Chinese secondary school vocational education has been given increased prominence over recent years to support the country's need for a highly skilled workforce and continued economic growth. The integration of secondary vocational and higher vocational education to move towards a tertiary system embodying lifelong education with Chinese…

The 2021 release of Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization was a reaction to a number of serious problems discovered in worldwide educational reforms. It sought to establish a new social compact for education to fulfill its unmet promise in the…

Identity serves as a valuable lens through which to investigate, understand and facilitate teacher learning during curriculum reform. Identity learning is the core process of educational change, with teacher emotion at the heart of professional learning processes. In this study, we traced the 1-year journeys of four Chinese EFL teachers during a…

The purpose of this study is to examine a Chinese teacher's decision-making and changes in beliefs in a designed, blended learning environment that explored the use of thinking tools (TTs) strategies in nurturing students' thinking skills. The study used a qualitative methodology of Cultural Psychology, Trajectory Equifinality Approach (TEA), to…

This paper seeks a deeper understanding of how principals strive for instructional leadership with organisational management strategies in China today. Drawing from 116 interviews of district supervisors and school principals from two regions, we first conduct qualitative analysis to map the dimensions and sub-dimensions of Chinese principal…

Drawing upon a collection of curriculum proposals and reflections and informed by a textual analysis approach, this study investigated how 234 university teachers planned to enact and reform their English-medium instruction courses (n = 66) in an English as a foreign language (EFL) university context. Results reveal that the teachers tend to adopt…

Curriculum material use is an agentive, reciprocal and innovative practice, involving multiple stakeholders such as teacher, students and assessments that mutually shape one another. While it is generally acknowledged that teachers' knowledge and skills deeply shape the way they use materials, little is known about how material use can possibly…

In today's digital society, computational thinking (CT) is a critical component of all children's education. In "Computational Thinking Curricula in K-12," editors Harold Abelson and Siu-Cheung Kong present a range of professional perspectives on the most effective ways to integrate CT into school curricula. Their edited volume, which…

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) have been recognized as a promising infrastructure for teacher professional development and student achievement. There has been increasing research interest in PLCs outside mainstream Western contexts. Based on literature and documentary analysis, this paper outlines the historical development of PLCs in…

Special education schools in China and other developing countries are increasingly adapting curricula and approaches developed in Western countries to serve young children with disabilities. Yet not enough is known about how effective these curricula are in different cultural contexts and what difficulties teachers may face in implementing them.…

As part of a mixed-methods reconnaissance action research study, I assessed the impressions teachers had of using an innovation configuration for vocabulary instruction at an English education center in China. The quantitative data strand consisted of lesson artifacts and documents. The qualitative data strand consisted of semi-structured…

This article reviews Education for Sustainability (EfS) in the secondary sector across a range of countries. Drawing on journal articles, book chapters and official reports, it identifies some of the more successful approaches to implementing EfS within the secondary sector. The authors first discuss the importance of educating for sustainability…

The term Professional Development (PD) was first introduced to English teachers in China in the Revised Curriculum Standards (RCS). For PD to be effective, the teachers and policymakers involved in its implementation need to have a common understanding of its scope and purposes, but little is known about how English teachers in China understand…

The teaching research system was established after the founding of New China in emulation of the Soviet Union for the purpose of learning, research and teaching management, with the aim of promoting improvement in the caliber of primary and secondary school teaching and guaranteeing the quality of education. The system played an important role in…

Purpose: This study aims to explore how a Chinese lesson study (LS) supports a teacher's learning of transforming curriculum reform ideas into classroom practices. Design/methodology/approach: Data analyzed in this study included lesson plans, three videotaped research lessons, three audio-taped group meetings, interviews, the teacher's reflection…