Support for newly qualified professionals: It takes a village

In the UK context, as per worldwide, we need teachers and doctors more than ever. We face the challenge of attracting the right candidates, ensuring they complete training programmes, and enter...

Teachers are doing it for themselves: Developing Beach School approaches to support an effective climate change curriculum

Zac Goldsmith’s controversial resignation letter in 2023 was interesting for its ‘insider’ revelation about the apathetic attitude of the present political leadership towards the...

Rose-tinted glasses and varifocals: A reflective lens on the development of initial teacher training curricula

In 2023 I attended the annual BERA Conference, and was particularly struck by Elizabeth Chapman Hoult and colleagues’ workshop, ‘Revisioning teacher education within higher education: An...

The teacher education content framework we really need

The BERA Blog post ‘Dropping off a cliff’ makes a strong case that the current trainee teacher recruitment crisis in England has been exacerbated by several Department for Education (DfE)...

How to optimise the use of Hattie and Timperley’s feedback levels for student learning

Hattie and Timperley (2007) distinguish four levels of feedback messages that address different aspects of students’ learning: task, process, self-regulation and self. This blog post outlines...

How can online instructors enhance student performance by effectively participating in asynchronous online discussions?

Online learning has become increasingly important in education, especially during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. A key activity in online learning is asynchronous online discussion (for instance...

What are we educating for? Education policymaking in England

Education represents no less than our vision of society, and the people in it. It represents values. How education policy is made tells us about whose values are prioritised, what sources of...

British Educational Research Journal: Call for special issues (2024)

This opportunity is now closed. The incoming editors of the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ) intend to publish a number of special issues during their tenure, which commences in...

Exploring Ghanaian lecturers’ engagement experiences in hybrid learning environments during the Covid-19 pandemic

Lecturers teaching in Ghanaian public universities have never had their pedagogical skills and competencies more tested than during teaching online during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prior to the...

Designing more robust experiments to improve education research

Meta-analyses can play an important role in educational research. Aggregating results from different, but comparable studies, to demonstrate average effect sizes can be highly informative....

Initial teacher education: Are we missing something?

Initial teacher education (ITE) has increasingly come under public and political scrutiny in several countries due to a growing focus on competitive international rankings (Douglas-Gardner &...

Holding the space for professional learning

BERA Conference 2023

The professional learning of teachers and school leaders occurs in multiple spaces and potentially throughout their careers. Professional learning matters because it creates opportunities for...