Our Journey
… through time and place
Sometimes teaching is just hard, especially when you want to bring the best out in your students and build up their creative and critical thinking skills. But it doesn’t have to be. That is where we come in.
We love building up creative and critical thinkers and believe it is the best thing for your students, but we understand it can be diffcicult and often overwhelming. That is why we want to make it easier for you to do this in your classroom.
As teachers we are there for more than just sharing knowledge.
It is about encouraging creativity and critical thinking.
We believe this and embed it in everything we do. We believe in it so much that we want to make it easier for other people to do this.
Teaching can be overwhelming with all of the standards you need to cover let alone other expectations of the school. Figuring out how to teach creative and critical thinking skills can be just too much at times.
But we know you can do it and we want to help you.
Can we put in here the roll your eyes phrase of “we want you to be the best teacher you can be!”. But we honestly do.
We want to do everything in our power to help you build creative and critical thinking in your students.
Some thoughts that might be running through your head already:
Now if you are agreeing with us so far and thinking “Yes, I want to support creativity and critical thinking” then
You have found your people.
We are speaking from experience because we have been you.
We have taught multiple curriculums in 5 countries now. We have been trained in International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme which is full inquiry methodology. We have taught from explicit direct instruction to open-ended individualised explore programs.
We have taught in inner-city schools, rural schools, huge schools and tiny schools in developing countries. We know the one major thing that helps all kids is the need for creative and critical thinking skills. And what we have learnt is that all kids can be taught these no matter what English level, education level, cultural background, financial situation etc.
We have done it the hard way by ourselves at schools that were not super interested in changing pedagogies. We have at times discussed just doing it the school’s way and not embedding these skills in our teaching, as that would be easier. But we didn’t because we believe that kids need to be taught these skills.
Throughout our journey, we have learnt what works and what doesn’t work. We have developed our own teaching cycle (similar to an inquiry cycle) to match what we believe is important. When mentoring other teachers in developing their practices we know how difficult it is and firmly believe that no matter where you start it can be done and the seeing kids use their critical and creative thinking skills is awesome.
We want to help you get there too.
If you stick with us not only will you have more interesting and fulfilling lessons, your students will be participating at a thinking level you haven’t seen before. You will also be supported in your journey. We want you to succeed as we want all students to have creative and critical thinking skills. The more teachers nurturing creative and critical thinkers the better our world will become.
We want to help you get there too.
We are international teachers
We moved to international teaching from Australia in 2015 and since then have worked in Qatar, Jordan, The Gambia and Lithuania. This has been such a great opportunity. We have taught multiple grade levels using so many different curriculums (AERO, Common Core, Cambridge, IPC, PYP, Australian…). We have been able to co-teach a grade 2-5 class with 18 students in The Gambia. We have worked with schools that have 7 teachers on a grade level to just us soloing it. We also have worked with students and teachers of many different nationalities. All of this has shaped who we are as teachers and what we think is important in education. The bonus to all this – we have had the awesome opportunity to travel to so many different places that we wouldn’t have if we had stayed in Australia (I mean come on … Australia is in woop woop compared to everywhere else).
Also known as 2 Nomadic Escapers
In our travelling journeys, we have taken on another name. In Norway, we discovered that escape rooms were our jam. We have now escaped from over 185 escape rooms (come on 200). We have a 100% escape rate except for the few where the rooms were broken. Our favourite rooms include a Sherlock Holmes escape in Spain, Bulgarian Prison Escape in Portugal, Ski House and Subway in Hungary, and the best one The Phantom of the Opera in Belarus. And now we can firmly say – if you ever want to test your marriage get locked into a room that you have to work together to get out of.
We could also be called 2 Nomadic Gamers
We are both huge PC gamers (no consoles here). Not only this but we met while playing Call of Duty online. Of course Call of Duty holds a favourite place in our hearts, but we mix it up with some Guild Wars 2. While we both like FPS games, James is more into strategy and building while Stacy likes RPGs. This is not limited to just digital, we also love board games (Killer Bunnies, Settlers of Catan and Pandemic Legacy) as well as Dungeons and Dragons.
This love of gaming led to using gamification in our classrooms. We have created a class-based game for our students including an interactive map, character cards, item cards, and mythical moolah (money). it is definitely over 2000 pieces now.
We are proof that opposite workstyles attract
We work really really well together but we are definitely totally different personalities. This has been proven in escape rooms, games and co-teaching at schools. Stacy is the more planning pedantic perfectionist (triple P threat) while James is the more laidback approach with a frantic push before a deadline. Funnily enough, we both can drive each other up the wall, but we also balance each other out.
