Paddy Gormley's teaching projects, listed below, reflect the diversity of his interests and experience. 

PG began work as a management trainer in the 1980s.  This experience formed the basis for his work as an independent facilitator of strategic planning meetings in the 1990s.  His growing interest in both creative and business writing sparked the broader interest in adult education that characterises much of his present work. 

Whilst Paddy Gormley continues to offer business management training, he also undertakes community-based teaching of creative thinking and writing skills and applies his web design skills to a number of innovative, internet-based teaching projects. 

Most of the listings on this page include links to other websites by Paddy Gormley, which variously include internet-based tutorials, click-to-play film and audio recordings of PG's teaching in action, click-to-play audio documentary material about his teaching and printable study resources for experienced and beginner writers. 

The films on the left show Paddy Gormley's teaching in action.  One is a studio recording of a creative thinking class at Farnborough College, in which PG helps students to understand the creative process and to activate their creative potential.  The other is taken from an episode of The Test (Granada Television). Paddy Gormley helps Bev, whose education has been blighted by dyslexia, to overcome his inhibitions sufficiently to write an article for a magazine. 

The excerpt from The Test is included here by kind permission of Meridian / Granada Television. 

These interactive, on-line tutorials are the product of a joint initiative by Paddy Gormley and Women's Radio Group in 2006.  The project was part-funded by Awards for All. 

The tutorials were primarily intended to make learning resources available to women who might not otherwise have access to training for material or cultural reasons.  In fact, they have much to offer experienced as well as beginner writers from all backgrounds and fields of interest, insofar as the tutorials address the subject of creativity in broad terms and include a comparative analysis of the respective qualities of radio, books, film and television. 

The tutorials include the first public manifestation of Paddy Gormley's model for creativity, which suggests that ideas are created and given shape by alternating, symbiotic sessions of free and controlled thinking. 

Take the tutorials via Paddy Gormley's Write for Radio website. They are free of charge and there are no registration formalities. 

Paddy Gormley's career as a management trainer began more than twenty years ago, when he joined the small team of trainers conducting Tim Reeder's Business Problem Solving courses for IBM and Phillips in 1987.  His ideas were further informed by his decade-long career as an independent business management consultant to the legal sector in the 1990s, by his prolific work in both business and creative writing and, since the late 1990s, by his teaching and research in the fields of creativity and persuasive communications. 

Paddy Gormley's Persuadem courses are based on the same Aristotelian principles as the course he taught in the 1980s, but the Persuadem courses are exciting and unique by virtue of his subsequent experience as writer and communicator and his innovative thinking about memory, imagination and the uneasy relationship between the intellect and the emotions. 

The Persuadem website includes a twelve minute film (illustrated right) of Paddy Gormley's teaching in action, an audio-visual animation about organisational creativity, and outlines of the Persuadem courses. 

Since 2005, Paddy Gormley has taught a weekly class for Crisis UK, at Crisis Skylight in the East End of London. The Skylight project serves the whole local community, but with particular emphasis on supporting homeless people and the "hidden homeless", who typically live in hostels and squats.

For the first year, he acted as a temporary replacement for Skylight's long-standing writing teacher, John Petherbridge.  In the autumn of 2006, Paddy Gormley was invited to lead a new poetry class at Skylight. In 2007, this evolved into Words in Action, enabling a broader cross-section of Skylight members to engage with creative thinking and communications skills, regardless of whether they were interested in poetry or creative writing. 

In the summer of 2008, Paddy Gormley was invited to join the Speak with My Voice project, a creative writing and music initiative by Create (Arts) Ltd at Deptford Churches Centre.  See below left for an audio extract from a typical Speak with My Voice workshop led by Paddy Gormley and featuring the voices of Christine, Jason, Mark, Gordon, Richard, Charles, Chris, James and Rachel. 

Paddy Gormley is also a member of the project team for Tutu Foundation UK. 

Paddy Gormley speaks with great enthusiasm about these projects. "The stereotype of homeless people as social misfits, or worse, could not be further from the reality.  My work with Crisis has taught me that homelessness can happen to anyone.  The people who come into my classes are every bit as intelligent as I.  As often as not, they are extremely well read.  All have unique insights to offer by virtue of the extreme challenges they face in their daily lives.  It is a great privilege to exchange ideas with Skylight members and to play a small part in restoring self-esteem that is so cruelly crushed by force of circumstances.  I always look forward to our thought-provoking and inspirational discussions about language, memory and creativity:  discussions that would not be out of place in any top-flight university. I am extremely grateful to John Petherbridge for introducing me to this field of work."

Unknown Voices was Paddy Gormley's second project with Women's Radio Group (WRG). WRG has many years' experience of helping women to find opportunities as radio presenters, interviewers and technicians.  In 2007, Paddy Gormley and WRG Director Julie Hill devised the Unknown Voices project to bring together their respective training interests.  The project was funded by Fast Forward Grants, on behalf of the European Social Fund.  

Crisis Skylight hosted a course, led by WRG, in which homeless and otherwise disadvantaged women learned to conduct interviews using digital audio recording equipment. At the end of the course, Paddy Gormley led a programme of recorded interviews, with the help of the trainees, in which members of Crisis Skylight talked openly about their experience of homelessness.  At the beginning of 2008, Paddy Gormley built the Unknown Voices website, featuring more than thirty click-to-play interviews. 

The development of the project has been temporarily arrested by Julie Hill's tragic death from cancer in July 2008.  Paddy Gormley intends to continue the work of Unknown Voices as a lasting tribute to Julie, who was a truly inspirational colleague and friend. 

The estagelive project aims to provide study resources to students of A-level English, based on classic play texts as set for examination.  The project is a joint initiative by Paddy Gormley and Logos Theatre Company. 

Logos was founded by actor/director Kenneth McClellan, with the aim of enabling the plays of Shakespeare and others to speak for themselves in clear, unfussy productions.  Logos is formed as a registered charity, continuing the work of Kenneth McClellan, who died in 2004. 

The estagelive project is intended to bring classical texts to life for a new audience not only through live performance, but also with the help of the internet.  Specifically, estagelive will provide on-line study resources for schools, based on live workshop performances and discussions, with the active participation of students, teachers and theatre professionals, while Logos Theatre Company will devise low-cost productions that make classical theatre accessible to students who might not ordinarily experience the thrill of live theatre. 

Logos and Paddy Gormley are currently working to establish the requisite support of participating schools, with the aim of seeking project funding in 2009. 

The estagelive website includes illustrative click-to-play study resources based on The Rivals (Sheridan) and Richard II (Shakespeare). 

For several years after the Millennium, Paddy Gormley led a series of Exciting Writing courses as part of the adult education curriculum of the Blackheath Conservatoire of Music and the Arts, in south-east London.  The list of course subjects developed over the years to embrace many different processes of writing.  Course titles included Exciting Plot Writing, Exciting Writing for Theatre, Exciting Radio Writing, Exciting Writing for Laughter and Exciting Factual Writing. 

The Exciting Writing website was originally created by Paddy Gormley so that his students could easily access his teaching resources. Each week's class was based on a specific theme. After a class discussion of the theme, Paddy Gormley issued a ready-made topic sheet to reinforce the points made in the discussion and to introduce further ideas based on his own thinking about the subject.

These topic sheets are still available via this website.  They were written several years before Paddy Gormley's most innovative thinking about the creative process and the workings of memory and the imagination. They remain useful even so, insofar as they offer many imaginative insights and practical prompts to writers in any of the genres covered in the courses. 

The library of teaching resources remains dressed in the livery of the old Exciting Writing website.