Professional development, coaching, and consultancy

Author: José Picardo

  • From Static to Dynamic: Rethinking Education in the Age of the Generative Web

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Artificial intelligence is already reshaping the way we live, work, and learn. In schools, its presence is felt everywhere: from lesson planning and resource creation to feedback, assessment, and adaptive practice.

    For the past three decades, the internet has been built on an archive model: pre-made content, hosted on websites, indexed by search engines, waiting to be retrieved. Education has adapted around this architecture. We teach pupils how to search, sift, and evaluate. We warn them about the risks of unreliable sources, we design assessments that assume access to information, and we spend considerable effort developing their ability to navigate a world of premade content.

    But that world is shifting.

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  • The STAR Framework: Teaching in the Age of AI

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant promise; it is already reshaping the way we live, work, and learn. In schools, its presence is felt everywhere: from lesson planning and resource creation to feedback, assessment, and adaptive practice.

    Tools that generate text, images, and analysis offer the tantalising prospect of reduced workload and personalised pathways. Yet the promise is double-edged. With opportunity come the risks of inaccuracy, bias, and overreliance, as well as what researchers term cognitive offloading: the tendency to let machines do the thinking, leaving learners less resilient and less capable of deep understanding.

    The task before educators, then, is not whether to use AI, but how to do so wisely and safely. How do we harness its potential in ways that strengthen, rather than dilute, what we know about effective teaching and learning?

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  • 20 Signs of Emotionally Mature Leadership

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Leadership rarely happens in calm conditions. It often emerges in environments that are challenging, political, resource-constrained, and frequently unforgiving. Technical skills and sharp strategy are, of course, important, but they don’t sustain people through turbulence. What makes a difference and steadies a leader, building trust over time, is emotional maturity.

    Maturity in leadership isn’t about being endlessly patient or universally kind. It’s about knowing when to confront and when to step back, when to insist and when to compromise, when to inspire with ambition and when to calm expectations with realism. It is what stops organisations from being ruled by impulse, grievance, or wishful thinking.

    Here are twenty signs that frequently displayed by emotionally mature leaders:

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  • AI in schools: Between Hope and Hype – A Practical Strategy

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Walk into any school staffroom or boardroom today and the conversation about AI will be mixed. Some colleagues may roll their eyes at the latest “game-changing” technology, already bracing themselves for another initiative to add to their workload.

    Others might feel guilty that they’ve dabbled with AI, but only to produce lesson starters or maybe to gingerly experiment with adjusting reading complexity, never quite hitting the revolutionary shift they’ve been led to expect. Meanwhile, senior leaders feel the pressure of governing boards asking, “What’s our AI strategy?” without much clarity about what such a strategy should do or look like.

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  • Cakeism and Car Salesmanship: The Hidden Cost of Over-Promising in Schools

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    This piece is written to prompt reflection. School leadership is complex, high-stakes work, often carried out under intense scrutiny and pressure to deliver more with less. The temptation to promise everything to everyone is real, and many of us (myself included) have felt its pull.

    My hope is that by naming patterns like cakeism and car salesmanship, we can create space for honest conversations about capacity, priorities, and the trade-offs that shape sustainable progress. This is not a call to do less, nor a criticism from the sidelines, but an invitation to leaders, at every level, to examine our stance, our methods, and the culture we encourage.

    The term cakeism, or the belief that we can enjoy all the benefits without accepting any of the costs, came into my consciousness during the Brexit debates, where it became shorthand for a refusal to acknowledge the trade-offs involved in leaving the EU. While the label emerged in a specific political moment, the underlying mindset is not unique to that debate or even to politics; it can be found wherever uncomfortable choices are avoided in favour of comforting, all-gain-no-pain narratives.

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