Category: Professional learning
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Learning from the other side of the world
In October, alongside a trip to see my daughters in Australia, I arranged to visit in person several people from the education world in both Australia and New Zealand who I had met previously, mostly online. They in turn arranged various visits and meetings where I was able to meet…
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Research-informed improvement in Scottish education?
Anyone reading this and already familiar with my previous series of four blogs from last August https://stuartphysics.co.uk/2024/08/01/improving-education-curriculum-explanations-professionalism-and-more-part-1/ or from the recommendations I made in my PhD thesis https://stax.strath.ac.uk/concern/theses/w66344189 (Farmer, 2024a) will know I would like to see teachers using research and evidence-informed approaches with enquiry-as-stance-based professional learning embedded in their…
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Improving education – curriculum, explanations, professionalism and more – Part 4
In the previous three blogs in this series, I have considered several factors important to curriculum reform, both at a national institutional curriculum level and at the classroom curriculum level of individual teachers. But how might we go about more effective curriculum reform in the future? Complexity and expertise I…
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Improving education – curriculum, explanations, professionalism and more – Part 3
In the previous parts of this series of blogs, I explored the importance of good explanations in teaching and the potential benefits of good-quality textbooks and how good quality curriculum and teaching resources, including textbooks, might be developed. In this blog I will explore aspects of teacher professionalism and how…
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Improving education – curriculum, explanations, professionalism and more – Part 2
In the first of this series of blogs I discussed the importance of good explanations in teaching and the potential benefits of good-quality textbooks. Here I explore how good quality curriculum and teaching resources, including textbooks, might be developed. Curriculum development Curriculum and curriculum-making exist at different levels. Deng (2020)…
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Improving education – curriculum, explanations, professionalism and more – Part 1
For some time now I have been pondering over several related issues, and coming to some conclusions about the directions in which I think there ought to be travel. Part of this is related to the reading I did around professionalism for my PhD as well as related topics of…
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What I would do to improve Scottish education
On Twitter on 20 July 2024, Barry Black asked what could be done to improve Scottish education, see his tweet below. As I write this, he has received 78 replies from a wide range of individuals. Initially, I was hesitant to write a reply as the brevity of tweets are…
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Use it, or lose it?
Many who know me will be aware of the value I give to good quality subject-specific professional learning. My research with physics teachers in recent years (Farmer, 2024; Farmer & Childs, 2022) has shown that alongside being able to spend good collaborative time with their subject colleagues they most value…
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Improving the quality of teaching (and the education system)
The recent death of Tim Brighouse and the many tributes to him on Twitter have helped me crystalise some of my thoughts on improving the quality of teaching and with it the performance of the education system as a whole. This is essentially at the core of my PhD research…
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Teacher professionalism in Scotland
During my reading for my PhD exploring the professional learning of teachers in Scotland it became clear that it was necessary to explore what is understood about the words ‘professional’ and ‘learning’. This helped me identify some of the main issues I required to focus on during my research. Here…
Stuart Physics 