With the advent of appraisal, performance related pay, induction for NQTs (Newly Qualified Teachers) and the stresses of league tables and Ofsted inspections, middle managers in secondary schools are being asked to develop and display first class management skills. This book meets the needs of those who need to develop and update skills for their present job, or who are preparing for the next step into more senior management, including the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH). Those aspiring to middle management will also find the essential skills and practical guidance in this book inspiring and supportive.
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Criticizes the pedagogical issues of common methods of teaching young people about visual media via textual analysis. Excerpt from a class discussion of the horror film 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' in a media studies course in Britain; Possible rhetorical moves to claim status and material resources for cultural studies pedagogy; Criticism on critical pedagogy.
This article addresses employability as a performance indicator in higher education. Questions are raised about the values behind seemingly neutral indicators of value, and whether the same employability attributes have similar economic and professional values for different social groups. A central argument is that employability is a socially de-contextualised signifier in so far as it overlooks how social structures such as gender, race, social class and disability interact with labour market opportunities. The article also interrogates hegemonic assumptions behind the concept of key or core skills in higher education.
Michael Fielding looks at what the Labour Government has achieved in the last four years with its policy of 'education, education, education'.
There has been widespread disappointment in New Labour's education policies, which on the whole have not steered too far wide of those put in place by Margaret Thatcher, including issues of marketisation, testing and performativity. Michael Fielding has called on the key policy thinkers in education to offer their opinions on what has happened in education over the first three to four years of the New Labour Government.
Education policy is a controversial subject and with a General Election expected within the next few months, this book will be read widely by people within education, politicians and journalists and by others anxious to get to facts and avoid the spin. The subject matter and the presence of so many high profile educationalists make this an essential read.
Drawing briefly on the quite different discourses of schooling-as-performance and education-as-exploration, the paper opens by exploring some of the consequences of the distinction between schooling and education for any system of school inspection. The second section of the paper examines the conceptual and practical inadequacy of ‘accountability’ as an agent of reciprocal public engagement in a participatory democracy. In its stead a more robust, more open notion of ‘reciprocal responsibility’ is offered as a more fitting means of professional and communal renewal. Section III focuses on the relationship between means and ends that is at once central to democracy and so conspicuously absent from current inspection arrangements. The short conclusion suggests we need a radical break from OFSTED if we wish to approximate more closely to our democratic aspirations.
Michael Fielding looks at what the Labour Government has achieved in the last four years with its policy of 'education, education, education'. There has been widespread disappointment in New Labour's education policies, which on the whole have not steered too far wide of those put in place by Margaret Thatcher, including issues of marketisation, testing and performativity. Michael Fielding has called on the key policy thinkers in education to offer their opinions on what has happened in education over the first three to four years of the New Labour Government. Education policy is a controversial subject and with a General Election expected within the next few months, this book will be read widely by people within education, politicians and journalists and by others anxious to get to facts and avoid the spin. The subject matter and the presence of so many high profile educationalists make this an essential read.
This article offers a poststructuralist analysis of the academic division of labour in the UK higher education sector. It takes the standpoint of a contract researcher and explores some new contradictions of an intensified academic division of labour. It raises some political, social and methodological questions of these divisions through exploring their class and gender dimension. As Paul Rabinow (1986) has argued despite talk of reflexivity, most academics remain deathly silent about the conditions of their own production. He argues that reflection upon our own social, political, economic and cultural location within the academy is one of the greatest taboos ? far greater strictures operate against addressing the significance of 'corridor talk' than operate against the denunciation of objectivism. Until we can bring to the surface and publicly discuss the conditions under which people are hired, given tenure, published, awarded grants and feted, 'real' reflexivity will remain a dream' (Gill 1998: 38)
The paper opens by asking sharp questions about the current vogue for
consulting students about various aspects of their experience of schooling. The unwitting manipulation often embedded in much of this activity is contrasted with a radical
approach known as ‘Students as Researchers.’ Having described the still current joint work
in a UK high school that has developed since 1996 the paper moves on to consider the
transformational nature of the project and ends by offering two frameworks: one suggests
a number of key questions pertinent to any evaluation of the institutional conditions for
student voice; the other provides an overarching conceptual re-appraisal of the domain.
Practical examples are given and the compelling nature of the “Students as Researchers”
approach reaffirmed.
Most vocational qualifications have been gazumped by general educational qualifications that have higher selection value,
and their relative esteem is self-perpetuating. The use value of vocational qualifications depends on (1) the appropriateness of, and interconnection between, their work-related and work-based components, and (2) further work-based learning after qualification to ensure that the acquired knowledge and skills can be used in the particular circumstances and conditions of the current workplace. The NVQ experience has confirmed that detailed national specifications cannot match the diversity of workplace learning needs, so a more flexible approach is needed. Qualification policy should be based on evidence of fitness for purpose, rather than political troubleshooting or wishful thinking; and backed by a programme of incisive research.
Much currently is made of mathematics being a generic skill in Higher Education. What has not been established systematically is what this means in terms of who teaches it. This opinion article draws on an attempt to find out who is teaching mathematics in one university. As suspected, individuals who would not describe themselves as mathematics specialists undertake much of the mathematics teaching. Indeed, many teachers learned their mathematics independently in order to address specific problems, e.g. related to research, and others learned and continue to learn from their teaching. For most people mathematics learning is situated in the contexts in which it is applied, and teaching is one such context. Exploring the experience of learning mathematics in order to teach can provide specific insight into the successful learning of mathematics per se
Both feminism and quality assurance movements have attempted to deconstruct and reconstruct the academy. Both have called for more transparency in procedures, accountability from elite professional groups and the privileging of the student experience. Both are globalized systems calling for transformation. However, it is questionable as to whether these two forces for change can form strategic alliances, or whether indeed they are in oppositional relationship. As a dominant regime of power in the UK academy today, quality assurance both exposes the micropolitics of gendered power in organizations and creates its own structures and systems of power. Quality assurance is part of the modernization process of the public services. However, gender equity is not a performance indicator in UK quality audits. In this paper, I interrogate the gendered implications of quality assurance, with particular reference to the assessment of teaching and learning in the UK (the Quality Assurance Agency's Subject Review). Drawing on empirical data and conceptual critiques, I will argue that quality assurance, as a regime of power, is gendered in its conception and practice.
This article reports the outcomes of a research project designed to investigate and develop formative classroom assessment in primary schools. The project was a collaborative one, involving two university-based researchers and a team of teacher-researchers. The aims were to build on basic research already carried out by the university researchers by investigating the issues from a more practical and applied perspective; consider how a collaborative action research approach to the professional development of teachers might be used to bring about changes in classroom assessment practices; and provide a basis for the further development and refinement of theory on formative assessment. The article reports on changes in classroom practice, particularly involving the clarification and communication of assessment criteria to pupils, and on the processes by which this came about.