The Common Room - Where the World Teaches

Joshua Darryl Sussex
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A podcast for international educators exploring leadership across cultures, the realities of life and career abroad, and the conversations the sector needs to have. Hosted by Joshua Sussex, school leader and doctoral researcher, with a decade of experience across five countries on three continents.

  1. 2d ago ·  Video

    Let Every Star Shine and Every Bird Fly — A Conversation with Dr Conrad Hughes

    Send us Fan Mail Ask Dr Conrad Hughes what advice he'd give his twenty-year-old self and the answer is the one his father gave him: don't take yourself too seriously. He adds, straight away, that it doesn't mean he always manages it — and that's probably why the advice has stuck around. In this episode, Joshua sits down with Dr Conrad Hughes — Head of School at the International School of Los Angeles, previously Director General of the International School of Geneva, Professor in Practice at Durham University and senior fellow at UNESCO's International Bureau of Education. He holds a PhD in English literature and an EdD on prejudice and education, has written on prejudice, elitism and assessment, and still teaches philosophy every week, twenty years into headship. Together, they work through the argument the conversation keeps returning to: that AI outperforming students on examinations tells us more about the examinations than about the technology. Narrow assessment, as he puts it, drowns out potential — and the answer isn't a better instrument, it's a wider one. In this conversation, we cover: Why he still teaches, and what it's like being on the receiving end of your own policiesLeadership as head, heart and gut — and why a leader who only does housekeeping is impoverishedRunning the French Baccalaureate and the IB under one roof, and the pilot that puts students from both in the same Theory of Knowledge classroom"The curriculum is the floor, not the ceiling" — and what a school actually represents if it stops thereCognitive offloading, the return of pen and paper, and why his own philosophy tests are going back to being marked by handReading the Iliad and the Odyssey to his children, and what he'd tell parents worried about screensThe Learner Passport, the criticism that it was building an "Uber student," and why they redesigned the graphThree kinds of elitism, and how someone arguing for widening access spends a career in fee-paying schoolsHis son missing the shot that lost the final, and why the drive home mattered more than the resultA huge thank you to Conrad for his time, his generosity, and for a conversation that ends with a question worth asking about any classroom you walk into: is everyone in here being allowed to shine? 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.

    Let Every Star Shine and Every Bird Fly — A Conversation with Dr Conrad Hughes

  2. Oct 13 ·  Video

    Silence Doesn't Mean Agreement — A Conversation with Johnny Harris

    Send us Fan Mail You ask the room to challenge you. Nobody speaks. In a lot of leadership training, that silence gets read as consent — and Johnny Harris will tell you it isn't a cultural problem at all. It's a hierarchy problem, and it happens just as reliably when the person at the front is Vietnamese. In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Johnny Harris — a coach who started at fifteen in Lanarkshire and moved to Vietnam thirteen years ago, choosing it largely because he knew nothing about it. Eight of those years were with ChildFund Rugby, taking a life skills programme across Asia Pacific and using the game to teach what doesn't fit a timetable: gender equity, financial literacy, how to talk about domestic violence. He now builds Đại Việt Rugby and trains lawyers, NGOs and school leaders in how to actually work across cultures. In this conversation, we cover: Why team sports were described to him as un-Vietnamese, and what a subsistence farmer risks by getting injuredThe moment several things aligned at once — government, grassroots, a national interest in health — that made a rugby federation suddenly plausibleThe case he makes to a parent who has never seen the gameCuriosity as the skill underneath everything: stopping to understand a problem before assigning blameFacilitation, and why the leaders who complain their teams won't step up are often the reasonThe five-minute fix for a silent meeting — small groups, first language, a specific brief — and why it works every timeSafeguarding where there's no functioning system to plug into: policies on paper versus practice that gets rehearsedWhether you can genuinely have impact in a culture without speaking the language, put to him as a yes or noA huge thank you to Johnny for his time, his generosity, and for a conversation that reframes something a lot of us have been reading wrong for years. 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.

  3. Oct 6 ·  Video

    With Great Struggle — A Conversation with Callum Watt

    Send us Fan Mail The data already exists. It's sitting in your school right now. The hard part isn't collecting it — it's getting teachers to share it, and then using it to give them time back rather than take more. In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Callum Watt — Assistant Head Teacher in Penang, where he leads assessment, data, reporting and the maths curriculum, and Malaysia Country Representative for Leading Your International School. Before Malaysia he spent seven years in Egypt, as head of maths, head of year three and head of house across two international schools. He came to teaching from forensic science and psychology, and that analytical lens shapes how he reads a school. Together, they trace what assessment work actually looks like when the goal is workload rather than compliance — and where it meets a second thread running through Callum's leadership: resilience, and what building character means in an age where hardship looks nothing like it used to. In this conversation, we cover: Why he wants to reduce his staff's workload so they can stop being bureaucrats and get back to teachingWhat changes when you move from a low-context culture to a high-context one, and how that reshaped the way he communicates with parentsThe reporting system that automates the academic grades so teachers can write about the childParent workshops every other week, and what happens when you show families a pilot and ask what they think before you launch itWhy parents come back to you immediately and staff need time, and what that means for how you introduce changeRishi Sunak, one Sky TV, and why hardship is entirely a question of perspectiveWhat he'd say to a UK teacher who arrives thinking they already know what hard looks likeLeading Your International School, and the figure behind its push for equal opportunity in school leadershipA huge thank you to Callum for his time, his candour, and for a conversation that makes the case that good data work should give teachers their afternoons back. 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.

    With Great Struggle — A Conversation with Callum Watt

  4. Sep 30 ·  Video

    Is This Kind? — A Conversation with Joanna Povall

    Send us Fan Mail "I'm not a naturally kind person." That's how Joanna Povall opens the first chapter of her book, and it's where the whole framework comes from — a place of hurt, and having watched unkind leadership up close. In this bonus episode marking twenty episodes of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Joanna Povall — Principal of Wales International School, a COBIS lead improvement partner working inside other schools, and author of the bestselling Kind Leadership. With thirty years across schools in the UK, France and the UAE, her CHASE framework — communication, honesty, accountability, self-esteem, ego awareness — came to her backwards, starting with E for ego, after she worked through every example of leadership going wrong she could think of and found the same thing underneath all of them. Together, they take apart the difference the title depends on: kind is not nice. Nice is people-pleasing. Nice is avoiding the difficult conversation to keep the status quo. In this conversation, we cover: The parent complaint she could have made disappear in two easy conversations, and why she didn'tWhy we spend our careers telling teachers what not to do with children, then do exactly that to the adults — blanket emails, whole-staff detentions, talking at people for sixty minutesThe colleague who left teaching to become a barber, and the moment that made this personalOnly one in five leaders wants the top job, and what unkind systems have to do with that"A thousand tiny conversations rather than one big explosion" — and what happens when nobody says anythingThe principal's little black book, and why the most important person in the room is the one who challenges youWhether any of it travels: twenty-three COBIS visits, and what turns out to be identical in every school on earthThe daily ego check, and why she sometimes tells her team she needs to sleep on it when she already knows the answerA huge thank you to Joanna for her time, her candour, and for a conversation that leaves you with a question worth carrying into your next meeting. 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.

    Is This Kind? — A Conversation with Joanna Povall

  5. Sep 29 ·  Video

    They're Not Just Playing — A Conversation with Lynsey Logan

    Send us Fan Mail Within the first hundred days of a child's life, over a million neural pathways connect every second. Sitting at a desk, something takes forty repetitions to stick. At play, it takes ten to twenty. In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Lynsey Logan — early years specialist, author of The Rewilded Child, and Head of Primary at an international school in Tanzania. With twenty years of teaching across Scotland, the Czech Republic, Ghana, Vietnam and Tanzania, including over a decade in senior leadership, Lynsey brings a specialist early years lens to whole-school strategy. Together, they go behind the sand pit and the story corner: what genuinely effective early years provision looks like, the misconceptions that still surround "just play," and why the earliest years deserve to be taken every bit as seriously as what comes after. In this conversation, we cover: Why play isn't a break from learning but the brain's optimum way of doing it, and what myelination has to do with a toddler knocking over the same towerWhy parents bring their own childhood into the classroom with them, and how to build the bridge without preachingThe teacher who asked whether early years was babysitting, and the conversation that followedWhy becoming a specialist in Key Stage 1 means becoming a specialist in development, not a subjectPeer observation across primary and secondary, and the through-school opportunity that British schools rarely getThe funding argument Lynsey keeps having: why the least expensive phase needs the most qualified teachersDr Edward Tronick's Still Face experiment, and what it tells families about moving a young child across the worldThe Rewilded Child, the book designed to get muddy, and the balance between consumption and creationA huge thank you to Lynsey for her time, her expertise, and for a conversation that makes the case that the foundation years are exactly that. 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.

    They're Not Just Playing — A Conversation with Lynsey Logan

  6. Sep 22 ·  Video

    Kindness Is an Act, Empathy Is a Skill — A Conversation with Ed Kirwan

    Send us Fan Mail 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 rightThe basketball lesson he never asked permission for, and the four-mark GCSE answer his class still remembered afterwardsThe finding he didn't expect: students building empathy for each other, not just for the person on screenWhat's lost when the black man is only ever asked to talk about racismThe bottle of wine he gave a Muslim colleague at Christmas, and the gap it exposed between kindness and empathyWhy sympathy and empathy shouldn't sit on the same scaleThe single anonymous question you can put to your staff tomorrow, and what to do with the answersA 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. 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.

    Kindness Is an Act, Empathy Is a Skill — A Conversation with Ed Kirwan

  7. Sep 15 ·  Video

    Nobody Trained Us for Each Other — A Conversation with Jennifer Abrams

    Send us Fan Mail 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 assumeGrowing 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 couldThe 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 itJohn Lewis's "good trouble, necessary trouble" as a test for whether a conversation is worth the discomfortWhy "it's above my pay grade" makes her bristleWhat speaking up looks like in Southeast Asia, and why a concern raised sideways and in passing may be the whole conversationMission statements everyone signs and nobody interprets the same way — and the "view from your window" question she uses to surface itWhat 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 longerWhy twenty years of teaching entitles nobody to a coaching careerA 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.

    Nobody Trained Us for Each Other — A Conversation with Jennifer Abrams

  8. Sep 8 ·  Video

    Two Years in the Planning — A Conversation with Ruth Shipley-Palmer

    Send us Fan Mail Two successful people in Bristol, both quietly unhappy. He in a career that wasn't working, she running companies she loved so much she couldn't get off the treadmill. The childcare was outsourced, the days were long, and neither of them recognised the life they were supposedly building. In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Ruth Shipley-Palmer — business owner, property investor, and the accompanying partner whose family relocation to Malaysia took two years to plan. Two years of executing it: selling one company, restructuring another to run entirely online, and telling nobody until the job was signed. Together, they trace what that took — the loss of control that came with depending on someone else's visa and contract, the guilt of taking the only grandchild away from grandparents whose lives revolved around him, and the strange freedom of arriving somewhere with no title, no induction pack and no built-in staffroom. In this conversation, we cover: Why the move began not with a job advert but with a question: is this really it?The two-year planning process behind what looks, from the outside, like a leapWhat it takes to run a UK business from Southeast Asia, and why the time difference turned out to be an advantageWorking three hours a day between drop-off and pick-up, and refusing to open a laptop after thatBeing dependent on a partner for the visa, the admin and the paperwork, and what that does to someone used to being in controlWhy Ruth enjoys telling people she's the housewife, and what that gets wrong about what she actually doesThe isolation risk for accompanying partners, and the deliberate work of building a life outside the houseA perspective international schools depend on and rarely hear from: the person who rebuilt everything, without a contract to arrive into. A huge thank you to Ruth for her honesty, and for a conversation that puts the accompanying partner exactly where they belong — at the centre of the story. 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.

    Two Years in the Planning — A Conversation with Ruth Shipley-Palmer
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A podcast for international educators exploring leadership across cultures, the realities of life and career abroad, and the conversations the sector needs to have. Hosted by Joshua Sussex, school leader and doctoral researcher, with a decade of experience across five countries on three continents.

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