Six Quick things All About Botheredness

1. Professional imagination is as important as the imagination of children

What do you want being taught by you to be like? When I ask this question, the answer is never about having quality PowerPoints slides, especially ones someone else has prepared. It’s about being a creative and imaginative curriculum creator – ‘a sherpa of awe and wonder’ – and finding the magic in the mundane and joy in the everyday. This takes imagination. This is botheredness.

2. Educators work alongside, as well as in front

What’s the best way for me to share this information with my class? How can I make the abstract real? The mundane exciting? How am I commanding the space? Can I work next to the children as well as leading from the front? Your answers to this ongoing internal ‘dialogue of botheredness’ are what will transform your pedagogy.

3. Stories matter

Humans love stories. All humans. Stories help shift abstract knowledge from something cold (and dead) to something warm (and alive). Look at Mr Bates vs The Post Office if you want proof. Botheredness is all about this transition from cold to warm, bringing the curriculum alive.

4. Children learn best from adults they like

Some cognitive scientists disagree with me on this. I don’t care. My experience tells me connection helps. A lot. Maybe children can learn from teachers they don’t like but how much more enjoyable is the process when you are bothered to make genuine connections. You all might even enjoy it!

5. Investment trumps engagement

A classroom full of compliant, biddable, engaged children sounds perfect but look again. Engagement is children simply meeting expectations around manners. Learning happens best when classes are invested – when children are actually bothered about what they’re learning.

6. Schooling uses the academic to promote the social to develop the human

Having a decent curriculum is only part of the story. It’s still only a paper exercise between consenting adults. Children need that curriculum to be made real – socialised, if you like. And it’s that socialisation – the warming up of cold academia – where pedagogy is placed. You don’t deliver, you humanise. Or you do if you’re bothered.

And when you’re bothered, you have children who are bothered too.

To find out more about Hywel and the powerful and proven benefits of 'botheredness' read his profile here.

And to buy his book Botheredness: Stories, Stance and Pedagogy published by the Independent Thinking Press with 20% off and free UK p+p, use the code 'ITL20' at the checkout. [ITL]

Hywel Roberts