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Should we ‘teach’ interdisciplinarity at school?

Should we 'teach' interdisciplinarity at school? This blog post suggests that we should. If you think of real world problems in engineering, health, politics and so on, these require...

Involving students in assessment conversations

For students to be actively engaged in their own learning journey, they need to know what they are learning, why they are learning it, how to learn it, how well they are learning it, and how to...

Effectiveness of mathematics teaching: the truth about China and England

Building on last year’s BERA paper, this year, we are sharing the key findings from the completed EMT project. With more to be found in the paper and the presentation, here we highlight a small...

Can classroom enquiry be sexy and be policy at the same time?

There was recently a DfE call for evidence on Teacher Development to inform a national standard. I am interested because I have pioneered UK Lesson Study - which I view as a powerful form of...

Learning from the past: History qualifications in the 21st century

History is for human self-knowledge… the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teachers us what man has done and thus what man is. (R.G...

Gaining insight through student voice

As I spend my last days of summer vacation in my classroom preparing for the start of my 25th new school year, I find myself reflecting on past classes, curriculum changes and my beliefs about...

What difference can be made to teacher practice in assessment for learning?

Most people want students to learn as well as possible, while being fiscally and time efficient. The majority of teachers do the best they can. Yet some students and teachers appear to achieve...

Can Social Realism Do Social Justice?

Our BERA presentation, ‘Can Social Realism Do Social Justice: Debating the Warrants for Curriculum Knowledge Selection’, is based on a paper of the same title, soon to be available online from...

Teacher agency: What is it and why does it matter?

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

The concept of ‘teacher agency’ has elicited a fair amount of attention recently, including a special edition of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice. And yet, it remains an elusive...

‘Turning Schools Inside Out’: Developing Curriculum with Community Partners

In this blog I will be arguing that it would be extremely beneficial for many schools to engage in community curriculum making (CCM) whereby some of the curriculum is developed with community...

Statutory PSHE education – what more can we do?

In February, the Commons Education Committee recommended that Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education, the subject which teaches pupils to keep healthy and safe and prepares them...

How do you measure a national curriculum?

One of the trends in educational research has been towards more sophisticated understandings about which research methods are appropriate to answer particular research questions. For example a...