable to hijack, steal and resell stories or thoughts from others without giving due credit or hat-tips. Jay Cross's post has reignited my distaste of those who think nothing of charging big $s to regurgitate, without credit,... Continue reading

I'm working on an advisory project at the moment where the team in charge is largely remote: we're all spread around the world and the people organising things spend too much time in front of Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. The result? Lots of text gets sent back and forth and that text is festooned with bullet points, numbers and linear... Continue reading

I'm paraphrasing somewhat, but this is a fascinating interview from jazz musician and management professor Frank Barrett, on a key design thinking skill, where problem solving alone is not sufficient. A certain creative mindset with a distinct process that a team can use to hit its groove and make new discoveries is at the core of jazz, and it's at... Continue reading

Bianca Hewes and some others were last night asking some good questions to seek out the difference between design thinking and project-based learning (PBL) as techniques for use in the classroom. These kinds of questions we explore through out workshops with educators around the world, and there's an explanation developing in a book I hope to release soon. In the... Continue reading

In England and Wales today, and in Scotland last week, youngsters have been receiving their examination results. All those months of hard work, well, work in any case, pay off in about the 10 seconds it takes to open an envelope and take a glance over the final scores. Some people even choose to do it in front of the... Continue reading

Without a sense of progress you cannot be creative, so what language can we offer students that enables them to take control of understanding where they are in their learning? One key notion about creativity is that the ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process: knowing when something feels 'done'. Knowing when you're stuck, when... Continue reading

A genius lesson or two from Scottish colleagues who immerse students in real world spams in order to see what kinds of reply they might write: I gave a class of twelve year olds a selection of genuine spam emails and asked them to write down what their replies to these would be. It mostly purported to be from a... Continue reading

What are you going to do on the First Five Days of school to make that dent in the status quo? Tell us using the Twitter hashtag #1st5days Continue reading

Yesterday the Pearson Foundation launched its new site, Five Things I've Learned, and I was honoured to be amongst the first educators to contribute five key things I've learned in my career so far about learning, teaching, life and the universe. I've still got plenty of dues to pay in my career, so it is incredibly flattering to be amongst... Continue reading

When we're working with schools on our Design Thinking School programme, one of the easiest ways to explain what we're looking for in the way a project is set, is whether the statement or questions being asked can be Googled easily: is this a Googleable or Not Googleable topic? Every topic, every bit of learning has content that can be... Continue reading

When I was at school, I wrote an article in the student newspaper (the Pupils' View) about how fresh, healthy food was disproportionately overpriced compared to the "yellow food" on offer in the school canteen. The result was that the Catering Director for the Local Authority actually left her job. And I got into a fair bit of trouble. This... Continue reading

The computer is my instrument. I play it. will.i.am On one of my bored 38,000 feet periods I discovered a documentary about Creative Visionaries, and will.i.am was on. The guy's a superstar, a creative superstar for me for lots of reasons. I love this song that isn't released yet: Mona Lisa Smile. I like his way of thinking about music,... Continue reading

While sitting in on a seminar on Mental Toughness as a teachable, as well as genetic, attribute, I came across the work of Dutch researcher Nico Van Yperen. Being mentally tough means that we take control of our futures, we enjoy challenges as opportunities rather than threats, and we have deep involvement in meeting our own, personal goals. But if... Continue reading