1. !!SHORT NOTICE ALERT!! A Hachette webinar, From Assumptions to Partnerships: rethinking parental engagement to raise children’s achievement, with Cat Jones at 16:00 UK time tomorrow, Wednesday 10^th June. More info and registration here

https://hachette-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/5rYCdZUoTVCTJpaN3hetIQ#/registration

National research with in-service teachers (reveals) a striking reality: many teachers receive little to no training in parental engagement, and 70% believe that some parents don’t engage with school because they ‘don’t care’ about their child’s learning.

2. You are here is the title of the latest post by Alexandra Mihai on her blog, The Educationalist https://educationalist.substack.com/p/you-are-here

A topic that has been quite close to my heart lately is presence. Not mindfulness in the narrow sense, but presence as a quality of being fully engaged, attentive, and responsive. I want to apply this idea to the learning environment, as I feel we are often missing a great opportunity to use the classroom space to cultivate presence as a skill, an attitude and a state.

3. And this piece for The Conversation by Ross Channing Reed explores a similar idea to presence, Why sophrosyne, an ancient Greek virtue, matters more than ever in the age of AI https://theconversation.com/why-sophrosyne-an-ancient-greek-virtue-matters-more-than-ever-in-the-age-of-ai-282665

Texting while driving. Bullying people on social media. Buying into the latest conspiracy theory. Passing off AI-generated work as your own. That may seem like a random list of 21st-century vices. But I’d argue they’re all examples of the loss of one particular virtue: sophrosyne. An ancient Greek concept, sophrosyne – pronounced “suh-fros-uh-nee” – is what we might call “sound-mindedness” today. It’s a constellation of characteristics, including moderation, reflectiveness and self-knowledge. They’re found in the kind of person who can respect and trust herself and be respected and trusted by others.

4. Some reflections from C. Brandon Ogbunu on what it means to teach Darwin nowadays, What I Learned from Teaching Darwin https://undark.org/2026/04/23/opinion-teaching-darwin/

On the first day of class, I joked with students that I would play the role of their politically conservative uncle. That is, there would be no trigger warnings and none of the cushioning that has become standard in college courses that include exposure to ideas and readings with offensive language or content. I told them that we would read Darwin’s books as they were written and try to understand them, and if they didn’t like that, to enrol in a different course. The larger lesson was simple: To study a complex world, you must read difficult material and learn to interpret it with rigor and empathy. I was priming the class for Darwin’s views on race and gender, ideas that complicate many of our largely positive opinions of him (mine included).

Thanks, Maja!

5. And, finally, with fingers crossed it’s accessible, a piece from Tribune by Richard Heller & Peter Oborne,  Cricket for the Many https://tribunemag.co.uk/2026/06/cricket-for-the-many

The sport long associated with empire and elite privilege has a surprising, often neglected history of radicalism — which its fans must recuperate today.