Teachers' beliefs about skills play a significant role in how they teach those skills. Similarly, students' mastery of a skill is influenced by their ideas about its value and what the performance of the skill exactly entails. In this study, 10 history teachers and 17 students in secondary school (age 16-17) were interviewed about their beliefs…

A fascinating and rich landscape of personal views and approaches can be seen in architectural design and in architectural design education. This variation may be confusing for students. This paper focuses on the question: is the framework of generic elements that we developed for explicating the design process helpful to compare the differences…

The finding that biodiversity is a concept with different context-specific meanings has implications for its conceptual development when students are required to apply it in a diversity of contexts. An approach that may overcome these implications is that students learn to recontextualise one meaning to another. Since no empirical studies were…

Schools are important settings to promote health as they provide a context where children and young people learn to develop competencies to understand and influence their lifestyles and living conditions. This requires a school climate that encourages democratic learning processes and empowers students to become agents in their own lives. This…

Students need to be challenged to stimulate their learning. Applying challenge in practice however is not straightforward. Challenging students may conflict with other teacher responsibilities, creating potential dilemmas for teachers. This study discloses dilemmas teachers encounter when challenging students as well as the considerations…

Interest in student engagement has increased over the past decade, which has resulted in increased knowledge about this concept and about the aspects that facilitate engagement. However, as yet, only a few studies have focused on engagement from the perspective of the teacher. In this study, we capture the experiences of teachers who were…

Bernstein describes a curriculum context as a system context that is regulated by strong and weak framing, which refers to the "degree of control teachers and pupils possess over the selection, organisation, pacing and timing of the knowledge transmitted and received in the pedagogical relationship" (1975, p. 89). In this article, we…

In this study, we explored the relationships between teachers' self-articulated professional learning goals and their teaching experience. Although those relationships seem self-evident, in programmes for teachers' professional development years of teaching experience are hardly taken into account. Sixteen teachers with varying years of experience…

This study investigates the knowledge that experienced teachers draw on when fostering students' reflections. Reflective skills are crucial for advancing students' learning. In order to promote students' reflection productively, extensive support and scaffolding from teachers is indispensible. However, teachers are in need of more guidance in this…

L1 grammar education is internationally criticised because of its pedagogy and its curriculum content. There is a gap between linguistic theory and school grammar in which the latter rarely makes use of possibly relevant insights from the former. At the same time, linguistics itself has never seriously undertaken attempts to identify the…

Purpose: Preparing citizens for participation in pluralist democracies also requires a type of citizenship education that fosters critical democratic citizenship (CDC). This study inquires into an educational activity with a long history in many EU-countries: mock elections. It explores the extent to which elements of CDC-literacy, competences and…

This article describes an example of inter-professional action research conducted by teachers and university-based researchers/teacher educators in a vocational college in the Netherlands. The research was aimed at the professional learning of the teachers on their pedagogical approach to a new curriculum initiative. Despite a difficult context in…

In a large-scale top-down innovation operation in the Netherlands, workplace simulations have been implemented in vocational schools, where students are required to work independently and self-direct their learning. However, research has shown that the success of such large-scale top-down innovations depends on how well their execution in schools…

Grounded within literature pointing to the value of narrative in communicating scientific information, the purpose of this study was to examine the use of stories as a tool for teaching about natural selection in the context of school science. The study utilizes a mixed method, case study approach which focuses on the design, implementation, and…

The aim of this explorative study was to develop and test a pedagogy aimed at promoting students' ability to perform historical contextualization. Teaching historical contextualization was conceptualized in terms of four pedagogical design principles: (1) making students aware of the consequences of a present-oriented perspective when examining…