To say that school is for learning is to miss huge amounts of what school and education are really doing. Learning can happen in all kinds of places and in all kinds of ways - lots of modern technologies, from YouTube to AI, can be really valuable tools for learning. But that is different from education.

Learning is a part of education, but it's never the whole picture. The goal of learning is that we have some new knowledge or new skills, but the goal of education is connected with the kinds of lives we wish to live and the kind of world we wish to live in.

Back at the start of September, I was invited to give the opening keynote at the Festivalul Digital Predau Viitor - the Teach the Future Festival in Romania. The festival has been running since 2022, and in its 2025 edition, saw over 5000 participants join talks, workshops, and events for the biggest education conference in the region. It’s a powerhouse event and is both a really impressive feat of logistical engineering and an expression of enormous commitment to education and educators in Romania.

At the heart of both meaningful teaching and deep gameplay is the separation of our usual selves from our “learning” or “ludic” selves - between the everyday me and the “student” or “player” me. Who I am in the classroom or in the game is, in an important sense, a temporary me. This is a me that can experiment freely, make mistakes without fear, try new roles and rules, iterate, change, and shift. I can adopt new identities, new judgments, and try new activities.

Like so much in our lives today, learning has been accelerated and commodified to try and offer instant results at low costs. We can take short-form classes on YouTube, SkillShare, Udemy, and dozens of other platforms. We can sign up for real-life classes and workshops. We can self-teach or join online communities. All of them offer quick skills at low prices. Inevitably some of that will be snake oil, people on the grift looking to extract money from those who want, or need, to learn new skills, improve their education, or expand their knowledge. Some of it, though, is high-quality, thoughtful, and impactful learning content. Telling which is which may be the trick, there.

I’ve long advocated that, whatever field or discipline you work in, you should always be looking at what is happening elsewhere. That might be in neighbouring industries or practices, but it might also be in fields that are very distant from your own. As a learning experience designer, I’m keenly interested in the work of designers in a whole range of industries - game design, architecture, graphic design and, of course, product design. I’m looking at what’s happening in these different disciplines to see if there is anything exciting, interesting, or innovative that I might find use for in my work as a designer. What, then, might a learning experience designer, take from Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Design?

In his interview with Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki on the release of his masterpiece Spirited Away, Robert Ebert asked Miyazaki about the moments of rest in his films. Moments that showed what Ebert called “gratuitous motion” - a character sighing, sitting for a moment, looking to the distance. Moments that didn’t serve to advance the plot, or provide the audience with action, or provide comedy or drama in themselves.

In a classroom somewhere a student is asking their teacher, is this English we are studying or history? What a strange question to ask in the middle of a class on Shakespeare - but these are the divisions our school systems build into the minds of students. Are we doing music now or mathematics? Is this a physics class or philosophy? We do both a disservice to learners and to the knowledge and disciplines we love when we hold fast to the boundaries erected around us as teachers. Boundaries are built, not for the benefit of teachers or students, but for efficiencies of organisational models, labouring under the weight of the status quo.

A small group of participants are gathered around a table. The conversation is curious, urgent, and probing. A large piece of paper covers the surface of the table - heavily drawn upon. The participants consult their notes, plans they’ve been making, and various documents. They suggest strategies, and possibilities, and brainstorm ideas. There are flashes of inspiration, realisations, and questions. They’re chewing on a significant challenge that will take all their skill, experience, and resources to resolve. Finally, they come together, having settled on a way forward.

In the Ancient Greek city of Miletus, there lived a philosopher named Thales. It is said that he was asked by the people why, if he was so wise, he was also poor. Surely if he were truly wise, they said, he would be a wealthy man. He may have knowledge of science and philosophy, they said, but he seemed to have no skill for using them in the real world. Thales sought to prove these critics wrong. Using his knowledge of meteorology, economics, psychology, and his sharp, analytical mind, Thales devised a plan…

My manifesto outlines the big six principles I follow to achieve powerful, innovative, and transformative learning experiences. Everything happens within a relationship. Only authenticity is sustainable. Listen, Ask, Speak. Be what you are looking for. We walk the journey together. And, Let the learning emerge. Taken together these six principles can transform your workshop facilitation, learning and development programme, and learning experience designs.

Asking just the right question, at just the right time, in just the right way is one of the most powerful ways to facilitate any learning experience. A fantastic question can be disruptive, revelatory, inspiring, and even re/disorienting. A great question can be a thought grenade. Asking great questions can be tough though, so how do you handle questions in a way that enhances the learning experiences for your participants?

In workshops and training, I have often used the Design Thinking methodology and Problem-Based Learning in conjunction, both in developing workshops and structuring and facilitating them. I have even run workshops that have taught these processes and approaches to teachers and educators which has always proven to be a transformative experience. In those workshops, I’m very often asked to give an example of these at work and so I took some time to write up one of my favourite case studies for Design Thinking and Problem-Based Learning in schools.

Skeletal, alien creatures roam wild on the beaches of The Netherlands. Tubular bodies and an array of legs skitter along the sand powered by great sails of white cloth and stomachs of plastic. These creatures have not come from some crashed meteor or alien spacecraft but from the mind of a Dutch inventor, artist, engineer, and creator - Theo Jansen. 

We might then ask ourselves, as educators, how can our students approach a challenge, a task, or a puzzle “as if for the first time”? When we set work for students, plan our lessons, and give them assessments, are we teaching them to really pick locks or just to be great at picking one very particular lock? To do this would emphasise skills and tools over memorisation and repetition. We would be looking at a much more holistic approach rather than the targeted learning so many education systems rely on.

Over the past few months I, and a team of colleagues here in Milan, Italy, have been participating in Project Zero’s online course Creating Cultures of Thinking. Along with my responsibilities as a department head I spend most of my time teaching philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge, so the notion of Cultures of Thinking seemed to make obvious and appealing sense to me. Of course we need deep and rich thinking cultures in our schools, I thought to myself. After all, as a philosopher thinking is at the very heart of what I teach . What I came to see, over the months of working with my team and other colleagues in teams around the world, was that there were wider dimensions to building that kind of culture than I’d yet realised.

A transcript of the keynote speech I gave at the MITA IV conference held at the American School of Milan on February 2nd 2019 and that I presented in revised form at the IB Global Conference in Abu Dhabi, on October 25th 2019.

In the Zen monastery, in a monk’s daily life there is time for meeting with the master of the temple, the Roshi. This meeting consists of a single activity. The Roshi will give the monk a koan, a cryptic phrase of question, a sort of paradox or puzzle, about which to think. The sound of one hand clapping or trees falling, unobserved, in the woods.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at BETT - the global Education Technology show in London. I was asked to speak on behalf of Google, as one of the educators speaking at Google’s Teaching Theatre. I’ve long been a vocal advocate of Google Apps for Education and have seen its transformational effect in my own teaching practice and in that of my friends and colleagues – at my own institution as well as on-line.

I gave a talk that focused on what might seem like a pretty dull aspect of education technology – being efficient. Being efficient is not exciting. Being efficient isn’t attention grabbing but, I hope I argued, everything that is exciting and attention grabbing becomes possible when you become more efficient.

I saw this great infographic posted on the Wayfaring Path blog, and I think it provides a lot of stimulus for thought and reflection. It covers issues of learning technologies, of course, but also much more within teaching practice. I’m not sure I can hold my hand up proudly and say that I do all of these, certainly not all the time, but they are all things I would say I would hope to do and hope to develop. Some are scarier than others and I imagine different teachers are going to have very different ideas of which are the difficult ones.

I’ve been working an awful lot lately on the educational technology front. In particular I’ve been working within my institution to manage some of our transition to the use of Google Apps for Education. I’m an enormous fan, advocate and enthusiast of these apps and have been working with them for the best part of a school year now so I was very pleased when I heard that Google were overhauling their entire Certified Educator system.