My name is Charlie Comerford and I’m a teacher in a wonderful school in south west London. Welcome to The Heart and the Mind!
I’ve created this blog as a means for me to get my thoughts about education down in a more durable form than sticky-notes and margin scrawls.
I’m interested in lots of big questions and ideas in education: curriculum; pedagogy; ideology; and how we implement these great big juicy ideas too. At times, I’ve been (and I’m sure will be again) beholden to fads and fancies, and I spend a great deal of time reading about and thinking about education. This means that this blog is likely to jump around in its focus and function, much like a Monday Period 1 lesson that you just couldn’t bring yourself to plan on Friday and is now being constructed on the fly...
However, my expertise and experience is in the leadership of what Ofsted are now calling Personal Development (PD) and this is where I think I have the most to offer right now. PD is for me at the heart of what great schools do, and it’s also one of the most challenging, contested and messy domains that we’re tasked with delivering.
Over the next few months I’m going to blog about my experiences, ideas and strategies around PD. I want to share how I’ve developed our Personal Development Curriculum (PDC) at my school, and talk about how big ideas taking centre stage in educational debate right now like cultural literacy and powerful knowledge can be used to build a functional shared language around PD education that is sorely needed. I want to help drive forward and revitalise this area of education in the same way that pedagogy and curriculum have been so wonderfully reinvigorated in recent years. I want to bring Citizenship, PSHE and RE (my disciplines; more on this later) into the foreground of our professional debates and discussions.
I’m also hoping that by writing about and hopefully discussing my ideas with you, my (currently hypothetical) readers, I might start to tease out some of the remaining knots in my own thinking and practice and crystalise some presently amorphous ideas.
I've been lurking (and sometimes even posting) on edutwitter for a few years and I tweet under @MrC_Educate. I’m very much looking forward to getting more involved in the great conversations of our profession.
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