Botheredness: Stories, stance and pedagogy

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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. After reading this book I realised that I'm already doing some of the things he mentions, and it has given me the reassurance that I might actually be doing a good job. There are lots of ideas that I knew of already and have used in the past but maybe I need to revisit them and pull them out of the dusty drawer. It's also given me the inspiration to try out new techniques with some classes and some students for whom I've maybe thought that nothing was working. Botheredness is a book about rethinking how we teach children but will appeal to anyone that has ever taught, trained an apprentice, led a cookery class, etc. – the content has far broader applications. 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 you bothered. This book feels like sitting in a warm and welcoming hostelry with friends and colleagues, setting the world to rights and landing upon an exciting new idea. Hywel has given a lot to the teaching world and Botherednesssings with hope and aspiration throughout. A must for anyone who works or dabbles in education.

Written by Hywel Roberts, Botheredness®: Stories, stance and pedagogy is a funny, engaging and rapturous read that will inspire teachers to reclaim their professional imagination and reignite the excitement they felt when they entered the teaching profession. It’s about botheredness – a made-up word that everyone understands. 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. This book is brilliant for any teacher. New, old, inexperienced or near retirement. It's also very useful for others in education, from teaching assistants to further up the management scale.

I have just finished the book today and it has given me that energised feeling that brand-new teachers get when you first step into a classroom. Hywel was the reason I became a teacher. His enthusiasm shone through in everything he did. He told stories, he listened to our stories and most of all he was bothered by what we had to say. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be bothered.

In part a critique of the educational status quo, Botheredness is littered with engaging reminiscences of life on the educational coalface, simple tips to inspire young people and a healthy dose of pop culture. Hywel speaks with the authority of experience and the warmth of a veteran educator that never fell out of love with the romance of the profession. Like Hywel’s lessons, Botheredness strikes the perfect balance between describing in detail a new path for teachers and keeping the reader (professional or otherwise) engaged and entertained at all times.