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"Storytelling may be as old as the hills but it remains one of the most effective tools for teaching and learning. A good story can make a child (or adult) prick up their ears and settle back into their seat to listen and learn. But despite the power a great story can have, storytelling has an endangered status in the classroom - partly due to a huge emphasis on "active learning" in education. This is the idea that pupils learn best when they are doing something - or often, "seen to be doing" something. Any lesson in which a teacher talks for 15 or more uninterrupted minutes would be regarded today as placing pupils in too passive a role. Indeed, even in English lessons teachers now very rarely read a whole poem or book chapter to pupils, something which now worries even OFSTED. "

"As my first batch of masters courses come to a close, I was asked to reflect back on my experiences with the Maker movement. At first, I found it to be a bit out of my realm of comfort. I'm not one to sit and tinker with machinery and play video games. As I delved deeper, I found that making is not only about video games and tinkering with things, it's about creating and inventing. Creation can look many different ways, too. It can be using everyday household items to make a new game to play. It can be using a familiar presentation tool to create a project on a topic you've been dying to learn more about. Creating is the basis for the Maker movement, and it needs to become commonplace in the classroom."

We are living in interesting, frightening and rapidly changing times. Where rapid changes and transformations through technology, politics, globalisation and the climate, conspire against normality. These times demand a fresh approach to education, one that provides learners with the thinking dispositions they need to turn challenges into opportunities.  "All that was 'normal' has now evaporated; we have entered postnormal times, the in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have not yet emerged, and nothing really makes sense." But what thinking might guide us through this time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity?

"Importantly, our early indications suggest that the least effective method of reading may be the one society has been clinging to for centuries: reading on paper."