“This is not about ‘revolutionary’ change, but rather about ‘evolutionary’ change – starting from where you are, experimenting, adapting and learning by doing – with all changes based on evaluated evidence.” (Collarbone, 2015, p. 13) Schools today are required to prepare students for a changing world. In this climate of fast change, teachers are urged […]
There is an ever-increasing focus on teacher learning. Teacher learning aims to improve teacher practice, which has an impact on student outcomes. It is therefore clear that if we want our students to be as successful as possible, we need our teachers, through their own learning, to be as successful as possible too. For this, […]
Achinstein (2002) suggests that conflict is essential in a learning community. Yet, while some communities will be conflict-embracing, others will externalise the conflict and become conflict-avoidant. Over the past five years, I have been using lesson study to support the development of a learning community in my school, so that it is increasingly conflict-embracing. In […]
The author of this article is an Associate at Unlike Minds, an organisation that offers chargeable consultancy services in many fields including education. This paper presents teachers’ self-reported findings about the effects of mindfulness and meditation on student behaviour in three primary schools situated in areas with multiple deprivation indicators. Schools first participated in a […]
Japanese lesson study has become increasingly popular (Seleznyov, 2018) as an approach to teacher professional development in the UK. Translated from the words jugyou (instruction or lesson) and kenkyu (research or study), lesson study involves teachers collaboratively planning a lesson, observing it being taught and then discussing their findings. In line with recent research on […]
Any discussion about behaviour should begin with thinking about our values. What do we mean by ‘good behaviour’? How do we want our children to think about their behaviour in relationship to their learning? To what extent is behaviour in schools about immediate academic gains, and to what extent is it about longer-term considerations? What […]
Appraisals, done well, can be at the heart of moving a school forward. My experience, however, is that they are more often part of a cycle in a busy schedule of activities in the autumn term under ‘performance management’. They are increasingly viewed by staff as generic, linked to whole-school priorities and pupil outcomes. As […]
According to its last annual report, half of all senior leaders in England consult the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit to inform decision-making (EEF, 2018a). In just seven years, the Toolkit has become central to – and indeed driven (Coldwell et al., 2017) – evidence-based practice in schools here and overseas. For an […]
We all recognise schools as places of learning for children and young people. However, in schools with strong learning cultures, everyone shares an identity as a learner. When staff speak about the learning dispositions they expect to see in their students, they could hold up a mirror and see the same dispositions in themselves. This […]
The literature on group work indicates pros and cons to its use in the classroom. By looking at mechanisms of group failure and success and then linking these to concrete practices, we highlight some important boundary conditions involving goal difficulty, how goals are set and feedback, which practitioners may find helpful to know about before […]
This is the story of two teachers. Angela and Amber have been teaching for 10 years each. Angela is a 32-year-old primary teacher whose particular specialism has been teaching reading in Years 3 and 4. Amber is a secondary drama teacher, now in her early 50s, who came into teaching after a first career as […]
A longstanding debate in educational and psychological research is the effectiveness of constructivist teaching methods over direct instruction. Although constructivism can take many forms (such as discovery learning, inquiry learning, etc.), one common assumption widely shared in the research community is that learning is constructed by the individuals, who are active sense-makers, rather than being […]
Teaching is an intellectual profession and, as such, its knowledge bases are underpinned by research, one definition of which could be new knowledge made public. However, within the education community, the concept of research is used in a variety of what might be thought of as loose ways, including, for example, reports of innovative practice, […]
In the early stages of your teaching career, it’s not uncommon to feel overwhelmed by the many demands of day to day classroom teaching. Teaching is a challenging but highly rewarding profession and with the added pressures of remote/blended teaching and learning, effectively managing your time and workload is more important now than ever. Additionally, […]
JONATHAN DOHERTY, LEEDS TRINITY UNIVERSITY, UK A changing picture of school leadership Over the last few decades, roles in schools have changed in response to an evolving educational landscape. School leadership includes not only includes headteachers now, but staff at all levels, supporting their career advancement (ET2020, 2019). Classroom teachers are assuming greater levelsof responsibility […]
Judith Bruce-Golding, Researcher and SEND Teacher, University of Birmingham, UK Studies over the past 10 years have documented different school leadership approaches and how they influence students as well as individual staff members, including teachers’ career trajectories (Mboyo, 2017; Callender 2018, Bruce-Golding, 2019). Given the lack of black and global majority teachers and leaders in […]
Vivienne Porritt, Strategic Leader, WomenEd; Vice-President, Chartered College of Teaching; Leadership Consultant, UK Lisa Hannay, Strategic Leader, WomenEd; Senior Leader, Centennial High School, Calgary, Alberta, Canada Parm Plummer, Strategic Leader, WomenEd; Senior Leader, Victoria College, St Helier, Jersey England has a severe teacher retention crisis, with 32.3 per cent of newly qualified entrants to […]
Lindsay Patience, Teacher, Putney High School The recommendation that middle and senior leaders should be able to work flexibly was a main finding from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) report ‘Part-time teaching and flexible working in secondary schools’ (Sharp et al., 2019), and flexible working is a key strand of the Department for Education’s Teacher Recruitment and […]
LYN DALE, CAMBRIDGE ASSESSMENT ADMISSIONS TESTING, UK ALISON FOX, THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, UK ROB LOE, RELATIONSHIPS FOUNDATION, UK ANNA RICHARDS AND KATE SIDA-NICHOLS, SUFFOLK AND NORFOLK SCHOOL-CENTRED INITIAL TEACHER TRAINING, UK BEN WINKLEY AND EVELIN GAÁL, EIDO RESEARCH, UK The role of personality in teacher retention Personality, or people’s preferences in how they think, feel […]
Tanya Ovenden-Hope, Institute of Education, Plymouth Marjon University, UK There is a discord internationally between the ‘agencies’ that control the supply and quality (teacher status) of the school ‘workforce’, such as the Department for Education on behalf of the government in England and the government and Swedish Association for Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR) in […]
