10 years ago today I published my first post on this blog. A lot has happened in those years (I wrote about most of them here) and while I haven’t posted as much as I would have liked, I’m pretty pleased that a decade on this blog is still going.

When I look back on that first blog post, I can see that my primary focus was on reflection, and that makes sense to me now. I had just moved to Belgium after two incredible years in Korea during which I had been on an internal rollercoaster of self-discovery and development. 

I don’t think there’s ever been another point like it in my life before or since, with ideas of what should happen in the classroom, how it can happen, and the role of the students and the teacher coming together in my head. I allude to this back in 2010 as ‘intense’, and I wasn’t wrong, so it’s no surprise to find me looking to pause and consolidate everything that had been percolating in the years before. 

I mention that “my hope is that by reflecting … I will be able to improve myself as a teacher” and in that respect, I definitely feel that it delivered. Through this blog, I’ve been able to try and make sense of my teaching practice, what worked and what didn’t, with the added benefit of it being a dialogue with my readers. So thank you for reading this blog, whether you are one of the few die hards who’ve been here since the beginning or a more recent convert, and thank you for contributing to my development as a teacher.

Of course, the reflection isn’t over, so I will be looking back at a few more of my posts from the last ten years in the next few weeks to see what I’ve learned. I hope you can join me.