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Balancing honesty with hope: new centre will help teachers build-in climate change education
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 16 June 2022
16 June 2022
Few can doubt that the climate emergency is the defining issue of our time. The most recent IPCC report confirms that without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach with potentially profound implications for life on our planet.
In this context it is no surprise to read in research commissioned by UCL’s new Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education (CCCSE) that climate change – and education about climate change – is an important issue to parents, teachers, school leaders and young people. What is more surprising is how many of the students and teachers participating in the research feel that schools are not always doing enough to educate young people about all aspects of climate change and the possibilities of more sustainable lifestyles.
Public First, who carried out this research, polled more than 1,000 parents, the first time we believe parents have been asked Read the rest of this entry »
Do teenagers who feel anxious about testing achieve worse GCSE grades?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 15 June 2022
15 June 2022
By John Jerrim
Before all our lives were turned upside-down by the coronavirus pandemic, there was much concern over how GCSE examinations were affecting young people’s mental health. For some young people, the stress and anxiety induced by these examinations can be severe. This could then become a vicious circle, whereby anxiety about the exams can lead young people to achieve lower grades on them.
I explore this issue in my new academic paper, investigating whether GCSE grades are indeed lower amongst Year 11 pupils who suffer from high-levels of test anxiety. Read the rest of this entry »
Receiving Ofsted ratings ‘below good’ can act as a barrier to school improvement
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 7 June 2022
7 June 2022
By Bernardita Munoz-Chereau, Jo Hutchinson and Melanie Ehren
Finding ways to solve the stubborn underperformance of around 580 schools in England is high on the government’s agenda. The Schools White Paper ‘Opportunity for All: Strong schools with great teachers for your child’ sets out the government’s plans over the coming years, with strategies to address schools with successive ‘requires improvement’ (RI) grades.
Yet since 2017 Ofsted has focused on a group of schools judged as ‘requires improvement’, ‘satisfactory’ or ‘inadequate’ in every inspection over more than a decade. Subsequently, Ofsted conducted qualitative case studies of 10 ‘stuck’ and 10 ‘unstuck’ schools. ‘Fight or flight? How ‘‘Stuck’’ schools are overcoming isolation’ reports that ‘stuck’ schools need more targeted assistance, following more thorough and detailed inspections that are not tied to overall grades .
Our two-year mixed-methods research project studying ‘Stuck’ schools’, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, concluded that Read the rest of this entry »
Rethinking assessment: is the ‘oral essay’ a realistic alternative to the written essay in HE?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 31 May 2022
© MINES ParisTech / S. Boda 2020
31 May 2022
By Katia Dowdle
‘I own the words I speak more than I own the words that I write’. (student’s sentiment recorded by Joughin)
Higher education students in the UK are predominantly assessed through the medium of writing, with essays being the most common type of assignment. As an academic writing tutor, I have been ‘part of the system’ for several years now, preparing foundation students to understand and appropriately address essay tasks in their university studies.
The mere existence of my job has depended on the long-lived and cherished tradition of essay writing as a means to facilitate learning, diagnose students’ progress and assess understanding. I have always admired the format of academic essay that has an inherent potential to give learners space for expressing new and original ideas and, at the same time, demonstrating their deep understanding of the existing knowledge.
Students have not always shared my enthusiasm though. Moreover, the combination of independent thought and experts’ Read the rest of this entry »
‘How do you assess that people have become more tolerant?’ and other challenges of teaching ‘difficult’ histories
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 25 May 2022
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
25 May 2022
By Mary Richardson, Becky Hale, Tom Haward and Kwaku Adjepong
We concluded our Holocaust Memorial Day blog about teaching ‘difficult’ histories with the proposition: ‘We could assess these kinds of knowledge, but is it appropriate to do so?’ Since then, we have been exploring this idea further.
Our current focus on assessing how students understand and learn about ‘difficult histories’ arose from research (2019-20), led by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education,to explore teaching about the Holocaust in English secondary schools, which surveyed more than 1,000 teachers. The original study was not about assessment, but we found that teachers were keen to explore ways to reflect on their teaching and their students’ experiences of learning about the Holocaust. However, some noted that care is necessary when considering how assessment could happen, as this interviewee stated:
…we need to give them the emotional space to actually realise what the topic’s about, and the impact it has on people, and I think if we start bolting on assessments to it we lose some of that ability for them to actually self-reflect. Read the rest of this entry »
Ukraine invasion: how history can empower people to make sense of Russia’s war
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 19 May 2022
19 May 2022
By Stéphane G. Lévesque, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa and Arthur Chapman, IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered, in the words of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “the greatest threat to European stability since the Second World War.”
Since then, not a single day has passed without powerful stories and shocking images of bombardments and casualties circulating online.
In a recent CBC interview, Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan examined how history has become “an instrument of war” Read the rest of this entry »
IOE at 120: the Second World War and the educative society, 1942–1952
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 18 May 2022
THE NEW BOY Mr RA Butler: “It may not seem very easy at first but you’ll soon settle down.”
18 May 2022
This blog is the fifth in a series of 12 exploring each decade in IOE’s history in the context of the education and society of the times. Find out more about our 120th anniversary celebrations on our website, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with everything that’s happening.
The decade from 1942 to 1952 went from some of the most difficult and dangerous days of the Second World War, to the stirring of hopes that an educative society could be created in which educational values underpinned the reconstruction of society.
For the IOE it might be called Fred Clarke’s decade. When he died in January 1952, 70 years ago, Professor A.V. Judges at King’s College London, could recall him as ‘the doyen of pedagogic leaders in his own country… a reformer through and through’. To former students like the historian Brian Simon, he was ‘the leading educational statesman in Britain’.
It was Clarke who presided over the early development of the Institute of Education under its new title at the University of London as its director from 1936 to 1945, through the challenges of the war years when the IOE had to be evacuated from London to a temporary home in Nottingham.
Clarke was acutely aware of the social class inequalities on which English education had been based. He was also concerned to help to promote a new social philosophy that would be ‘in harmony with that which inspires a generous education’. He Read the rest of this entry »
Family? Factory? How metaphors help make sense of school life
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 10 May 2022
jarmoluk / Pixabay
10 May 2022
When we use the word ‘school’ we expect all of us to have a similar view of what this means. In its most basic form, it’s a building with classrooms of students and a teacher. This ‘grammar of schooling’ has been in place for decades and tends to include the grouping of students for purposes of instruction, with teachers’ work defined vis-à-vis groups of students and how they are progressed through school on the basis of assessment outcomes and age.
So far, so obvious. But underlying these visible structures, we find a vast variety in practices and views of what it means to educate children, how to organize a school and the meaning of a school. Those involved in schooling – students, parents, teachers and leaders – may have different views of their school, conceptions of their role in the school, and of the values of schooling. Such views, often expressed in metaphors, provide an important means to access what people think, but also to understand their actions. Mills et al, for example, argue that how we choose to act is (also) a function of how we construct conceptions of what we are and what we are trying to do; and when certain metaphors gain prominence in the minds of a Read the rest of this entry »
Is there is a link between Year 11s’ wellbeing and their GCSE grades?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 28 April 2022
28 April 2022
By John Jerrim
The 2021/22 academic year is due to see the return of GCSE examinations after a Covid-enforced two-year hiatus. Before the pandemic hit, there was much concern about how these high-stakes examinations may be affecting young people’s mental health.
At the same time, it was recognised that those Year 11s who were struggling with their wellbeing could see their GCSE grades suffer as a result. Yet we actually know relatively little about this key issue – how strong is the link between the wellbeing of Year 11 pupils and the GCSE grades they achieve?
This blog takes a look at the evidence, drawing upon work I have published today in a new academic paper. Read the rest of this entry »
IOE at 120: Imagining the education of the future, 1932–1942
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 26 April 2022
Senate House by Rain Rabbit
26 April 2022
This blog is the fourth in a series of 12 exploring each decade in IOE’s history in the context of the education and society of the times. Find out more about our 120th anniversary celebrations on our website, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with everything that’s happening.
1932… hardly the best of times to create a new Institute of Education in London. Certainly, it was an age when there were many brave and even utopian schemes coming to the fore in the world of education. The 1920s and 1930s saw progressive ideals becoming manifest, for example, in A.S. Neill’s Summerhill school, with its ideals of freedom for children; Bertrand and Dora Russell’s Beacon Hill school, with its radical ideals about child-rearing; and the civic philosophy of Kurt Hahn’s Gordonstoun. The New Education Fellowship was founded in 1921, inspired by the mystic Beatrice Ensor, and continued for the next two decades to generate international conferences on lofty themes and the journal The New Era, while the threats of fascism and war grew on the European continent.
And yet, despite the progressive visions, the years following the First World War were also hard times for education, despite the promises of the Education Act of 1918. Economic pressures were at the heart of this. The Geddes reports of 1922 led to Read the rest of this entry »
