Thinking Out Loud

In 1998, as a drama student at Northumbria University I submitted a dissertation arguing that the best way to give children a genuine democratic voice was not to hand them a committee agenda — it was to protect their right to play.

That dissertation was called 12 Through 31 — Louder Than Words. This website is its thirty-year culmination.

My name is Gordon Poad. I am a theatremaker, educator, and early years leader, currently Director of Dråbitten, a small børnehave in Ebeltoft, Denmark, where forty children between the ages of zero and six spend their days thinking, playing, arguing, building, and becoming.

I co-founded Theatre Cap-a-Pie in County Durham in 1996 and led it for eighteen years, developing an approach called Dramatic Enquiry — a way of combining process drama and Philosophy for Children so that people can imagine and argue at the same time. Under the UK government's Creative Partnerships programme, that work reached thousands of children across England, and has since travelled into schools and settings in the UK, Malaysia, Norway, Sweden, and Latvia.

Along the way I have studied creative and critical practice in educational settings, trained as an executive coach, worked with Danish municipalities on John Hattie's Visible Learning framework, and supported school networks across Europe. The point of that work has always been practical: how do adults create conditions in which children and colleagues can think more deeply together?

Thinking Out Loud: Creative and Critical Thinking in the Early Years (0–6) is the book I am writing. It argues that children think — creatively, critically, and with genuine sophistication — from birth, and that the environments and adults around them either open that thinking up or close it down. Dråbitten is the living laboratory. The next three years are the writing window.

This site is where the work happens in public.