Some guy called Colin 2025

Hello.

My name is Colin Beere. I am the founder of Mobile Mini Class LLC, I am also the teacher, though I prefer to think of myself in terms of "exploration and applied learning facilitator", admittedly that sounds pretty pompous, but more about that later...

I am originally from England. I was a professional news and commercial photographer from 1989 to 2015 working in London and Hong Kong, (You can still find traces of my work if you search my name and New York Times or Financial Times). I met my American wife Alexandra when we both worked at the Financial Times in London. We moved together to Hong Kong. Once our children were born, we moved around  between Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Whilst raising our children, I retrained as a teacher.

I have an online US Bachelor's degree in education from Eastern Oregon University and I completed my post graduate teacher training at Durham University in the UK (see below). However, speaking frankly, I couldn't 100% recommend either of those courses. I learnt more about why schools fail children than I did about how to transform teaching into learning. 

During our time living in Shanghai  I had various training placements for my degree and PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate of Education) and teaching roles at a variety of schools in Shanghai and then later Hong Kong. I taught puppet making and puppet theatre, costume design, scenic design, media literacy, phonics, Science and Social Studies.

During Covid I worked at an amazing forest-style Kindergarten, Eminent International School (EIS) in Hong Kong.  After working in "elite" local and international schools of Shanghai and seeing how they squander childrens' precious childhood years, EIS was a revelation. I became the specialist outdoor teacher and could teach 4 year olds to cook on a fire, and how to use power tools. I also took on the role of building all the playgrounds, tree houses, sand pits etc for the school. This was great for really thinking at length about how children explore and how much risk/freedom they should be allowed to explore at each stage of childhood. 

After the experience of homeschooling my own children during Covid, I couldn't face the inefficiencies and time wasting of a traditional school setting. So I started Mobile Mini Class LLC.  

By creating my own classroom/STEM Lab on wheels and collaborating directly with parents,  I can create the most engaging, challenging, creative and  cumulative learning opportunities.

I hope to work with families over many years to support students in following their curiosity as far as they want to go in any direction of applied STEM knowledge.

As much as possible, instead of 'teaching" or following a set of instructions, I prefer to plan my classes based on allowing students a chance to figure things out, get things wrong, get a little hint, then figure it out again. Which leads me on on to one of my favourite topics - Resilience! This is such a big topic we should save it for when we meet in person. 

Thanks for reading this, I hope to meet you soon.

Regards Colin Beere