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  I’ve been reading Saul Alinksy’s seminal ‘Rules for Radicals’ recently – it fits in well with a lot of what i’m involved in at the moment – work, study, politics and so forth. It’s a great book – written much like Sal Kahn’s stuff – more on the back of experience than philosophy, although…

Introduction Mentoring continues to be a hotly contested and often referenced topic in educational circles. This is possible due to the fact that a number of reports have identified that more than a third of all new teachers leave the profession after five years or less. With that startling statistic in mind, teaching has been…

Introduction Education is almost always in a state of reform. It says something about the fraught professional world of teachers that they seem to be either implementing a new program or a new piece of technology, providing feedback on a new pedagogy or planning for the next wave of reforms. In addition to the challenges…

Entrepreneur: a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk I’ve started seeing  various mishmashes of the words education, teacher and entrepreneur on Twitter and at conferences a lot lately. Certainly, it seems to be one of those buzzwords in education that suddenly everyone is talking about…

When I was a student at school (which is not recent, I’ll admit), there was a profusion of lots of little clubs and groups and movements at the school that were all focused on saving the environment. I remember – and I know how faulty memories can be – thinking that this generation was going…

So, the ‘love-in’. I’d been hearing about this since the start of the year, when I started my new job as an IEU Organiser. All the officers from all the branches of the IEU (SA, QLD/NT, VIC/TAS, NSW/ACT, WA) all headed down to the RACV Resort in Torquay to take part in a series of…

It’s difficult to be a union activist in the current climate. I’ve only got experience to talk about my very limited time with the union I currently work for, but, upon reflection, I imagine that it’s never an easy time to be a union activist. Even in periods when there is a Labor government in…

Good morning everybody. My name is Keith Heggart, and I’m an IEU Organiser working in Cumberland and Ku-Ring-Gai. Marilyn asked me to come to the activist conference and tell you a little bit about my journey and share what wisdom I might have learned along the way in the hope of encouraging you all to…

So, in the space of the lsat couple of months, I have seen The Dirty Dancing Musical (shudder), Ed Sheeran (Hooray), The Zac Brown Band (Hooray) and Frank Turner (Hooray!!). It’s been a great time – and certainly more live entertainment than I’ve seen ni the previous couple of years. What can I say? It…

For as long as I have been alive – and thats thirty plus years now – Richie Benaud has been a part of cricket. Sure, lately he’s been seen on our screens less and less, but there was always that feeling that he was there, behind the scenes, marking down the bowling figures or acutely…