This paper examines an initiative promoting collaboration between schools located in a city setting in Northern Ireland, which is broadly divided along ethnic and political lines. The schools involved, like the vast majority of schools in Northern Ireland, educate Protestant and Catholic children separately. This presents particular challenges for…

This paper adds to a growing body of literature which views global citizenship education as part of a broader social and cultural process of subjectivity production. Rather than focus on global citizenship in relation to pedagogy or curriculum content, as much of the previous research literature has done, this paper examines it in relation to the…

This paper reports on a year-long research study: four teachers of English, their Year 8 (13-14 year old) classes (110 students) in urban, secondary schools and a university teacher educator investigated the contexts for students to develop dialogic, exploratory talk in small groups. Assuming a Vygotskyan perspective, the study adapted a pedagogic…

This paper attempts to identify leadership practices of school principals as they engaged in exploring and exploiting possibilities in and around the school contexts to develop school capacity for change. Based on interview data of school principals, this paper shows that the capabilities of school leaders to perceive and exploit situated…

The paper is based on interviews with a sample of 200 teachers from the Limpopo province about their life histories, particularly those aspects related to their choice of teaching as their first career path, and their expectations, experiences and perceptions in this regard. It argues that current approaches to teacher education in South Africa…

It is a challenge for an early education teacher to enhance the development of self-regulation of young children to become and stay motivated for tasks that elicit school-related skills that do not immediately make sense for them. Being aware of motivational orientations in young students is therefore a must. In the study, a cross-cultural…

The higher skills policy of the UK New Labour Government emerged from the recommendations of the Leitch Review of Skills, and was implemented in England between 2007 and 2010. The policy aimed to encourage higher education (HE) institutions to engage with employers and employer representative bodies to design and deliver HE provision that…

In recent years, there have been concerns in the UK regarding the uptake of particular subjects in post-compulsory education. Whilst entries for Advanced level (A-level) subjects such as media studies have experienced considerable growth, entries for A-level physics have, until recently, been declining, prompting fears of a skills crisis in future…

Two departments in a secondary school in England participated in "lesson study" projects over a five-month period to explore its usefulness as a vehicle for professional development. Through a cycle of two research lessons, conducted separately in each department, teachers identified challenges that inhibited the learning of their…

Schools in China and elsewhere are starting to teach English as a second language or foreign language (FL) to students at increasingly earlier ages. Although young learners (YLs), due to their developmental stage, are likely to be particularly susceptible to the influence of parents, parents' roles in YLs' motivation to learn English as…

Collaborative learning can, if designed and implemented properly, contribute to student learning outcomes and prepare them for teamwork. However, the design and implementation of collaborative learning in practice depend on beliefs of lecturers about teaching and learning in general, and collaborative learning in particular. One hundred and…

In the democracies of today, school often have a dual role to play. Not only should they give students the knowledge they need to enter the labour market, they should also teach young people about democracy, and develop students' capacity to exercise their citizenship. A third task for schools is to enhance political equality in society by…

The concept of moderate learning difficulties (MLD) is not clearly understood in its definition and in its general use. Nevertheless, as a distinct area of special educational needs (SEN) this category has constituted about a quarter of all of those pupils identified as having SEN in England. This paper reports the analysis of findings from an…

This study focused on the impact of using Socratic questioning, based on the Paideia Method, on the nature of middle-schools students' patterns of interaction and on the cognitive complexity of their discussions. The hypothesis is that an experimental group will increase in both interaction focus and complexity at T3, which is the…

Since 2010, the whole national cohort Key Stage 2 (KS2) National Curriculum test in science in England has been replaced with a sampling test taken by pupils at the age of 11 from a nationally representative sample of schools annually. The study reported in this paper compares the performance of different subgroups of the samples (classified by…