James A. Nottingham

James A. Nottingham

James A. Nottingham is the creator of the Learning Pit®, one of the most widely used models for teaching to emerge in the 21st century. He is also the author of 12 books, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and is listed in The Future 500, which lists the United Kingdom’s most forward-thinking and creative innovators.

James is driven by the desire to make education better and has been on a mission to discover and share the very best practices. Along the way, he has worked closely with professors Carol Dweck (growth mindset) and John Hattie (Visible Learning), been a teaching assistant in a school for deaf students, taught across ages 3 to 19, and held a range of leadership positions in schools. At the end of the 1990s, a BBC documentary featured his work, leading to an invitation to design a new approach to teaching and learning that would raise the aspirations and achievements of students in low socioeconomic schools. The success of this project was noticed beyond the United Kingdom, and so, in 2006, James started an independent company to share his approaches farther afield. Over the course of the next 15 years, James built his company into an organization employing 30 staff in seven countries working with preK–12 schools and community groups.

You can find James’s work at https://learningpit.org, https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jamesnottingham, and @LearningPit on Instagram.