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Twenty-four Year 11 boys named themselves the U Gang after their Christmas mocks came back. Ed Kirwan heard them chanting it up three flights of stairs to his lab, and his heart sank.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Ed — a former North London science teacher whose route out of the classroom ran through Uganda, Mexico and central India, and ended in a non-profit that has now reached 1.8 million students.

What followed the U Gang was, in Ed's words, a real exercise in humility: standing in the doorway every day so they could only come in one abreast, keeping the emergency gas cut-off within reach, and working out that no amount of science would land without the human connection first. Every one of them came out without a U — including a boy who sat 0% in chemistry because he was in a police cell on the day of the exam.

Then he left, at twenty-five, without a plan. Eighteen months he calls tasting: a £500 grant spent entirely on a camera, and three and a half months in Nagpur at 40 degrees with no air conditioning, building a leadership programme for a football charity.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What Ed got wrong with the U Gang, as well as right
• The basketball lesson he never asked permission for, and the four-mark GCSE answer his class still remembered afterwards
• The finding he didn't expect: students building empathy for each other, not just for the person on screen
• What's lost when the black man is only ever asked to talk about racism
• The bottle of wine he gave a Muslim colleague at Christmas, and the gap it exposed between kindness and empathy
• Why sympathy and empathy shouldn't sit on the same scale
• The single anonymous question you can put to your staff tomorrow, and what to do with the answers

A working definition of empathy as a skill rather than a feeling — and one thing you can do with it on Monday morning.

A huge thank you to Ed for his time, his honesty, and for a conversation that genuinely changed how I use a word I thought I already understood.

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The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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We hold credentials in how to teach our subjects, and none at all in how to talk to each other. Everyone under eighteen, we were trained for. Everyone over eighteen — the colleague, the line manager, the person we supervise — we were not.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Jennifer Abrams: author of five books, a former high school English teacher who now works with schools across six continents, and someone who calls herself not a consultant but a voice coach.

Her move out of the classroom wasn't planned. A job offer in Kathmandu turned down for a boyfriend, a relationship that ended anyway, and a multiple sclerosis diagnosis that arrived at the same time. What her district offered instead was the chance to build a new-teacher coaching programme with no secondary lead in post. That accident became a career.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Why "voice coach" and not "consultant", and what her own coach warned people would assume
• Growing up in Minnesota where hard conversations simply weren't had — and why she wrote the book because she couldn't do it, not because she could
• The questions she asks before speaking up: is this educationally unsound, does it go against what we said we were, am I the person to say it
• John Lewis's "good trouble, necessary trouble" as a test for whether a conversation is worth the discomfort
• Why "it's above my pay grade" makes her bristle
• What speaking up looks like in Southeast Asia, and why a concern raised sideways and in passing may be the whole conversation
• Mission statements everyone signs and nobody interprets the same way — and the "view from your window" question she uses to surface it
• What success looks like to her now: not a drafted script, but someone still in the room at three o'clock, sitting with their discomfort a little longer
• Why twenty years of teaching entitles nobody to a coaching career

A practical and unusually honest account of the work that has to happen inside you before the conversation can happen at all.

A huge thank you to Jennifer for her time, her candour, and for a conversation that made a strong case for suspending our certainty a little more often than we do.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

Send us Fan Mail

It didn't begin in a casino or at a racetrack. It began with fantasy baseball — statistics, sport, friendship, and the desire to belong.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Saul Malek, a former compulsive gambler who has turned his lived experience into work helping schools, parents and young people understand one of the fastest-growing and most overlooked risks they face. What looked completely innocent became sports betting, secrecy, isolation and addiction.

Together, they explore a question many schools are only beginning to confront: if we routinely educate young people about vaping, alcohol, drugs and online safety, why are we still talking so little about gambling?

In this conversation, we cover:

• The moment it crossed a line: Saul told his mother he had stopped, and instead learned how to hide the money and the behaviour from her
• Why the first warning signs may have nothing to do with losing money, and what teachers and parents should actually look for
• The shift from gambling as a social activity to preferring to watch games alone, because other people interfered with the intensity
• Why gambling hides in plain sight in schools while vaping, smoking and alcohol get far more attention
• The uncomfortable reason some schools are reluctant to acknowledge it at all, and what admitting a problem means for reputation and parents
• Why a single assembly isn't enough, and Saul's argument that gambling education is like planting a tree — cultivated consistently over time
• What schools can do now, from mathematics and financial education to phone policies, staff awareness and clearer safeguarding structures

A conversation about a risk that may be far closer to young people than many of us realise.

A huge thank you to Saul for speaking so openly about his own experience, including the parts that are uncomfortable to revisit, and for turning it into work that helps young people recognise the warning signs early.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.