All Posts
📝In the early 1990s, I was giving a workshop for MA students at Columbia University, most of whom were practicing Japanese high school teachers of English. The worksheet I handed out contained a wide range of activities. One section offered five instructions, each followed by a blank line. The first
All Posts
📝I was sitting down for lunch with my mother-in-law. She is 93 and living with dementia. I brought two glasses of water to the table, one for her and one for me. Before I put them down, I gave her a choice: Would you like wet water or
All Posts
🌱Multidimensionality is a term and design principle that helps us remember that any learning moment is active on more than one level at once. We are never only learning the declared content. We are also experiencing processes, inhabiting a role, forming a sense of ourselves, meeting or resisting authority, noticing
All Posts
📗Part 1: The Editorial Pages of the JALT Journal May 2026 This is the first in a series of posts in which I analyse the May 2026 issue of JALT Journal cover to cover, reading not so much for what each piece contributes but for what the whole reveals about
All Posts
📝One afternoon in the autumn of 1984, sitting in my living room in South Parade, Oxford, I got a phone call that changed my life. It was from a professor in the Faculty of Education at Okayama University. With him was an English gentleman I had never met, but had
All Posts
🌱The Architecture of a Living Curriculum is built from triads. This post looks at why. Triads recur in thinking about complexity, design, and human systems. Are they doing real structural work, or are they merely decorative? I've had to ask this question of myself, since the architecture is