The challenge of researching dialogic interactions in digital classroom contexts

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...

Student behaviour, motivation and the potential of attachment-aware schools to redefine the landscape

The starting point for our article (Parker & Levinson, 2018) was the apparent contradiction in current government policy between an essentially top-down, ‘zero tolerance’ behaviourist model of...

Confusion, contradiction and exclusion: The problems of British values and the national curriculum in history teaching

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...

Action research in the classroom: Applying spacing and retrieval practice

The future of educational research in Wales

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,...

Hopes and fears: The development of a new curriculum in Wales

The future of educational research in Wales

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...

Through adversity comes strength: Educational policy reform and developing research capacity in Wales

The future of educational research in Wales

Introducing a special issue of the BERA Blog on education in Wales, to mark the conference, ‘The future of educational research in Wales’, held in Cardiff on 14 November 2018. Education...

A new tool to help teachers as digital learning designers

We began with a sense of mission: to support teachers in making effective use of learning technologies. Educational research has done little so far to help teachers into the digital age; policy...

Regeneration, re-education and an anthem for peace: Insights for education from the re-education of Wilfred Owen during his 1917 convalescence at Craiglockhart War Hospital

From 26 June until early November 1917 2nd Lt Wilfred Owen of the Manchester Regiment convalesced at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh. There is limited focus on Owen’s time in Scotland, but...

Gamifying programming education in K-12

In our recent article published in the British Journal of Educational Technology (Lindberg et al 2018), we present the results of a review on how programming has been approached by K-12 curriculum...

National curriculum in England: The first 30 years, part 2

This is the second in a two-part series on the development of the national curriculum; read part 1 here. The work of the expert panel, for the most recent review of the national curriculum...

National curriculum in England: The first 30 years, part 1

For the whole of the 1970s I taught in secondary schools. (I am that old!) At that time there was no national curriculum (NC), so teachers usually decided what to teach as well as how to teach....

To thrive, new teachers need environments of trust

Having just attended BERA’s Annual Conference at the University of Northumbria, I have been reflecting on the diverse range of talks I attended, and some of the key research messages that I...