The trigger

As a teacher and education specialist working in France, very early on in my career I made a conscious decision to adopt a different pedagogical approach to the traditionnal teaching methods that I'd been trained to use during my two French professional qualifications (PGCE/Masters in education equivalents).  I could see that simply teaching from the blackboard and following the chosen text books complexified the whole learning process, switching pupils off to the point that their only motivation was knowing what to revise for the end of sequence tests regardless of whether the information was useful to know or would ever be retrieved by their brains again in the future.  Not only did learning become cumbersome, but teaching did too, as more and more of my time was taken up by classroom management which is the inevitable consequence of teaching mentally switched off classes. 

I turned to new innovative methods like the Method Rivoire, that dealt with behavioural problems by dividing the class up into six or seven 'islands' that would receive grouped behaviour marks for cooperating in class.  The more activities the groups did, the better their island's behaviour mark.  The advantage was that even the 'naughty' rebellious pupils felt compelled to conform since their co-island-dwellers' grades were dependent on their complicity. Despite the apparent quietness or air of hard work that then filled my classrooms, I hadn't in fact solved my problem of wanting to switch pupils back on.  I'd simply transfered the teacher-pupil power struggle from myself to the seven islands, who would fight amongst themselves so that order would sufficiently reign for them to all get a good enough behaviour mark while actively occupying themselves with the wonderfully entertaining activities that I'd dreamt up.  My pupils were busy and well-behaved but they weren't capable of making sentences in English that they hadn't already learnt by heart.  

I started to experiment with many different techniques that would entice pupils to start thinking while giving them the freedom to innovate and express themselves in English, stimulating both genuine learning and relationships based on trust, which had a positive impact on all the schools and individuals I worked with. 

However, my decision to not powerlessly accept school bullying in France, first from a professional and then from a parental point of view, was not favorably received.  Following my son's brutal assault at the start of secondary school, and my desire to not allow the incident to be glossed over, as is so often the case here, my family and I were subjected to extreme harrassment in an attempt to intimidate us into silence from both my son's headteacher and my own headteacher, who happened to be her friend and close colleague.  My superiors preferred to sit on the fence, not daring to act despite the evidence, for fear of tarnishing their own careers. The situation became so intense that we were forced to move and I to resign, in order to overcome the psychological damage that was deeply affecting us all. Resigning from a teaching job in France has greater implications than simply leaving a British school and finding a new position at the start of the next term.  Here, given that teachers who manage to pass the competive teaching exams are civil servants, handing in your notice means resigning from a career in teaching.  It is therefore rare for teachers to make such dramatic decisions.  Suddenly, it was as though all the time and energy I'd invested over the years in trying to bring about positive change within the system, had been an illusion.  Going against the grain and not accepting the systems's usual way of dealing with bullying i.e. by doing very little (which I'd witnessed throughout my career) and hoping that such an incident be treated seriously and fairly, was simply unheard of.  As a parent you are not expected to make a major fuss and as a teacher, you should very rarely speak out.   

Instead of launching into two or three long arduous court cases in order to obtain compensation (which I could have done since I'd collected enough evidence to prove the extent of the bullying and the harrassement that my family and I had been subjected to), or even seeking vengeance through the press and social media, I chose a different option.  I wanted something positive to emerge from the cinders.  I wanted to understand how seemingly intelligent, educated people, working with children, could choose to act in such a destructive manner, either by consciously setting out to destroy or by voluntarily turning a blind eye.  I realised that it is the way we have been taught to interact with each other that creates the perfect environnement for relationships based on power struggles and thus the need to fight to come out on top, at whatever the cost.  

My practical teaching experience, research and personal knowledge allowed me to analyse and understand how we can evolve once and for all from such a destructive way of interacting, eradicating at the same time the symptoms of our current social difficulties (violence, bullying, dropping out, stress, depression, nervous break-down and a general pessimism towards the future).   I wrote a digestable analysis of French society through its education system (soon to be published) in order to help the system and its users wake up to this reality and offer simple solutions, that we can all put into practice on a day to day basis to help bring about positive change.  I wrote Last Tango with Fire : Encouraging bullying to show that in a complex relational dynamic such as work-place bullying both the bully and the victim unwittingly behave according to a certain psychological code they created as a survival mechanism throughout childhood.  The goal of both books is to increase awareness concerning the hidden mechanisms that actually dictate our daily lives, allowing us to move from auto-pilot mode to self-awareness, making interactions based on empathy truly possible.