As it grew safer for schools to reopen fully in spring 2021, "FORUM" convened a roundtable discussion to hear more about the experience of teaching and learning through the pandemic, and how that experience might help us rethink the education system. Melissa Benn chaired this wide-ranging and insightful conversation between Eliane…

The government's policy of helping pupils and students 'catch up' with 'lost learning' misconceives learning, and endorses pedagogical approaches based on this misconception. Whether or not to learn lies with the learner, so teaching is more properly understood as an act of faith in people rather than of delivery to them. Such a view has…

In several of his writings, John Dewey returned to the importance of the imagination for thinking about experience and making sense of it. This article looks at some of what he says, especially in "Democracy and Education," and considers the enduring importance of imagination for lesson-planning, teaching and assessment.

The requirement to ready pupils for high-stakes summative testing continues to undermine and baulk teachers as they try to act in line with their pedagogical principles. For some -- perhaps many -- practitioners this experience is increasingly insupportable and gives rise to profound inner conflict. Test readying promotes in pupils a necessary…

In this article, members of the Learning without Limits research team describe the establishment and work of the Learning without Limits network. This network brings together practitioners, school leaders, academics and others involved in education to further develop approaches to anti-determinist pedagogy, and to consider the issues which arise.

Scores of articles in "FORUM" have engaged for almost sixty years with a range of substantive issues relating to the grammar/secondary modern school divide, and to the movement for comprehensive reform. These articles constitute an invaluable resource for campaigners and historians. Highlighted and introduced here are half a dozen such…

This article revisits Douglas Barnes's book-length exploration of the implications for teachers of a constructivist epistemology, notably in relation to the importance of small-group talk in classrooms. Empirically based consideration of small-group exploratory pupil-pupil talk enabled Barnes to reveal the learning strategies such a context…