1. Since the beginning of this year, The Rest is History podcast has covered, often in considerable (enjoyable, enlightening) detail, an extraordinary range of subjects: Joan of Arc; The Nazis at War; Horatio Nelson; Walt Disney; Queen Elizabeth 1; Jack the Ripper; Wagner; The First World War Christmas Truce; Tchaikovsky; The Fall of the Shah & The Revolution in Iran; Hannibal and Rome’s wars with Carthage. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0d0mj5v Fill your boots!

And does anyone have a convincing explanation of the origin of that fill your boots phrase, I wonder? I’m not persuaded by stories of coal miners filling their boots with coal or sailors filling their boots with rum!

2. Alan Maley gave a characteristically engaging talk at IATEFL in Brighton last week entitled The Case for Silence. Alan’s kindly agreed that I can share the slides from his talk, and he’s also sent me an article by way of background reading, Silence, Well-being, and Learning. PDFs of both below!

Alan’s article was published in The Journal of Silence Studies in Education https://jsse.ascee.org/index.php/jsse

3. Margit Szesztay also gave a good talk, Turning to one another in the age of AI: developing social skills through ELT. One of Margit’s activities was based around this picture from eltpics, ‘Bench with a View’ https://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/30877770544/ Work in pairs, A and B; A closes their eyes before the picture is revealed and B develops the story of how, when and why they themselves took the picture; A opens eyes and listens to and questions B’s story.

I’m ashamed to say that eltpics was new to me: a wealth of free photographs to use in the classroom https://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/

4. Daiana Natalia Martinez gave yet another good talk that I was lucky enough to attend last week, Mirrors, Windows, and Pathways: Rethinking Reflective Practice, which was inspired by Jason Anderson’s thinking on reflection literacy. This is the tool that Daiana adapted https://www.jasonanderson.org.uk/downloads/Two_tools_for_promoting_teacher_reflection_literacy.pdf and here’s Jason’s website https://www.jasonanderson.org.uk/index.html

(Jason’s) research interests at the University of Warwick are as diverse as the complexities of teaching itself, including teacher expertise, teacher reflection, teaching methodology and multilingualism in education. I am particularly interested in the challenges and innovations of teachers working in low-income contexts in the global South.

5. And, finally, a gift article from The Telegraph about hedgehogs that I think should probably be classified as an ‘advertorial’ – great videos, though! https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/cd39a151a0e17f05