Motherload

I found the BBC Radio 4 Programme broadcast yesterday ('The World's Best Teachers') captivating and inspiring. It was all about Doug Lemov's techniques for teaching, which focus on gentle, non-invasive interventions helping children and students to bring their attention back to the classroom. Teachers can stay in control of their own emotions, and children don't feel yelled at and coerced. I found it inspiring for so many reasons. When I was a university lecturer, we were never given any teacher training at all, which is why university lecturers are, on the whole, poor teachers. All my teaching was based on having done a load of acting and improv as an undergraduate – I acted my way through. On the whole that worked fine, unless I was in a sticky situation with one student, or wasn't as familiar with the material I was trying to teach. I did have a year in the classroom, in France, in a Lycée Technique in the Vosges. I was 21, on a year abroad during my un...

Roman Krznaric has published a new book called Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution . I feel like crying. Everything that he says is, of course, correct. We are evolved to develop empathic skills by the age of around three. Empathy, the art of listening and putting one's self in the place of another, is crucial to conflict resolution, whether in marriage, the workplace or in parenting. I have myself practised an artificial empathy when trying to prevent myself from screaming at my children — he cites the parenting book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk , from which I learnt to stop, look and listen when my children were acting out, and try to understand what they were feeling , through asking them intuitive questions. Often, in my experience, you can feel what another is feeling by monitoring the tension levels in your own body. If you start to feel stressed and anxious, ten to one it is not your own feeling, but the feelings of someone close by...