Böcker av Phil Beadle

The Fascist Painting is a serious, rich and deeply intelligent piece of work that will radically alter the way we view culture in schools and will be a key text for anyone designing a curriculum.

Rules for Mavericks: A Manifesto for Dissident Creatives by Phil Beadle is a guidebook to leading a creative life, to being a renaissance dilettante, to infesting your art form with other art forms, to taking a stand against mediocrity, to rejecting bloodless orthodoxies, to embracing your own pretension and, most of all, to dealing with your failure(s). 'If you make any stand against power, then power will stand against and on you. And it will do so with centuries of experience and techniques in how to do so effectively: you will be painted as barbaric, dismissed as stupid and insane, be told to know your place. Most of all, you will be termed maverick.' This genre-flouting manifesto is written by someone who has achieved and has failed in more than one field. As a Guardian columnist, award-winning teacher, award-winning broadcaster, author, editor, singer, songwriter, producer and public speaker, Phil Beadle knows a bit about leading a life producing good work across a variety of platforms. In this elegantly written book he glides and riffs around the idea of maverick nature, examines the processes of producing good work in creative fields and broaches the techniques that orthodoxies use to silence dissident voices. It is a 'how to dream' book, a 'how to create' book, a 'how to work' book and a 'how to fail productively' book; it is an examination of the many accusations that any dissident creative will face over a long career stirring things up, a guide to dealing with these with grace and a study in how to make creativity work for you. Rules for Mavericks is for anyone who wants to live and work more creatively and successfully. Contents include: Introduction: 'maverick nature', 1 Rules, 2 Starting off, 3 Failure, 4 Creativity and the process of production, 5 Work, 6 The realm(s) of appearance, 7 Performance, 8 Change, 9 Renaissance dilettantism, 10 Writing (and reading too), 11 On being reviewed.

If you buy only one book on metacognitive strategies for the last ten minutes of the lesson this year, make it this one!

Literacy is important. This book is about getting it right.

Dancing about Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity is a compendium of outrageous ideas: ideas about how to take more risks, and about how to go about coming up with better ideas. Ideas about how to plan experiences that leave people who are in the same room as those ideas awestruck, and ideas to help you avoid the textbook, the worksheet the barely stifled yawn. From using The Book of Revelation as a planning device; to seeing every experience through the prism of physical activity or song; to measuring a poem to find its real heart; it outlines a methodology that, if you use it, will make you an even greater creative force than you already are.

Phil Beadle has been described as The scourge of education policy makers and A prolific writer of articles challenging the status quo in education. Bad Education is an anthology of his best columns. Written in his trademark, simple, luminous and down-to-earth style, this collection is a wry look at more or less every element of educational change over the last five years.

Written by Chris Curtis, How to Teach: English: Novels, non-fiction and their artful navigation is jam-packed with enlivening ideas to help teachers make the subject of English more intellectually challenging for students - and to make it fun too! Never underestimate your duty and power as a teacher of English. English teachers help students to think and feel. They prompt them to reflect on their actions. They hold a mirror to society and inspire students to see how they can make it better. What other subject does that? This insightful interpretation of what makes excellent secondary school English teaching is the work of a man whose humility fails to hide his brilliance and provides educators with a sophisticated yet simple framework upon which to hook their lessons. Covering poetry, grammar, Shakespeare and how to teach writing, Chris Curtis has furnished every page of this book with exciting ideas that can be put into practice immediately. Each chapter presents a store of practical strategies to help students in key areas - providing apposite examples, teaching sequences and the rationale behind them - and has been accessibly laid out so that teachers can pinpoint the solutions they need without having to spend an age wading through academic theory and pontification. The book explores the wealth of learning opportunities that can be derived from both classic and more contemporary literature and offers expert guidance on how teachers can exploit their own chosen texts to best effect with their students. Furthermore, it is replete with ready-to-use approaches that will help teachers upgrade their lesson planning, enhance their classroom practice and ensure that the content they cover sticks in their students' heads for months and years afterwards. Suitable for all English teachers of students aged 11-18.

Phil Beadle is a former rock musician, the winner of the Secondary Teacher of the Year Award 2005, and the inspirational teacher who wowed the nation with his unorthodox teaching methods in Channel 4 series THE UNTEACHABLES.