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Dr James Mannion is a keynote speaker, teacher trainer, researcher, consultant and author who is widely recognised as a leading authority on self directed learning and organisational change.
A former teacher and school leader, James brings extensive classroom and leadership experience to his work. He holds an MA in person centred education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in self regulated learning from the University of Cambridge.
As the co founder and Director of Rethinking Education, James specialises in implementation and improvement science, practitioner inquiry and the creation of sustainable whole school change. His work has influenced children and young people across the world, and he continues to champion the co creation of an educational ecosystem that serves every learner.
James is known for his radical thinking and his willingness to challenge long standing assumptions about how education works. His TEDx talk, How to change the world, sets out an ambitious and hopeful vision for the future of education, healthcare, business and politics. He is also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, which has received more than half a million downloads, and he is the author of Making Change Stick and Fear is the Mind Killer.
Alongside his written and research work, James advises government, chairs the Education Policy Alliance and co hosts RePod. He has delivered sessions at major national and international conferences including BERA, ResearchED and the Wellington Festival of Education, and he regularly speaks at events for headteachers and senior leaders. His keynotes and workshops are interactive, thought provoking and consistently highly rated, reflecting his commitment to a more harmonious and hopeful future for young people and society as a whole.
Implementing change is complex, and the vast majority of school improvement initiatives fail to meet their stated goals. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In recent years, new fields of study have emerged – notably, implementation science and improvement science – which provide valuable insights in how to bring about lasting, positive change in real-world contexts.
Over the last 10 years or so, I have worked intensively with schools all over the world to implement powerful ideas and strategies from implementation and improvement science in educational settings.
This effort has resulted in the Making Change Stick book and online training suite, where you can also find free resources and a taster course.
The Learner Effectiveness Programme (LEP) is a whole-school approach to developing more confident, proactive, self-regulated learners. It’s a bespoke approach that can be tailored to any setting, which combines taught lessons with embedded elements across the curriculum.
My PhD, carried out at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Neil Mercer, was an 8-year study of the Learning Skills Curriculum (a fore-runner of the LEP). This controlled study found that the LEP:
I have now implemented versions of the LEP in many schools all over the world, and these findings have been replicated in other settings.
The word ‘oracy’ was invented in 1965, in an attempt to give spoken language the same status as written literacy and numeracy.
Almost 60 years later, despite much progress having been made in terms of our understanding of oracy, speaking and listening skills remain largely underdeveloped in schools, where reading and writing still rule the roost.
This is frustrating, because there is a wealth of evidence that teaching children how to speak and listen effectively leads to a range of positive outcomes, including:
People often define oracy as ‘speaking and listening skills’. But learning how to speak and listen with confidence in a range of contexts – from small talk to delivering a knock-out speech – is far more important than simply ‘learning a skill’ like riding a bike or learning to juggle.
Learning how to speak and listen effectively is transformational. It makes you walk an inch taller. It changes the way you see yourself and the way that other people see you. It changes what you might do in the future. And it makes you much more likely to be a happy, healthy human being.
One-size-fits-all approaches to professional development, such as courses, INSET days and all-staff twilight sessions, are often ineffective at meeting the needs of individual learners.
Practitioner research empowers participants to improve outcomes by investigating, innovating and evaluating their own practice.
It enables teachers, leaders and support staff to improve their practice by engaging with research and in research.
Who It Is For
The Practitioner research programme is suitable for any teacher, leader or member of support staff. Often, schools enrol a group of 8-12 participants – a combination of teachers, leaders and/or support staff – to engage in an annual programme of inquiry.
I don’t usually think of educational conferences in terms of their comedy value, but James Mannion’s presentation was a hoot! A combination of his own humorous and engaging style and the benefits of a smaller, more interactive audience, made this session both informative and enjoyable.
James’s presentation was clear, informed, carefully constructed, accessible and engaging. As a consequence, his purposeful research in relation to self-regulated learning has enriched our initial and teacher education programmes.
