Tag Archives: Learning

Time to Think

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There is a rhythm that takes over when you spend days in the saddle. The world narrows to the width of the road, the steady turning of the pedals, and the sound of the English countryside—rain included.

The purpose of my cycling journey across England was simple: to visit my newborn grand-niece, Florence (born on the same day as Florence Nightingale). I also wanted the journey to carry a second thread—reflection on thinking, learning, and attention. I took Nancy Kline’s Time to Think with me.

Newborn Florence. What a beautiful, pure and curious soul she is!

A mobile laboratory

Kline’s premise is simple: the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first—and good thinking requires space and attention.

A bicycle tour turns out to be an unusually effective laboratory for this. No meetings. No notifications. No agenda beyond the next village. Just repetition, motion, and a mind disconnecting from noise.

Well, mostly. There was rain, there were more punctures than expected, and the traffic was occasionally overconfident in its interpretation of physics. But even that becomes part of the rhythm, eventually.

An unpaved section of National Cycle Route #1!

Places that hold thought

As I moved through England, I began to notice how often thought seems to gather in certain places.

Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon are saturated with it. You feel it in the density of books, weight of stone, and arguments made over the centuries.

Oxford

But deep thought doesn’t only happen in institutions. Further north, at Woolsthorpe Manor, Newton’s birthplace, the story goes that much of his transformative thinking on gravity and calculus took shape not in Cambridge, but in his family’s orchard during the plague years. Whether exact or embellished, the image stays with you: revolutionary ideas generated not in a frantic hub of activity but in stillness.

That contrast stayed with me as I rode on.

Newton’s Orchard and Home

Lincoln

Standing beneath the vaulted ceilings of Lincoln Cathedral, I was struck by the scale of what people can build across generations. Stone laid upon stone, intention upon intention, each generation adding something lasting to something far larger than itself.

It made me wonder: building things that outlast us requires ultra-long-form attention that seems incompatible with today’s ‘notification economy’.

Lincoln Cathedral

The real distance

The kilometres on the bike were only the visible measure of the journey. They were scaffolding.

The real distance was mental: the slow clearing that comes from sustained movement and an open uncluttered mind.

Whether in Newton’s orchard, beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford, inside the stone vastness of Lincoln Cathedral, or in the quiet presence of Florence, the same idea kept returning in different forms:

We think best—and perhaps live best—when we step out of the noise and give ourselves time and space.

Human Literacy

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Foundational literacies

For much of my professional life, I have been committed to enabling teaching and learning, particularly the foundational literacies that help people thrive: reading and writing, numeracy, scientific and cultural literacies. These are the building blocks upon which so much else depends.

Human Literacy

As AI becomes increasingly capable—and may soon outperform us in many of these traditional literacies—another literacy is moving to the foreground: human literacy.

Human literacy: the ability to understand and regulate ourselves, relate effectively with others, and continue to learn, grow, and flourish.

If traditional literacies help us engage with knowledge, human literacy helps us engage with ourselves and one another.

Environment of Trust

Cultivating this literacy isn’t just an academic exercise, it requires intentional practice. This realisation was one of the reasons I enrolled in a nine-month coaching programme at Henley.

I expected to spend my time learning coaching theories, frameworks, tools, and techniques. What I did not fully anticipate was the importance of the environment in which that learning would take place.

One of the most striking aspects of the programme has been the sense of trust, safety, and support created among participants and faculty. Coaching requires openness, curiosity, self-awareness, and, at times, vulnerability. These qualities cannot be forced; they emerge when people feel respected and free to experiment without fear of judgement. They become more rather than less important as AI takes on a growing share of analytical and knowledge-based work.

It was remarkable how quickly accomplished professionals became willing to share uncertainties, experiment with unfamiliar approaches, and offer candid feedback. This has established a community that feels deeply collaborative rather than competitive. Credit to the faculty and team for creating this!

Personal Struggle

One of the most challenging aspects of the programme for me has been learning to step out of the driving seat. My instinct is often to steer people reach a conclusion, but effective coaching requires creating the conditions for the coachee to find their own way forward. Before joining the programme, I assumed I would be most drawn to structured, solution-focused approaches. I was surprised to find myself appreciating more humanistic and systemic perspectives. They often created a greater sense of calm and presence in the conversation, which in turn seemed to help the coachee open up and explore more freely.

It has been a useful reminder to me that some of the most valuable learning comes from the approaches we initially resist. It’s a lesson I hope to carry beyond coaching.

Learning Partnership

The connection between coaching and learning has been the most valuable insight for me so far. Good coaching is not about providing answers. It is about creating the environment in which learning can happen—cultivating trust and psychological safety, encouraging curiosity and reflection, offering challenge alongside support, and enabling continuous growth.

At its best, coaching is a learning partnership. It helps people think more clearly, discover new possibilities, and move forward with greater confidence and purpose.

I expected the course to be the project. Instead, I have found that I am the project.

Coaching and Mentoring

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Today was my last day as Chairman of Infinitas Learning — and the end of an important chapter for me in educational publishing, following my earlier years as CEO of Sanoma Learning.

Those who know me well know how passionate I am about learning, and about the role organisations like Infinitas and Sanoma play in supporting learner outcomes and helping teachers in their vitally important work.

Following its acquisition by NPM Capital as lead investor, we have doubled the size of the business, including expanding into Portugal and Poland. Working on that growth — alongside the company’s digital and, more recently, its AI transformations — has been especially rewarding. There are enormous opportunities ahead to better support both teachers and students.

Most of all, I’ve valued the people. My colleagues at Infinitas and NPM Capital have been outstanding, and I’m genuinely grateful to have been part of the journey. I wish them every success for the future.

Over the past 15 years leading and chairing organisations in edtech and learning, I’ve accumulated hard-won experience in leadership, transformation, and what it takes to grow — both as an organisation and as a person. And I’m still very much learning. What continues to fascinate me is how much of leadership ultimately comes down to learning.

In the next phase, I want to put that experience to work more directly through coaching and mentoring, alongside my ongoing board commitments in edtech, including as Chairman of Ovivio.

Where I’d most like to help:
> Executive transition coaching — supporting leaders stepping into C-suite or senior roles for the first time.
> Strategic leadership — working through the real complexity of leading organisations through change.
> Personal effectiveness — helping leaders perform at their best.

For mentoring, my focus will naturally remain close to education and edtech (while avoiding conflicts with Infinitas or Ovivio). For coaching, the methodology is different, and I am keen to work more broadly across sectors — including healthtech and business services.

If any of this resonates, or if you simply want to catch up, feel free to reach out here or directly at: johnmartin@contentconnected.com

Looking forward to what comes next.

#learning #education #edtech #coaching #mentoring

Homeschooling is becoming mainstream

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Homeschooling is becoming mainstream in many countries including the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, where demand is increasing and well-established legal frameworks are in place. In the USA about 3 million students (6% of total) were homeschooled in 2021-2022, an increase of 25% from 2019-2022 and a step increase from the trend growth rate of 2-8% per year since the 1990’s.

Why homeschool?

Research from the National Center for Education Statistics from 2022 shows that four of the five most popular reasons why parents decide to homeschool their children are social-cultural rather than academic:

  • concerns about the school environment (safety, drugs, peer pressure)
  • wanting to provide moral instruction
  • emphasis on a family life together
  • wanting to provide religious instruction.

In the meantime, growth in the market for education technology solutions, in part further stimulated by the pandemic, has ensured that good quality learning resources are available at scale in the home environment, thereby lowering this particular former barrier to homeschooling.

“Old school”, “new school”, “not school”?

The trend towards homeschooling reminded me of the scenario planning we had done at Sanoma about the future of education some 15 years ago, especially considering three main scenarios i) “old school” ii) “new school” and iii) “not school”. I had personally not expected the “not school” model to break through due to the high value-add of the professional teacher and the high economic and organisational implications for the family (typically requiring one parent to stay at home).  I had expected technology to underpin the further development of all three scenarios but had not foreseen the pandemic nor the increased polarisation of society at the time, which are surely factors that have made some impact on the growth of homeschooling.

I wonder what the trend to homeschooling might mean for homeschooled children and families? What impact will it have on public education systems and society as a whole?

Should we take the child out of the school, or bring the parent into the pedagogy?

School is in some ways already a limited intervention in the learning and development of a child, after all more than 80% of their time is spent outside of school. To what extent might approaches that encourage greater parental engagement in education help to support the learning of the child and help to remedy some of the social and cultural concerns that some parents have about schools?

It seems likely that more hybrid models might emerge, combining the professional and economic benefits of the school with the social and cultural engagement of the family.  Typically, an encouraging home environment, a high level of personal attention and more personalisation, tend to support learning.  Have we “outsourced” too much to schools? Especially in a world of increasing teacher shortages, might greater involvement of parents be part of the solution?

How big is the global teacher shortage?

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According to UNESCO in a report published this week, we need to attract no less than 44 million additional teachers into the profession to achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2030.

¡Viva la profesora!

Put in to context, that’s more than half the size of the current global workforce of teachers (about 77M) and roughly the population of Spain!

Hello, Goodbye

The gap is caused by two main factors (with the impact and underlying drivers differing significantly by country):

  1. Expansion as demographics push education systems to grow (42% of the 44M), and
  2. Attrition due to teachers leaving the profession (58% of the 44M).

About 1/3 of the total demand for new teachers by 2030 comes from Sub-Saharan Africa (15M additional teachers). This is driven to a significant extent by demographics and growing access to secondary education (62% of the gap is to fill new teaching posts). However 93% of the 4.8M additional teachers required in Europe and North America, are needed because of attrition.

Push, Pull, Personal

There are clearly many factors that affect teacher recruitment, retention, job satisfaction and productivity, often driven by local dynamics. Broadly, the report highlights several “push factors” (e.g. working conditions, teacher well-being), “pull factors” (e.g. remuneration and professional development) and “personal reasons” (e.g. retirement, health, family circumstances) that influence whether people join the profession and how long they stick with it.

Can AI solve the problem?

There isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all answer to finding 44M new teachers in the coming years. AI can surely help in many areas, such as optimising the recruitment and deployment of the teaching workforce, and saving time on administrative tasks for teachers so they can focus on teaching (about half of the working time of a typical teacher is spent on non-teaching tasks outside the classroom).

However, beware of solutions that completely substitute teachers. The human teacher plays an essential role in the process of learning and coaching. Parents are unlikely to leave their (especially younger) children in the hands of a robot. Larger class sizes will likely exacerbate the negative “push factors” in the teacher workplace.

In my view, solutions that super-charge rather than disintermediate teachers are most likely to succeed.

Imagine all the Teachers

Imagine the positive impact we can make on the prosperity, well-being and sustainability of the next generation across the globe when we ensure universal access to primary and secondary education. On the other hand, imagine what declining levels of literacy and numeracy might mean, not only in a faraway land but in your own neighbourhood.

This is a high impact, solvable challenge. We should give it the priority it needs.