Academic life is not usually built around peak moments. It is built around routine, persistence, and work that often feels too slow, too precarious, or too marginal to ever gather momentum. For most academics, and certainly for me, the year is shaped far more by the long stretches of quiet labour than by moments of recognition. There are semesters filled with heavy teaching, projects that seem to stall indefinitely, papers that return with criticism, and a sense that one is always balancing ambitions against the constraints of time and energy.

Preface Let me begin by saying that I do not deny the reality of climate change. The planet’s ecosystems are under strain, and human activity plays a part in that. Where I part company with many mainstream voices is not in recognising the problem, but in questioning the prevailing style of response. I am unconvinced that our current mix of alarmism, moral grandstanding, and institutional posturing represents the best path forward.

Few ideas enjoy the moral consensus that character education does. No teacher, parent, or policymaker seriously denies its value. The problem is not whether character education matters, but that its research base has not yet moved beyond proving that truism. Our recent scoping review of global character education research shows how far the field has come, but also how much of it remains at the level of affirmation and theoretical exposition rather than explanation and verification.

“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar; you are only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” I am writing this tonight because I cannot sleep after the events of today. The image keeps replaying in my mind: the video of Charlie Kirk collapsing, blood pissing from his neck in front of his young family.

So, as you may know, I wrote a book. Oddly enough, that was the easy part. It took me eleven months. That might sound fast, and in some ways, it was - but only because the book was not built from scratch. It was built from layers of thought and experience laid down over thirteen years of work, reading, coaching, questioning, and slowly noticing patterns that others had either missed or ignored.

In Hedgerow Vale, where the air hummed with bees and the paths were pressed smooth by generations of paws, two kinds of creatures lived among the roots. The bristle-eared fieldmice were the older settlers - shorter, solid, their ears rimmed with coarse fur, nicked and weathered like bark after rain. They had long been the makers of maps, the keepers of seeds, and the ones who gave names to the turns in the tunnels.

With just under 80,000 words now drafted, Practical Wisdom Coaching is approaching completion. Seven chapters are finished. The eighth — a final reflection on the book’s contributions and future research directions — is currently underway. What began as a conceptual synthesis has become, I hope, a practical philosophical framework: one that connects moral psychology, differential psychology, and behaviour science into a useable coaching-based approach to human development.

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There is a kind of silence that descends when writing moves from insight to structure. One feels full of purpose, yet strangely paralysed by the weight of getting it right. That is the territory I currently inhabit as I write Chapter 6 of my book on Practical Wisdom Coaching. The ideas are there. The urgency is there. But the challenge is how to speak clearly, without flattening complexity; to be useful, without succumbing to platitude; and to offer a kind of psychological realism that does not pander to sentimentality or cynicism.

A short blog about our long paper (see here). For more than two thousand years, Aristotle's phronesis—or practical wisdom—has held an almost mythical status in the realm of moral philosophy. It is the intellectual virtue that sits at the crossroads of reason, emotion, and action, guiding us to live well and act rightly. Aristotle believed that phronesis was essential to moral character, the faculty that transforms isolated virtues into a cohesive moral life.

This article presents the development and validation of the Short Phronesis Measure (SPM), a novel tool to assess Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom). Across three studies, using large,…

This article presents the development and validation of the Short Phronesis Measure (SPM), a novel tool to assess Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom). Across three studies, using large, national...

As the year comes to an end, I find myself reflecting on the remarkable journey that 2024 has been. It has been a year shaped by collaboration, discovery, and milestones—each one serving as a reminder of the privilege of doing work that can make a meaningful difference. This reflection is not just about looking back with gratitude but also about looking forward with a sense of optimism for what lies ahead.

ResearchHub Journal launches latest attempt to compensate referees for their labour.

(and Why They Must Be Debunked) Everyone knows that education shapes lives and determines futures. Few professions carry such weighty responsibilities. Yet, education has long been vulnerable to myths, fads, and assumptions that persist despite a lack of evidence. Evidence-based practice (EBP) promises to cut through this noise, providing educators with the tools to make decisions rooted in rigorously tested research.

Note. I consider myself to largely be "politically homeless" - while this post relates to and was prompted by current affairs in politics, I hope that readers will see that the motivation for this piece was not political. The motivation and message here is about a glaring issue of injustice within civic society, the effects on the social fabric, and most importantly, those who enable injustice by turning a blind eye for partisan reasons.

In the age of influencer therapists and mental health apps, experts say the public need to be better informed