Further Reading

We are committed to lifelong learning. It’s something we nurture through critical reflection and professional connections. But we especially appreciate learning from and with others. 

Here are some websites and books that we both value and celebrate. We hope you find them interesting too.

Progressive Education

This online hub explores progressive approaches to education which are forward-thinking and aim to equip students with 21st century skills. 

They present a variety of options so that parents/carers, teachers, students, policy makers and other professionals can make informed choices. 

Their directory includes a list of progressive schools and learning communities in the UK, and their Voices section showcases innovation from the state and private sectors.

They are committed to sharing the voices of key stakeholders in order to re-imagine education.

kids playing outdoors
book cover by Guy Claxton and Becky Carlzon

Learning Power Approach

The Learning Power Approach (LPA) is an umbrella term for an emerging school of thought about teaching and learning. Deriving from research and development groups working independently in Australia, the UK and the US, the LPA shows teachers how to adjust small aspects of the nitty-gritty of their teaching in order to achieve two aims:

  • Better results
  • And the development of confident, independent learners

This website is invitation to forward-thinking, reflective practitioners to engage in the LPA – to think deeply about their practice, feel inspired to plan ways to engage, motivate and challenge their learners and to re-connect with their deeper purpose of becoming a teacher.
If this is you, welcome to Learning Power Kids.
Learning Power Approach

Forest School Education

Forest Schools are nature-based communities where trained practitioners nurture learner-led exploration and discovery, nurturing meaningful experiences for positive lifelong impacts.

Well-being is the foundation of our practice and through recognising the social, emotional and physical needs of participants we provide the guidance and facilitation for our time in nature.

Through creating learner inspired experiences based on exploration and discovery, we recognise opportunities to mentor holistic growth over the course of long-term programmes.

Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson worked with governments, education systems, international agencies, global corporations and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations to unlock the creative energy of people and organizations.

He led national and international projects on creative and cultural education in the UK, Europe, Asia and the United States.

The embodiment of the prestigious TED Conference and its commitment to spreading new ideas, Sir Ken Robinson remains even today as one of the most watched speaker in TED’s history. His 2006 talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity” has been viewed online over 60 million times and seen by an estimated 380 million people in 160 countries.

book cover

Empower by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani

As they go through school, something happens to many of our students, and they begin to play the game of school, eager to be compliant and follow a path instead of making their own.

As teachers, leaders and parents, we have the opportunity to be the guides in our kids’ education and unleash the creative potential of each and every student. In a world that is ever changing, our job is not to prepare students for something; instead, our role is to help students prepare themselves for anything.

What happens when students own their learning?

Machine Learning and Human Intelligence By Rosemary Luckin

Intelligence is at the heart of what makes us human, but the methods we use for identifying, talking about and valuing human intelligence are becoming impoverished. We invest artificial intelligence with qualities it does not have. In doing so, we risk losing the opportunity to develop our own intelligence in new and sophisticated ways, and may waste the capacity for education to enrich the emotional, collaborative, sensory and self-effective aspects of human intelligence that define us.
book cover

Clever Lands by Lucy Crehan

As a teacher in an inner-city school, Lucy Crehan was exasperated with ever-changing government policy claiming to be based on lessons from ‘top-performing’ education systems. She resolved to find out what was really going on in the classrooms of countries whose teenagers ranked top in the world for reading, maths and science.

Clever Lands documents Crehan’s journey around the world, weaving together her experiences with research on policy, history, psychology and culture to offer extensive new insights into what we can learn from these countries.