The Everyday Metaphors of Teaching: ‘Guide on the Side’

In my last post, building on Maxwell’s (2015) work, I outlined the inevitability of metaphor in our discourse as teachers and how understanding this in our profession can help us shed light on what our metaphors exaggerate but also hide. I posed two questions: With what metaphors in mind are we to teach? What evidence…

The Everyday Metaphors of Teaching: Problems and Solutions

It's an elephant guys - come on. Metaphor is so deeply embedded into the language of teaching that Greene (1973) argues that it would be possible to organise a history of educational ideas around recurring metaphors. As early as 1553, the classical humanist view of educators was as ‘gardeners’ (Rabelias, 1991). Rousseau (1979) saw the…

Teaching the ‘more able’ child

To understand 'the more able' pupil, I draw on the educational experiences of Scout Finch, the daughter of Atticus Finch in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (don't worry, you don't have to have read the book to get what's going on here). I will then use a few of my own…