Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Kevin Lister's Teach Like You Imagined It: Finding the right balance shares a wealth of tools, ideas and encouragement to help teachers manage the conflicting pressures of teaching and become the educators they imagined.Teaching is an incredible profession, but it also comes with a potentially toxic workload. You do not have to put up with burn-out, however and one way to avoid it is to return to how you imagined teaching to be in the first place.Before you became a teacher, you pictured yourself as a teacher; in your imagination you almost certainly saw yourself as happy, efficient and able to manage your worklife balance effectively. Yet chances are that the reality of teaching is a little different, and it is this disconnect that can give rise to stress, anxiety and frustration.But what if you could use simple strategies to get a handle on your schedule and take control of your workload?Covering lesson planning, behaviour management, the streamlining of marking and getting the best out of CPD, Kevin Lister has drawn on his background in engineering to fill this book with trusted techniques and savvy suggestions to help you maximise your productivity and teach like you imagined it.Each chapter examines a different aspect of the day-to-day reality of teaching and suggests alternative, practical ways to look at or approach common tasks. Throughout the book Kevin touches on topics such as time management, prioritisation, educational research, leadership, psychology and other diverse concepts that his personal experiences and education have led him to explore. After each area of discussion there are prompts for action, where Kevin asks you to reflect on your working habits, question your practices and decide what you will do in response.Suitable for both new and experienced teachers looking to boost their day-to-day efficiency and find the right balance.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 298
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
PRAISE FOR TEACH LIKE YOU IMAGINED IT
We all have a unique backstory, and when this background is filtered into current practice it can produce some really fascinating insights. This is the case with Kevin Lister. With a professional background in engineering, Kevin has some very interesting and pertinent questions to ask about efficiency and lean organisations – and in Teach Like You Imagined It he provides plenty to think about when it comes to refining our practice.
A really enjoyable and accessible read.
Mary Myatt, adviser, speaker and author of The Curriculum: From Gallimaufry to Coherence
Too often the discourse on teacher workload and wellbeing has focused on the symptoms and causes rather than the solutions. Kevin Lister’s Teach Like You Imagined It reverses this by reflecting on the reasons why people join the teaching profession, why it is such an “awesome” and exciting career, what we can control, and why all of this is so vitally important for future generations.
Drawing honestly and with humility on his extensive experience as a teacher and school leader and on his previous roles in the engineering industry, Kevin forensically analyses specific aspects of being a teacher in order to help readers “reconnect with the teacher they imagined they would be” and manage their wellbeing and workload more effectively.
This excellent book contains a wealth of practical advice, thus providing a blueprint for teachers and school leaders to take back ownership of their professional and personal lives in the interests of the young people they serve. I wholeheartedly recommend it to teachers and school leaders.
Brian Lightman, former general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders
I have long believed that every good teacher is committed to becoming an even better teacher, and in Teach Like You Imagined It Kevin Lister offers advice to everyone – at any stage of their career – for whom this is true. He encourages teachers to explore how they can identify specific areas for improvement, build on their strengths and develop those areas in which they are less competent and confident through reflection, specific action and, crucially, a determination to work more efficiently.
While he accepts that the profession needs to exert what pressure it can to address those externally imposed factors which can make teachers’ work draining, at the same time he exhorts educators to consider the agency they have and to strive to use it positively. This is such an important message, and Kevin’s advice is balanced and sensible – grounded in his own practice, in his reflections from the front line of teaching and in his experience as a senior leader.
Teach Like You Imagined It will be useful to classroom practitioners and school leaders in challenging and supporting them on their journey to becoming the teachers and leaders they dream of being.
Jill Berry, leadership consultant and former head teacher
Kevin Lister is clearly a man of considerable experience and wisdom. The personal reflections he shares in Teach Like You Imagined It are excellent, built as they are on his very evident passion for teaching – which adds huge authenticity to what he writes. The guidance Kevin provides is all so perceptive and practical too, making the book an insightful and helpful resource for teachers.
Sir John Rowling, founder of PiXL
What Kevin Lister brings in Teach Like You Imagined It is the analytical mind of an engineer to the teaching profession. His career in the car industry prior to entering the teaching profession enables him to view educational challenges through a different prism to most, and in this thought-provoking book he rallies teachers to work more effectively and achieve successful longevity in the profession.
The eyes of an engineer question the cost–benefit analysis of going the “extra mile”, now specifically lauded in the new Ofsted framework, in working long hours beyond reasonable expectation – noting that in education there is rarely any evaluation of the cost of a task because it usually only costs the time of those involved. Kevin rightly articulates there is a tipping point beyond which more teacher effort does not necessarily translate into more student progress, and he applies the law of diminishing returns to suggest that going the extra mile may be no more effective than going the extra inch. This is followed by specific guidance on how to prioritise what to do now, do next, do last and what not to do.
The delicious irony of the teaching profession is that teachers are often good at advising students on how to spend their time, yet they are not so good themselves at practising what they preach. The challenge set out loud and clear in this book is to take back control and plan what you do – most notably how you choose to allocate your precious time to make teaching an enjoyable, impactful and ultimately sustainable job!
Teach Like You Imagined It offers a timely reminder of why you became a teacher and will help you rediscover, nurture and make use of that passion and enthusiasm.
Neil Wallace, Head Teacher, Stratford upon Avon School
This excellent and accessible book will support and challenge teachers to become better educators without sacrificing the life they lead outside the school gates. With a retention and recruitment crisis across the UK, Teach Like You Imagined It is important reading for teachers and school leaders alike.
Damian Benney, Deputy Head Teacher, Penyrheol Comprehensive School
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first group of people I need to thank are my family. I quite simply could not be myself and do the things I do without my wife, Elaine. She puts up with my distracted ramblings when I am exploring a train of thought and rightly brings me back to reality when I have wandered too far off. She is the love of my life and my best friend, who continues to inspire me to be a better me, because that is what she deserves.
My daughters, Kaitlin and Abbie, make me laugh more than anyone else does and are able to bring smiles and brightness into even the darkest of days. They constantly remind me that school from the perspective of a child looks very different than from the perspective of a teacher. Just by being themselves, they constantly cause me to question my assumptions and reconsider my perspective. They tolerate me disappearing off to work or, as has been the case recently, to work on this book. They allow me to get my exercise fix and go cycling regularly, and are always ready with a cuddle when I need it.
My mum and dad have been encouraging and supportive in everything I have done throughout my life and have always helped me to believe that I can do just about anything if I put my mind to it. Mum also proofread one of the first drafts of this book, and without her input it would have taken me far longer to get it into a workable shape. Dad was the last person (other than my publishers) to get a look at the draft of the text that you find here, and helped me to knock the final edges off to hopefully make it more readable for all.
Next, I need to thank my colleagues, and first I must mention Rob Williams, a colleague and friend who has the most fantastic ability to respond to change that I have ever encountered. Most people have a change cycle where they resist and fight back initially before coming round and making it work, and for some this process takes a very long time. Rob’s change cycle is so short that in the space of a sentence he will go from “that won’t work because …” to “that’s brilliant, how do we tell everyone else?” The original idea for RAG123 came from an afterschool discussion with Rob, and within a week he had tried it with all his classes and was offering improvements. He has also contributed to all sorts of ideas which I’ve shared via my blog, and he continues to be my go-to chap if I need to bounce a silly idea around with someone.
Next is Nik Doran, a friend who I trained to be a teacher alongside, who has a lot to answer for. Starting my blog, joining Twitter and going to TeachMeets were all the direct result of a conversation with him over a curry in Cambridge. From afar Nik has provided encouragement, and without the confidence that came from this, and the positive feedback on my blog, I would never have considered that writing a book would be a possibility.
I must also thank all the colleagues who I work with on a day-to-day basis. The school leaders – including my current head teacher, Neil Wallace – who have guided my development in school, allowed me enough freedom to try out some of the approaches outlined in this book and the occasional platform to share my thoughts more widely to see how others receive them. Colleagues at all levels in the school have shared ideas and inspiration, challenged my preconceptions, been honest enough to point out when I’ve got something wrong, and given me the opportunity to improve. Each of you has had an influence on the content of this book to some extent, so thank you.
I want to thank all at Crown House Publishing for allowing me to make this book a reality, including their support and guidance in shaping the finished article.
Beyond these individuals there are countless others – friends, extended family, former colleagues, Twitter contacts and other acquaintances – who have been supportive throughout my career, and in particular when they heard about this book. I simply cannot name you all here, but you know who you are, and I thank you just the same.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: UNPICKING THE BIG CONFLICT IN TEACHING
This book is aimed at the teacher or trainee teacher who wants to be great at their job but is struggling to maintain a healthy work–life balance. It is also aimed at the school leader who wants to run a high-achieving organisation but is struggling to manage that while maintaining realistic workloads and staff morale, and against the backdrop of constantly shrinking budgets. If this sounds appealing to you then hopefully you will find something useful in the following pages, but first I need to establish the background behind this book and what I am hoping to achieve here.
Teaching is awesome but difficult
For an amazing number of students, school is the best thing in their lives. Sometimes this is, unfortunately, because their home lives are unhappy. Fortunately, for most, it is because their young minds love learning, they are kept safe, and they are surrounded by their friends and by professionals who are there to help them develop into successful adults.
The children we work with bring with them an energy you simply do not get in other workplaces. They are young, excitable, often energetic and keen to see what the world can offer them. They are – mostly – free from the cynicism that can creep into adult life and adult workplaces. On top of this, we get to live and breathe our favourite subjects – and our love of learning – every day, sharing our passion for it and, hopefully, our enthusiasm.
Spend any time around teachers and you will eventually stumble into a discussion about workload. Unless you have been a teacher it is hard to appreciate how all-consuming it can become. The bottom line is: teaching can be difficult, really difficult. At times it is stressful, time-consuming, emotionally draining and frustrating; it can be all too easy to end up focusing on the negatives. In any class with mostly good results, the teacher will fixate on the student or students who did not quite make the grade more readily than they will celebrate those who overachieved. As this happens – and as stakes get higher through governmental initiatives or societal expectations – the pressure placed upon schools to deliver more and more is often passed on to classroom teachers. It is simply too easy to let our heads drop and forget the positive things that brought us into the profession.
Finding a balance can be challenging
It is also too easy for a fixation on these difficulties to swamp the awesomeness of teaching, and that threatens to make life unbearable.
Realistically, as with any job, teaching will always have its sources of difficulty. The trick we need to achieve is to see enough of the positives to outweigh the negatives, so that the harder things become more bearable. Conversely, we could see this as reducing the amount or impact of the difficulties, so that the awesomeness can shine through.
The challenge of doing your best
As teachers, we will constantly search for the next great thing that will help make a difference to our students. A commitment to continuous professional development (CPD) is admirable, and indeed necessary. However, if misdirected, our attempts to be an “even more awesome teacher” may well just add to our workload, and in turn make our lives harder. People talk about going the extra mile, but in doing that you accept the premise that normal effort is not good enough. You either work harder than you would find manageable in the long term, or you feel bad because you see others working harder and think that perhaps you should be too.
Nobody really talks about this conflict. School leaders see stressed staff and are often genuinely concerned about their welfare. But, with this said, they cannot be seen to discourage staff from putting in extra effort, as this might be the key thing that helps them to secure better outcomes for their students and therefore the school. Often the output of those putting in extra is highlighted as “best practice” across the school, raising the bar for everyone else. Workloads escalate to the level that people will tolerate rather than to a level they will like or enjoy, and everyone always suspects that others are doing a bit more or doing it a bit better, so everyone feels a bit guilty.
It is all too common for a struggling teacher, or more specifically a teacher struggling with a particular class or classes, to be thought of as “not working hard enough” or “not doing their job properly”. In my experience, the teachers who have struggled the most are often working incredibly hard, usually harder than colleagues who are apparently not struggling. Perhaps, counterintuitively, what’s required to improve a teacher’s performance is almost never an issue of working harder; it is almost always about changing practices so that their hard work is more fruitful.
Teaching is a job with an infinite scope for workload.1 In a factory, when the production line stops, the production line operator’s job stops. For a teacher, there is always another book to mark, display to update, lesson to plan, scheme of work to tweak, resource to create, behavioural issue to follow up, reward to give or letter to write. That is true in non-contact time during the day, in the evenings, at night and throughout the holidays. Work will expand to fill the time that you make available to it and, as such, it will always threaten to take over your life.
At the end of the day we know that there is a child’s future at stake and that we need to do our best for them. Therefore, teachers will routinely work through evenings, at weekends and through chunks of their holidays. It is too easy for this to become too much, to the point where it is detrimental to our wellbeing. We need to do something about it, and I think one way to approach this is to return to how we imagined teaching to be in the first place.
Why I wrote this book
The idea for this book grew out of a TeachMeet presentation I did at my school in 2016. I had been pondering morale and workload for some time and wanted to say something to reassure the many colleagues who seemed to be under strain. Having been written alongside teaching full-time, it has taken a few years to progress from idea to the finished product. However, despite the delay, it is clear to me that the need is still there, if not more so now than ever.
As I finished writing, the Department for Education in England issued a policy paper on reducing teachers’ workload.2 Furthermore, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) issued a report in 2018 highlighting the fact that teachers, on average, work longer hours than nurses and police officers – even once holidays are accounted for – and are typically less satisfied with their leisure time.3 It is good that note is being taken. My intention is to translate these insights into some actions that individual working teachers, and perhaps school leaders, can take as part of managing work–life balance.
There are so many books about how to teach, and ones filled with ideas about teaching practice, but very few about the actual realities of teaching. As a trainee teacher I encountered lots of advice about maintaining a good work–life balance, mostly things like, “Make sure you take one night off per week and one day off at weekends.” Frankly, that is an awful tip as it only gives guidance about achieving something vaguely tolerable for the training period and does nothing to help a working teacher in the long term, and even then it does not actually suggest how you might carve out this paltry time off.
Somehow it has become accepted that massive stresses and heavy term-time workloads are a basic requirement of being a teacher, and sometimes this is not restricted to term times either. Once you finish training you are just left to get on with it; you are expected to find a way to manage it all alongside having a real life outside of school. There is research suggesting that, depending on the school environment, the quality of a teacher’s performance can plateau after the first three to five years of experience.4 This would fit with the idea that teachers may find a way to survive with their workload and settle into that as a pattern.
My background
Having originally trained as a mechanical engineer, I started my working life with ten years in the car industry as an engineer and engineering project manager for an internationally recognised prestige brand. During this time, I became steeped in the car industry’s approaches to maximising efficiency and eliminating waste from processes when managing multimillion-pound projects. I accrued the professional experience required to become an accredited chartered engineer and studied part-time for an MBA in engineering management. Having achieved a lot as an engineer I became restless, and after much thought I took the decision to change career and become a teacher. I believe I have a different perspective on the education sector, given this varied experience, than many who choose to go straight into teaching from university.
In my relatively short time in education I have progressed through classroom teacher and head of department to senior leadership team (SLT) roles. To date, I have been part of six Ofsted inspections, ranging from “requires improvement” to “outstanding”, though not in that order. I have gone from an extreme of working basically flat out – working six or seven full days and over 70 hours per week – to cutting back to something hopefully a bit healthier in the long term. During this time, I have gone through phases as a prolific blogger and tweeter, removed myself from that altogether, and made a more measured return.
Over the last several years, I have contributed to international forums, presented at and organised TeachMeets, and organised and delivered training days both for my school and for a wider audience. I have been certified as a specialist leader in education (SLE) and deliver leadership training for the National Professional Qualification for Middle Leadership (NPQML) qualification and its senior leadership equivalent (NPQSL). During all of this I have had several crises of confidence, a few bouts of depression, a period of sickness that was at least partly stress related and at least one phase in which I was ready to leave teaching altogether.
Day-to-day I see and hear of too many people struggling to be happy as teachers, and have seen too many good teachers leave the profession, which is not a healthy position to be in.5 Teaching should not be a profession of bright lights and burnouts, in which only the toughest or those with the fewest other options remain for the long haul. It should be a profession in which experience is a valued commodity, and in which people can make long, prosperous careers. Even if we are not actively happy in teaching, at least we should reach a state of contentment.
I have thought long and hard about why I am a teacher and why continuing to be part of the education system is the right thing for me. I believe that I have found a way to make teaching a happy and productive career – one that does not consume my life – and with this book I want to help others to achieve that balance too. Given the constraints we work in, I am not sure that it will be easy, but I am hopeful that change is achievable.
The blame game
It is always possible to point the finger of blame at governmental policies or school management practices for the current bright light or bust pattern, but for me that abdicates all responsibility for finding a resolution for ourselves. It is effectively saying, “They did it to us, so we need them to fix it before it can be right again.” Certainly, there are structural and governmental influences; however, I believe that we, as teachers, really need to fix a lot of things from within, by working together to find the best approaches.
A large part of the ownership of the solution lies with school leadership, but I also believe that every teacher in every classroom can have an impact. In many ways the workload of teachers is left unmanaged; it is down to individuals to find a way to manage their own time. I would like to suggest that there is a route that teachers can take for greater control of their workload and overall work–life balance. While we can and should campaign for better education policies, we must also look into our own schools and classrooms and investigate what we can change.
As a chartered engineer, my approach to a problem was always to try to achieve the most efficient solution given the materials available. Having moved into teaching I still think in this way, and I see inefficiencies everywhere. Many may baulk at this point and think that I am conceptualising education as some kind of production line on which we churn out carbon copies of students all trained efficiently to pass exams, but this is not what I mean at all. Students are individuals with their own needs, desires, strengths and weaknesses – as are teachers – and we need to remember that. However, the personalisation thing that many teachers cling on to may not be quite so sacrosanct.
The “I do it my way because that works for me” or “you do not know my students like I do” perspectives have a point to some extent, but they can also overstate their cases massively, and as such limit the search for alternatives. In my experience, the “but it works for me” types of statements are often unsupported by any evidence of a direct benefit to the students, when compared with any other approach. I believe there is often scope to change our habits and become more effective in our roles while reducing stresses and workload. I am not suggesting an approach that is absolutely one-size-fits-all, but familiar processes can be used to serve the diverse needs of students.
Is change realistic?
Perhaps you think I am being naive here. School leaders may frown at the suggestion that their staff should not work quite as hard. You may also doubt that you could do your job in less time, or more efficiently than you do currently. Teachers and leaders may both point to the current situation as the only way to make schools work, and fear that they will become less effective if things are changed. I suppose there is a risk that they are right.
I also know that there are as many ways of running schools as there are schools, because every head teacher approaches the task differently, and within each school every head of department approaches things differently. Sometimes these differences are at a fundamental level and sometimes they are subtleties in day-to-day practices. Beyond that there are differences in the approaches of individual teachers, even when teaching the same topic. Underlying all of this is the reality of the fundamental differences between the students we are seeking to educate.
Sometimes the differences between students are socio-economic or cultural, others are simply down to personality. These differences are what makes teaching the challenging, fascinating and fulfilling career that it is. Given these differences, we would have to be either very arrogant or very short-sighted to assume that the way that each of us currently does things is the very best. We must also accept that what worked for last year’s students may not be the best thing for this year’s cohort, or for the lot after.
Against the backdrop of a workforce who are more stressed and tightly stretched than ever before, and with an ever more challenging funding situation, we must choose to do something to save the teaching profession and our education system. To do nothing is to admit defeat and await external improvement. I prefer the more proactive approach, in which we choose to do something to shape the situation from within. The suggestions that follow are mainly about choosing the right – or, rather, the most important – things to do, and making sure we do them in as efficient and effective a way possible.
How did you imagine your teaching career?
When I chose to leave engineering to become a teacher, I had a clear mental image of what I thought it would be like. Regardless of career trajectory to date, we all will have had preconceptions of what teaching would be like before we started training. My expected view of teaching life, hopefully not too far from yours, looked something like this:
Understand your subject and how to function effectively in the school environment.Plan and deliver lessons to teach an aspect of the subject.Use marking and feedback to ensure that students are on track.Assess to see if your lessons have been effective, and use that to inform your teaching, and report back to parents and school leadership.Repeat steps 2, 3 and 4 until the courses are complete.Manage behavioural issues along the way.Have a good work–life balance alongside teaching.I also imagined that I would be fairly good at teaching, and hopefully you had this view of yourself too. After all, who would go into a profession not expecting to be reasonably competent, at least? I am not suggesting that everyone should start off with the idea that they have to be the best in the world, the country or even in their school or department; however, I am sure that everyone starts off expecting to be reasonably effective and successful, or at least dedicated to becoming that way.
I expected to be happy as a teacher, and again I would hope that you did too. Why would you choose a profession that you expect will make you miserable? Of course, I am not naive enough to believe it must always be laughs and smiles; life, and work, has its ups and downs. However, at least being content with your lot should be an aspiration for us all.
In truth, the only aspect of this imagined teaching life that has ever been absent from my reality is the last one, as the various requirements of tasks 1–6 can become so all-consuming that time gets squeezed and squashed to the point where there is none left for the life part of the balance. A lack of balance can then threaten contentment; if you are not content and have no time for yourself or your family then it places huge barriers in the way of being good at your job.
If we can establish a working pattern that gets us closer to the expectations we had of teaching before we started, then surely, we have a recipe for effective and contented teachers. If we can get back to teaching like we imagined it, we will be somewhere along the right lines, as long as we were not completely deluded in the first place. Cynics may suggest that we will always underestimate the work required or imagine a really easy life for ourselves. However, I am not talking here about fantasy conditions that would require massive changes in workload or deployment.
Others may suggest that until changes are made at a governmental or societal level then the workload cannot change. However, I think it is important to remember that while we are taught how to teach, we are not taught how to manage time, prioritise between tasks or to really consider efficiency – and this is something that we can affect.
The same goes for school leaders who are often in their positions because they are good teachers, but this does not necessarily translate into ideal managers or leaders as extra skills need to be developed, which, again, are often not explicitly taught. In the never-ending pursuit of “better” there is often no space for “good enough”. Believe me, I am all for continuous improvement, but not continuous change. Sometimes the benefit versus the effort is simply not worth it.
Challenges can come from many directions. You may not have secure subject knowledge, you may take a long time to plan lessons (possibly due to your approach to planning, the students involved or the constraints you are expected to work under), your lessons may not go as planned, the marking and feedback takes time, the assessment takes time, the next round takes longer, the reports take time to write, there are more behavioural issues than could be considered ideal and they are difficult to sort out, and so on. If you pick up more responsibility as part of your role then all of this gets squashed further as other duties, such as leading others, start to tug on your time.
However, the tasks that you and I imagined to be the fundamentals of teaching are the basis of the work we undertake. As such, we should not see any of them as an inconvenience or as a surprise. They are what we expected after all! We just need to find a way to be efficient enough to ensure that there is time left over for life beyond work.
For action: how did you imagine teaching?
Take five to ten minutes and have a deeper think about your imagined view of teaching. Were you striding across desks like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society? Were you more of an inspirational leader like Samuel L. Jackson in Coach Carter? Was your vision something a little more grounded?
What tasks did you imagine you would undertake? How did you imagine you would spend your time? Do you agree with my list, can you add to it, or was your list shorter? Now try to identify the areas of disconnect between your preemptive vision and your lived experience. Are there things you now do that were not on your list? Are there things on your list that you never actually do? Do you have a balance? Or do you spend a disproportionate amount of time on certain aspects? Crucially, do you have a work–life balance?
Try to establish an image in your head of your teaching life as you wanted it to be. Be honest with yourself: you did not expect too much of an easy life, and you would have known that you cannot just ignore the unpleasant aspects or only do the parts of the job that are the most fun. This is professional work, after all, and you are qualified and paid to do it, so there needs to be effort expended and accountability. So this image is not rose-tinted or short-sighted; it is a realistic appraisal of the role you imagined you would be undertaking. Hold on to this image: it is the lens I will be asking you to look through as a reference point in the following chapters.
How to use this book
Each chapter will look at a different aspect of the day-to-day reality of teaching and suggest different ways to look at or approach common tasks. What I propose is not the only way of doing things and I do not claim to have the answers to everything. My core intent is to get you to think about and reflect on your working habits, question your practices and seek to find the most effective and efficient routes for the future.
Throughout the book I will touch on topics such as industrial management, leadership, time management, prioritisation, CPD, educational research, psychology and a few other diverse concepts that my personal experiences and education have led me to explore. In many cases I am not an expert in the field I am discussing, and I will be relaying an interpretation as I see it, and applying that understanding to the context of this book. If these ideas spike your interest or you want to explore these in a depth beyond my explanations, then I have tried to include suitable references to guide you to further reading.
