Classroom music teachers in England design their own music curricula for Key Stage 3 (11 - 14 year olds, 6th - 8th Grades). These curricula are designed in a context where policymakers define, regulate and legitimate curriculum formulations. This study traced curriculum development in England, where government has validated a policy driven…

This case study explores how literature, in particular poetry, can be used as an educational platform within the secondary classroom to explore gender identity. A six-week unit of poetry was created as part of a broader project to enable pupils to reflect on their personal and familial experiences of gender, whilst also utilising creative writing…

What happens when, in a nation under lockdown, teaching moves online? How is English as a school subject being differently configured? What are the gains and losses? This essay examines, through the prism of a single online lesson, the approach to English, to curriculum and pedagogy, that has been adopted by the Oak National Academy website, a…

Declining academic performance, along with a growing apathy of students toward the value of education, demonstrates that students in the United States public education system do not recognize the value of a positive experience in middle schools. A plethora of research and writing has been done on elementary schools and secondary schools, but…

This article reports an empirical study aiming to investigate students' use of mathematics textbooks in Shanghai and England, with a comparative perspective. The study used mixed methods to collect the data through student questionnaire, student focus group interview and classroom observation. 161 Shanghai seventh- and eighth-grade students and…

The secondary school transition is considered a critical life event by practitioners and researchers alike, and the challenges presented by the pupils during this transition continues to be high-profile in educational, social and political contexts. This study focused on Year 7 pupils aged 11 to 12 years old in their first year of secondary…

Michael Bird has a longstanding interest in the power of classroom dialogue, not only as a means of eliciting students' prior knowledge or checking their understanding of new ideas and information, but also as a powerful tool for generating new knowledge through a collective process of meaning-making. In this article, he first uses two extracts of…

A number of factors among schoolchildren in England are currently contributing to poor attitudes towards speaking in the modern foreign languages (MFL) classroom. Although multiple explicit strategy-based instruction (SBI) intervention studies have appeared in recent years, very few studies have focused on its effect on oral skills and, in…

Mixed-ability grouping is widespread in primary schools and in several subject areas in secondary schools in England. Notwithstanding, there is scant research on mixed-ability grouping in the education literature, particularly in terms of its impact on students' experiences. The research reported in this paper employs enactment theory to provide…

The stimulus for this article came from two developmental tasks that Barbara Trapani was set during the course of her initial teacher education programme: planning her first historical enquiry and bringing the work of an historian into the classroom. Trapani chose to tackle the two tasks together, using Susan Whitfield's accounts -- both of…

Current policy in England, informed by a version of cognitive science, enforces an absolute distinction between experts and novices, or teachers and learners; from this binary, operating in tandem with regimes of performativity instantiated in a curriculum shaped by high-stakes testing, are derived particular forms of pedagogy and particular…

The "world culture" framework posits a convergence in the organisation of education across the world. On the other hand, scholars observing teaching practices inside classrooms find significant variation among nations and regions of the world. This study examined the global change patterns of classroom practices at the between- and…

Recent research has established that it is academically advantageous for students to adopt an incremental view of their intelligence and that this is a key marker of a student's level of self-efficacy. The self-efficacy of students following Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) courses in UK secondary schools is known to be low. Interventions have been…

Ofsted's 2021 Curriculum Research Review outlines a language pedagogy predicated on an exclusively cognitivist approach to language learning, which relies on three 'pillars of progression': phonics, vocabulary and grammar. The review makes a brief acknowledgement of the importance of motivational factors, including 'pupils' positive views of…

Elizabeth Marsay wanted to ensure that her students were not hindered in their causal explanations of the abolition of slavery by being exposed to overly categorical, simplistic, and monocausal narratives in the classroom. By drawing on both English and Canadian theorisation about causation, Marsay outlines how her introduction of competing…