Thursday 31 August 2017

Printed copies have arrived

We have been notified that printed copies are back from the printer. Exciting!  The publisher Crown House says:

I am pleased to advise that we have just taken delivery of your book and it looks great!

Your presentation copies will be sent out to you today, for delivery tomorrow, and the pre-publication reviewers will also be sent their complimentary copies.

We have received advance copies here with the bulk of the stock being delivered in to our distributors. In view of this we will make the book available on our web sites today and Tweet etc.  to make people aware that they can purchase advance from us and will amend the publication date on Amazon (currently 28th of September) to the 15th of September, to allow for delivery and distribution of the book. Up to the 15th we will be Tweeting daily regarding the book and Tweet on the 15th availability on Amazon. The e-book files are currently being worked on, so hopefully they will be live by the 15th of September too.

Over the next few weeks we will be issuing a Press Release and sending out review copies.

Do let us know what you think of the printed version.

With very best wishes

Thursday 10 August 2017

The Authors

Our book explores the dynamics of schools and classrooms and in particular the effects of over-authoritarian attitudes. The authors are
Dr. Sean Warren, secondary school senior teacher in a mixed comprehensive, who successfully achieved his PhD for the research
Dr. Stephen Bigger his supervisor who led him through critical questions about pupil motivation, developing self-reliance, self discipline and citizenship development by adopting non-authoritarian practice. You can find more on Stephen's ideas here and his publications here.


Sean learned to base his work in school on mutual respect and collaborative learning. He explores his successes and his challenges.

Sean tells the story of his own education in East London which provided him with few options upon leaving school. A product of a broken home, he experienced himself as both vulnerable and resilient. He overturned his lack of qualifications by adult study at night-school leading eventually to teacher training. His subject, Physical Education provided a platform to convey his assertiveness as an adult in charge. In his third school he changed to Religious Education, a subject which has the potential to be challenging in that the RE teacher tends to meet the whole school for one lesson a week without the carrot of a qualification to come out of it. After his own life experiences, he found class discipline unproblematic and gradually rose to be in charge of whole school discipline. Conclusions from his Masters informed his proposal to start a part-time Doctorate. He considered himself a good disciplinarian and wanted to research how he might disseminate his habitual approach. But then cracks began to appear – he became increasingly aware of a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction but was unable to articulate it. Was he too controlling? Were his tried and tested disciplinary methods too authoritarian? Did they compromise his relationships? Was his professional practice incongruent with the values he claimed to hold? He began to wonder if there was a better way, where authority could be maintained but in a context of respect and cooperation? Involving 16 classes and 6 colleagues, this began a four year research project which is crystallized in this book.


Stephen entered secondary school teaching in 1973. He had finished his BA and studied for PhD in 1970-73. Married, and planning for a family, a job with a salary was imperative. The school was an overnight amalgamation of a boys' grammar and a secondary modern. The modern school became years 1-3 (7-9 in today's terminology). If you now fear the worst, multiply by ten. The year is referred to (not affectionately) as ROSLA, standing for 'raising of the school leaving age' to 16. In other words most of year 5 (year 11 today) had hoped and expected to have escaped but had been dragged back. By November my head of department had a breakdown - I found him crying in the toilets - and in all my inexperience I took his place. Out of teaching a 34 lesson week,  I taught 24 different classes and had to write reports for them all. Where I had more than one lesson a week, it was with ROSLA classes. No examinations were on offer. I remember looking up to one teacher, a disciplinarian, who cnfessed to me later he couldn't sleep on Sunday night for fear of Monday. A PE teacher liberally used his plimsol in the store cupboard. Despite this being my first year in teaching, I had no mentor or anyone to relate to at all. When a 5th year threatened me with a broken bottle he was made to apologise, but the one who ran in when drunk, smashed tables, chairs and a wall, was I gather dead within two further years of drunkenness.  I returned a few years later and the whole school had been blotted out. I have just read Charlie Carroll's On the Edge: One Teacher, a Camper Van, Britain's Toughest Schools and much seems familiar. I remember saying to a pupil leaving without qualifications having  signed to play for Everton, what happens if you break a leg when you are 25? He did break a leg when he was 25 and it ended his football career.

I moved on to a school which taught GCE and A level and all together taught in secondary schools for eight years. I recall some pupils getting a GCE pass for me and for no one else, to accusations that my subject must be easy. The truth was I made the subject interesting and relevant, trying to enthuse and not humiliating pupils who were struggling. I was taking with a long standing teacher friend who told a similar story, having been placed in a socially deprived area with extreme belligerence from pupils at first, but persisted by being nice to them. They surprised her in the end by putting together a leaving party and telling her she was the only teacher who had shown them respect. Some pupils of course were bad then and are still bad now. I remember a Facebook message from a naughty pupil then who managed to insult me and my wife  five times in ten lines. She was of course shown the door. We are not naive - some pupils were nasty and remain nasty. But not all.

Our simple message is to respect pupils as much as possible. Some may be difficult, and this is no magic bullet, and some may need to learn in a non-school setting. But it remains true that where good order is disrupted, it may be the teacher doing the disruption. John Holt saw this in the 1960s, as did Ivan Illich later. John Dewey argued earlier that democracy and pupil voice was better than dictatorship. In my school visits on teaching practice, a saw a great deal of good practice and happy relationships; but I also saw some abusive practice. Shouting, sarcasm and shaming for me should never be a normal disciplinary strategy. I took part in a programme with disengaged pupils (see Viv Bartlett, Nurturing A Healthy Human Spirit which I was happy to provide a Preface to). This essentially befriended pupils who had written themselves off, and offered them strategies to succeed, some even moving from complete failure to university degrees. Turning pupils around from failure to success is not part of today's agenda of quantifiable appraisal (league table) though it is the most educational of all school processes. 


Friday 4 August 2017

More reviews

Living Contradiction: A Teacher’s Examination of Tension and Disruption in Schools, in Classrooms and in Self  Sean Warren and Stephen Bigger
Six more reviews have been received.
3. What I like most about this book is its collaborative nature and its honesty.  Sean Warren and Stephen Bigger exemplify a collaborative educational relationship. Bigger, as a doctoral supervisor, has enabled Warren to make explicit and evolve his embodied knowledge as a professional educator whilst sharing, without imposition, his own insights. The honesty is in Warren’s educational journey, from his steadfast adherence to institutional standards and expectations, to his recognition that he was losing some¬thing of himself in the process and then to his creative and critical responses to these contradictions, in living his values as fully as he can. I believe that Warren’s journey will resonate with your own experiences of the imposition of institutional power relations and  captivate your imaginations in Warren’s inspirational honesty and responses.

The book also shows how Bigger shared his understandings of critical theory. He encouraged Warren to see that autobiographical writings could produce a valid and academically legitimate contribution to educational knowledge in the generation of a living-educational-theory.  This contribution, whilst grounded in the embodied knowledge of the educator, engages with, and integrates insights from the most advanced social theories of the day.   I believe that this book will be of great value on initial and continuing professional development programmes in education and to all professionals in a wide range of workplace contexts who are facing their own contradictions in living their values as fully as they can.
Prof. Jack Whitehead

4. This is the book that I wish I had had when I embarked on a career as a teacher. The ‘living contradiction’ that is its starting point is painfully familiar to everyone who has stood in a classroom and wondered how they had ended up this way, with the energy-sapping task of keeping order becoming an end in itself. We had thought it was a precondition for learning, and we craved the respect of pupils and colleagues, but we had sacrificed the excitement that brought us into the profession. Sometimes we blamed our pupils for forcing us into an authoritarian role, for not sharing the love of learning that we were so miserably failing to instil in them. Sean Warren’s book breaks out of this sterile dilemma: discipline versus self-expression, strength versus weakness. He is no naïve idealist, and is well aware that teachers continue to be accountable to a regime that insists on measurable, quantitative and sometimes trivial outcomes. But he has been willing to reappraise every aspect of the professional skills that had brought a form of success and recognition, along with deep frustration, and to hold onto the conviction that a classroom can be a place where education happens. The breaking of familiar patterns is challenging for himself, for colleagues and for pupils. It is a rocky ride for everyone, but also an exemplary exercise in practice-based research. Armed with insights from educationalists, a rigorous methodology that enables him to analyse and interpret the results of his new approach, and fortified by a constant, questioning dialogue with Stephen Bigger, Sean Warren succeeds in changing the dynamic in his classroom, a hard-won achievement and a thrilling one. This is not an arid book – all teachers will recognise the day-to-day dilemmas, confrontations and compromises, recounted with honesty and wit. But it is nonetheless inspirational: here is someone who has had the courage to believe in his students, in himself, and in the power of education.
Dr. Ann Miller, University Fellow (Formerly Senior Lecturer), University of Leicester.

5. The first thing to say about this book is that it is deeply human. The second thing to say is that it is a model of how to turn a piece of academic research (a PhD in this case) into a beautifully written, highly readable, and truly inspirational book. This is a book for now and it addresses the urgency for a radical reassessment of what schooling should mean. Schooling it should be remembered is not the same as education but as this book so clearly demonstrates, too much schooling today provides an arid landscape that produces stressed out teachers and unhappy pupils.
With admirable self -awareness Sean Warren began to see himself as a living contradiction in that, increasingly, what was required of him professionally was in contradiction to his personal aspirations and values. He saw himself as a teacher moulded by an education system much of which he began to find incongruous with his own humanity. Being a well- respected and effective teacher with responsibility for pupil behaviour and discipline was the impetus to undertake the autobiographical research described and presented so well with his supervisor Stephen Bigger. So often in schools, discipline is seen as something ‘done to’ a child rather than a case of enabling pupils to develop self-discipline. Anyone who has spent large amounts of time in schools, particularly secondary schools, will be all too aware of the increase in what is termed ‘low level disruption’. As the authors state, ‘The very idea of questioning whether the relational and educational experiences offered might have contributed to the pupil’s objectionable behaviour is rare’.
Some of the source material, particularly extracts from pupils’ diaries are, frankly, shocking, and illustrate an alarming lack of respect for their human rights and dignity. Of course, not all schools are the same but all who are involved with the education of our young people will find here a fascinating and inspiring journey that grapples with the real issues of schooling and does not provide easy ‘off the shelf’ answers to complex problems. I’m certain that many teachers will, like me, find this a truly inspirational book; one that is deeply relevant to everyone involved in the education of our children.
Dr Geoff TeeceHonorary Research Fellow, University of Exeter Graduate School of Education

6. A fascinating insight into teaching and education. I can personally identify with so many of the aspects discussed. What is clear throughout, is that relationships in teaching are crucial. They underpin and determine the behaviour of students in our schools, whether we agree that this should be the case or not. I would recommended this as a read for anyone entering or already in the education profession.
Clare Gammons - Headteacher BSc, PGCE, NPQSL

7.  Fascinating, honest examination of that genuine contradiction faced by teachers – the effort to encourage young people towards independent critical thinking whilst simultaneously feeling a responsibility to instruct and insist on a particular behaviour.
As adults we entrust teachers with a significant influence over the futures our children will enjoy. It is good to know that there are thoughtful professionals prepared the think beyond the constraints of the curriculum and work hard to find a way forward that best benefits you ng people. It is heartening to read work that promotes empowerment and motivation over discipline and dictation whilst still insisting on a mutual respect. There is an acknowledgement that school itself is a community that can reflect the best, and worst, of the society we expect young people to fit into as adults and that teachers have a significant part to play in how that society can be influenced by the experience of young people in schools.
The methodology is robust, with a full discussion and acknowledgement of the benefits and constraints of autobiography in an academic research project.
 Interesting evaluation of the role of educational theorists set against the realities of teachers’ experience on the front line in schools, where years of academic research are set against the need to respond to a behaviour in a matter of minutes.
Thought-provoking use of the immediacy of blogging as a tool to record or diarise, and share, immediate experience. I would like to congratulate both Sean and Stephen on what is a ground breaking piece of work and of significant interest to educators and researchers beyond the field of education. It is a terrific piece of work. I certainly wish my son has had a teacher as thoughtful and committed as Sean.
Suzie Grogan  LLB (Hons) PGDip. Author of Shell Shocked Britain: The First World War’s legacy for Britain’s mental health  Pen and Sword Books 2014.

8. Drawing from a great wealth of research and the even greater wealth of their combined personal experience, Sean Warren and Stephen Bigger have written something rare - a book which not only deconstructs the thorny issues endemic in the British education system, but which also presents us with intuitive and achievable remedies.
'Charlie Carroll' (pseudonym), author of On the Edge about schoolsand other books.