This paper explores the long-term impact of study visits to south India undertaken by UK teacher education students from 1999-2002. The research involved students who had been on the study visits ten to fifteen years earlier. All the participants completed an extensive open-ended survey and the themes which then emerged were investigated through…

In this article, I discuss how the context of children's classroom activities and the quality of their participation and agency are key to learning around values. These pedagogical approaches lie in a socio-cultural theoretical framework which I use to show how "empowered" participation in classrooms and in enquiry activities in…

This article investigates the extent to which Year One B.Ed student teachers arrived at university already possessing self-confidence as writers. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection were used to identify students' self perceptions and confidence as writers and their understanding of processes of written composition. The…

The research reported in this article explored in 2013 the classroom fear of two samples of UK primary school pupils (aged 7-8 and also 10-11 years old). The investigation was approached within a framework of critical theory, in which emancipatory aims were embraced. The authoritarian nature of most classrooms necessitates that teachers control…

This paper reports on the use of lesson study as a professional development tool. In particular the paper focuses on the way in which the teachers increased their understanding of how tasks, classroom activity and teacher actions scaffolded student learning of early algebraic reasoning of equivalence and the commutative principle. Teacher voice is…

Transforming Writing was a two-year action research project, sponsored by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, which developed a model for the teaching and learning of writing that embedded formative assessment. This report evaluates to what extent the model of writing developed by the teachers during the research period impacted on children's writing…