UAB Guest Lecture: Teacher education and globalisation

Slides from my guest lecture with the Masters of Education Policy students at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in 2018. A lecture about what teacher education is, what teacher education policy looks like, and some lenses for analysing teacher education policy. With a focus upon globalisation and new public management. Five case studies of […]

We need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously: Examples of research supporting teachers’ self determination

This post is based on a seminar presented to the Globalisation and Education and Sociology Policy (GEPS) group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously. “In my talk today I am arguing that we need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously. The talk has three parts. […]

How to design online courses for student engagement

I had the great pleasure of working with Neil Martin over a number of years, during his project investigating the way that the principles of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) can be applied for designing engaging online courses. I’m forever grateful to Neil for getting me to read deeply about positive psychology–the branch of psychology trying to understand the […]

Studying teachers in social network sites: Thinking about methodology

There is an entire genre of journal articles about how teachers in social network sites are behaving, what they’re doing, and what benefits they’re getting. This refers to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Ning and EdModo. Recent review papers by Macia & Garcia (2017) and Lantz-Andersson et al. (2018) gives some indication of quite how many […]

How design thinking can help teachers collaborate

I wrote this article with Les Dawes, Natalie Wright, and Jeremy Kerr for The Conversation about how design thinking can help teachers collaborate. The original article is under a Creative Commons attribution license and is located here: https://theconversation.com/how-design-thinking-can-help-teachers-collaborate-95932 I have included a reprint here: The recent release of the Gonski 2.0 report has done an […]

Economic thinking in education and its degrading/corrupting effect

This piece on economic thinking in education was originally published on the EduResearchMatters blog of the AARE under the title Economic Thinking is Corrupting Education in Australia where it is freely available. Introduction There is a growing trend in education of proposing and enacting policy ideas that are based primarily upon economic thinking. I believe there […]

Presentation: Online support for STEM teachers

On Friday 9th June 2017 I had the opportunity to present some of the ideas that have come out from TeachConnect. The presentation was called Online support for STEM teachers and in the audience we had representatives from government and the councils of deans of science and education. The main thread of my argument is: There might […]

Understanding the role of markets in education

This post continues my attempts to understand how educational economics are shaping our understanding of education. This is a philosophical project in the sense that it’s about concepts – understanding the ones that we use and creating new ones where they are needed. Previously I’ve written about the difference conceptions of education that arise when beginning from ideologies of either […]

The Educational Economics of School Choice

Ever since Friedman’s work on the educational economics of school choice (Friedman, 1962) the debate has gone round in circles about the merits of a comprehensive public system compared to what is known as a voucher system. It is likely that in some country, somewhere in the world, right now a government is attempting to implement “more competition in the schooling […]

Online learning networks of preservice and early career teachers

I’ve realised that I’m yet to put up here on this site a plug for my own book (co-authored with Marc Clarà, Ben Kehrwald and Patrick A. Danaher). It’s got the catchy title of Online Learning Networks of Preservice and Early Career Teachers. What does that actually mean? The book brings together a few years of research […]