Botheredness: Stories, Stance and Pedagogy

This is an education book that is like no other that has gone before. It won't tell you what to do minute by minute, lesson by lesson, day by day. It won't batter you with impenetrable research or tell you what you must think. You won't even find a scheme of work in it some planning ideas, for sure, even a template or two, but there's no spoon-feeding here. It's just a book that invites you to consider where you are in your own educational journey. It's a book to get youbothered.

Botheredness is a word Hywel Roberts uses to sum up the kind of authentic care and adult positioning that is real and deliberate and gets children and young people on board with learning. It is the holy grail of teaching and something that will both significantly improve your enjoyment of teaching and benefit your classes enormously.

This book is therefore an exploration of the road less travelled, backed up with Hywel's own experiences, reflections and research down the rabbit hole of contemporary education. It's about the reinstatement of professional integrity, the teacher as storyteller, and the need for our professional imaginations to be nurtured and curated. Hywel sets out to help teachers enhance their understanding of what it means to lead learning and thinking, to stand beside children as well as in front of them, whilst developing their knowledge acquisition with compassion, warmth and optimism.

If you are looking for an education book that will inspire not dictate, that will entertain, challenge and fire up your imagination in equal measure,that allows you to think beyond a path laid out by scripted lessons, downloadable schemes and quick-fix fads, then this is the book for you.

Providing clear strategies around imaginative and effective planning, supported by genuine examples of powerful classroom work from primary, special and secondary settings, this book is an essential guide to reclaiming your professional warmth, passion, and care - your botherednesss - in the classroom. Written by a travelling teacher and film buff who's on a mission to put botheredness into classrooms everywhere.

Suitable for teachers, teaching assistants and school leaders, as well as other education professionals.