This blog post springs from a symposium I convened at BERA Conference 2018 entitled ‘Using creative methods to explore complex topics with young participants’. The symposium reflected my...
‘Aspirations’ are a wonderfully simple concept. The problem is that it’s becoming increasingly clear they are of little worth in terms of understanding pathways towards higher education, as...
The rise of mobile learning in schools during the past decade has led to promises about its power to extend and enhance student cognitive development – for example, by providing greater...
A renewed call to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum has marked a shift in thinking about education and what should form the canon of curriculum content (le Grange, 2016). It has been amplified...
‘The primary place in which to work at ecology is necessarily in the field’ Tansley (1952/1987) Most contemporary ecologists could not envisage a world without fieldwork....
Language is the most ubiquitous and flexible of the meaning-making tools. As such, it is a teacher’s main pedagogic tool (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). ‘Classroom dialogue’ can be thought of as...
Many teachers find it difficult to operationalise ideas from the literature and envisage ‘what it looks like in the classroom’. Teaching historical thinking and reasoning (HTR) is a good...
It has become increasingly apparent that being literate is a fundamental skill for citizens of the 21st century, just as it was in previous times, but also that new conceptualisations of what it...
Anthropomorphic robots are increasingly being used as a technology in early childhood settings, and they have been found to enhance social interaction (Tanaka, Cicourel & Movellan, 2007), support...
From 2010, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition began to reassess the teaching of history in schools across the key stages of the national curriculum in England and Wales. After...
Since 2015, ‘pioneer’ schools across Wales have been contributing to the development of a new national curriculum based on Professor Graham Donaldson’s (2015) report, Successful Futures. As...
I have been a classroom teacher for nearly two decades, but have only recently undertaken action research. In this post I describe my experiences with spacing (Bjork & Bjork, 2014; Cepeda et al,...