Innovative learning environments (ILE) with open flexible classroom spaces are designed to support collaboration and emphasise responsibility for self-regulated student learning as a partnership between students and teachers. Recent studies of ILE focus more on teachers than students' experiences, and there is a gap in the theorising of student…

As it grew safer for schools to reopen fully in spring 2021, "FORUM" convened a roundtable discussion to hear more about the experience of teaching and learning through the pandemic, and how that experience might help us rethink the education system. Melissa Benn chaired this wide-ranging and insightful conversation between Eliane…

Parental involvement in learning, entertainment, emotion, and daily care is crucial to the growth and development of children. Due to the increasing significance of educational attainment in China, parental involvement in child learning is receiving ever-increasing weight and is now the most prevalent of the four aspects. In the wake of the…

"Whole-child development" can mean different things to educators, researchers, other child- and youth-serving professionals, and policymakers. Multiple bodies of research and methods of analysis affirm that child development (and human development in general) is dynamic, bi-directional (i.e., the child and context influence each other),…

In this paper, I use an autoethnographical approach, coupled with existing research literature on Chinese learners and learning, to reflect upon my own experiences as a junior high school student in order to explore how Chinese students perceive their learning, and how they establish and justify their own sense of self-regulation in learning. It…

This "From the Archives" article was originally published in Japanese in v6 n3 Mar 1936 of the Japanese-language journal "Shinkyo" (New Teachings), a periodical publication of the Soka Kyoiku Gakkai, the Society for Value-Creating Education, established by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi in 1930. This installment of "On Attitudes…

Life-long learning is a process. Learning skill ability is common to all as well as individually unique. A learner's beliefs are constantly susceptible to conditioning from external expectations. A discussion reflects on techniques for strengthening distance-learning skills in this technological age.

This column features essays written by current middle school and high school teachers, media specialists, librarians, literacy coaches, curriculum specialists, administrators, preservice teachers, teacher educators, and adolescent and adult learners. They highlight diverse perspectives on teaching and/or learning with literacies to inspire reader…

Since cheating is obviously wrong, arguments against it (it provides an unfair advantage, it hinders learning) need only be mentioned in passing. But the argument of unfair advantage absurdly takes education to be essentially a race of all against all; moreover, it ignores that many cases of unfair (dis)advantages are widely accepted. On the other…

Many teacher-development models posit teacher learning as a linear process in which teachers build skills and knowledge while progressing through different stages of expertise. Although this model is attractive for many reasons and often does seem to shed light on some of the aspects of teacher development, this author's own experience largely…

There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist. In this article, the authors begin by defining "learning styles"; then they address the claims made by those who believe that they exist, in the process acknowledging what the authors consider the valid claims of learning-styles theorists. But in separating the wheat from the…

Learners who have struggled along the way can provide many lessons for everyone and for schools that are supposed to help all students learn. Based on interviews with hundreds of "great learners," the author identifies seven characteristics that describe what sets great learners apart from other learners. These are: (1) Great learners see learning…

The Illinois Initiative on Transparency in Learning and Teaching is a grassroots assessment project designed to promote students' conscious understanding of how they learn and to enable faculty to gather, share, and promptly benefit from data about students' learning by coordinating their efforts across disciplines, institutions, and countries.…

The role of the emotions in learning has long been acknowledged but is often overlooked. This article considers the impact one particular emotion, happiness, has on learning and the school curriculum. Recent reports have drawn attention to the importance of happiness (or the lack of it) by highlighting concerns about childhood well-being. At the…

Lifelong learning is something which one does for oneself that no one else can do for one: it is a public and personal human activity, rather than private or individualistic. One of the features of the education system is the paucity of a language for learning as process and participative experience. Personalised learning requires a sense of the…