On teaching, leadership, and the job we’re actually doing now.

01 — The classroom years

I started teaching science in England in the early 2000s. Grades 6 through 10, the years where students either fall in love with how the world works or decide it’s not for them. That’s where I learned that the curriculum is never the product. The student’s relationship to inquiry is.

02 — The Manila decade

Twelve years at the International School Manila changed how I thought about education. Two years in middle school. Ten in high school. Four years leading the science department. In that time I watched education move from worksheet-and-textbook to something much closer to what it should always have been — students asking real questions, investigating real phenomena, building real explanations.

03 — The leadership move

In 2025 I moved into school leadership as Associate Principal at the International School of Krakow. The reason was simple: the decisions that shape what happens in classrooms are made two levels above the classroom. If I wanted to change how AI was being handled by international schools, I needed to be in the room where those decisions were being made.

04 — Why AI, why now

I started speaking about AI in education in 2023, when most international schools were still deciding whether to allow it. The premise of those talks was unchanged then, and is unchanged now: the question is not permission. The question is fluency. AI is already in your students’ homework. It is in your colleagues’ planning. The only variable is whether your teachers are confident enough to teach with it, or anxious enough to pretend it isn’t there.

05 — What I believe about teachers

I have not met an educator who wasn’t capable of learning this. I have met many who had been told, directly or implicitly, that they weren’t. The work I do now is about removing that false frame and replacing it with something more useful: a teacher who has used AI for twenty hours is not the same teacher they were before. They are faster, more differentiated, more ambitious, and more curious. That teacher is who I’m trying to grow, at scale.