Why are we splitting our children up into arts and sciences at an age when hormones are raging and peer pressure is so powerful? It’s time for an overhaul of post-16 education.
The recent UK budget announced plans to allow universities that exemplify good teaching to increase their caps on fees, meaning they will be financially rewarded for good teaching practice. But how do you measure this?
The proposal for a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) announced by universities and science minister Jo Johnson in early July that would recognise “excellent teaching” and “make good teaching better…
Wikipedia is frequently considered an unacceptable and unreliable source of information. It’s also constantly correcting – and isn’t that what content should strive to do?
By pre-school children are already thinking about the career they will have when they grow up, and ruling out jobs that do not fit with their gender. We need to get in early to get rid of stereotypes.
Humans spend an enormous amount of time and effort thinking about other people. Like primates, birds and even ants, we often learn skills and information from others. In the past, research has extensively…
For the past twenty years, I’ve heard this question asked many times about online education. It might be tempting for enthusiasts to say “of course it is good,” but I see this as a kind of “trick question…
Recruitment of student teachers to begin training in 2015 is well underway, and the government hopes it will lead to well over 30,000 new teachers entering the profession in England. But data from the…
An article we wrote last week for The Conversation on Seven “great” teaching methods not backed up by evidence prompted a large amount of comment and discussion. One of the main questions has been, ok…
What makes “great teaching”? It’s a complicated question, made more difficult by trying to measure how teachers make decisions in the classroom and what impact those decisions have on what pupils learn…
Can you imagine attending a lecture on, say, string theory and finding that the lecturer was actually explaining this complex scientific concept using his own words – sung to the tune of Queen’s Bohemian…
Amid debates about teacher quality and training, and with the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group soon to report on teacher education, we asked a panel of experts just what makes a good teacher…
As another teachers’ strike looms on July 10 it is worth setting out the reasons that teachers are unhappy with their profession. It’s not just because of conditions of service, pay, and pensions. Teaching…
Imagine a future where university enrolment paperwork is accompanied by the statement: Warning: lectures may stunt your academic performance and increase risk of failure. Researchers from the United States…
Does it matter what we call our teachers? Some academics seem to think so, and have called for the titles “Sir” and “Miss” to be banished from the classroom because they are sexist. Yet their use in the…
What would you do with $1m? One lucky teacher may have to start thinking. Entries are now open for a new $1m Global Teacher Prize, launched by the Varkey GEMS Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Dubai-based…
The issue of teaching character, which until now has mainly been debated within the ivory towers of academia, is suddenly all the rage in policy circles in the UK, in the wake of the report by the All-Party…
Are you a teacher? When you are at a party, a wedding or in the pub, and asked: “What do you do for a living?” – what do you say? Why might you lie? Is it too boring? Too complicated? Much too likely to…
In 1988, then-federal education minister John Dawkins almost doubled the number of Australian universities. Dawkins did this by by merging colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology into…
Australia’s national curriculum, which is set to be reviewed, is an easy document for anyone to find and read. It really doesn’t require two experts – or six months – to report on it. Over the past six…