Is the world better off because your school is in it? Do you believe schooling has a higher purpose? In Inspiring Purpose in High-Performance Schooling, Mary Anne Heng questions modern-day schooling with its dominant focus on what is efficient and effective in good education and how this is measured. This book critically analyses what really matters in high-performance schooling contexts using Singapore as an example and makes a case for putting purpose at the heart of teaching. Going beyond good education built on evidence-based and reflective practice and the instrumental questions of the “What” and “How” of education, she argues for a view of education as transformation with a deeper purpose that probes the “Why”. Using Singapore as a case example and Israel as a counterpoint, she moves past the rhetoric of developing passion, curiosity, creativity and other 21st-century competencies in high-performance schooling to uncover children’s real experiences of school. Based on research using multiple sources, she analyses surveys with Singapore and Israeli adolescents and in-depth individual student interviews, as well as provides insights from rich discussions and extended field-testing with practicing teachers and educational leaders to inform an urgent call for a new vision in education for the future of education and society—one that celebrates achievement with larger purpose for the wider world. A valuable academic and resource text for teachers, school leaders, policymakers and graduate students in education programmes, as well as education researchers in the fields of educational leadership and change, curriculum, teaching and learning, and youth purpose.

This volume presents a novel, theoretical, micro-analytical model – the 3A Methodology – for assessing the quality of school education. Drawing on philosophers as well as theoretical and pedagogical traditions from European and American contexts, the authors construct a model that is relevant to teachers, researchers, and teacher educators regardless of cultural setting. The chapters explain the 3A Methodology as a specific research tool developed to study classroom situations in the form of case studies, revealing findings that demonstrate prototypical failures (didactic formalism) that threaten to compromise the quality of learning as well as prototypical didactic virtues that verifiably support students’ learning. Ultimately building on the distinction of three modes of existence of educational content (the intersubjective, the subjective, and the objective modes), the book helps rediscover didactics as a transdisciplinary theory of content transformation and contributes to the improvement of teaching and learning in the classroom long term. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students working in school education, educational psychology, and didactics more broadly. Teacher educators and school administrators may also find the book of interest. Chapters 1, 3, and 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Centred around a contemporary conception of Bildung, this book effectively demonstrates how the aims of cross- and transcurricular teaching can be reconciled, resulting in a didactic framework for teaching and learning in secondary schools that can be applied internationally. Chapters present a nuanced and unified approach to fusing theory and practice by offering accounts of some of the most promising teaching methods from leading scholars in the field of curriculum research. These methods include dialogic teaching or movement integration, transversal competences like digital or entrepreneurial thinking, and topics that call for crosscurricular approaches, like sustainability or citizenship. Addressing diverse worries and criticisms of crosscurricular teaching, the book includes international viewpoints and trends such sustainability, citizenship, and student motivation to present a comprehensive and systematic scholarly treatment of crosscurricular didactics within the classroom. It further addresses important challenges that have been widely ignored, like how to evaluate crosscurricular work. Ultimately, this volume makes a highly novel contribution to the field of crosscurricular didactics, and will be of interest to researchers, scholars, academics in the fields of secondary education teaching and learning, educational science, and curriculum design. Those interested more broadly in the theory of education will also find the volume of use.

This book examines how the shift to remote teaching in March 2020 due to the global pandemic created new opportunities for innovation and creativity and shaped how social work classes were taught, with many temporary changes now part of permanent, standard practice. Drawing on narratives from 20 social work leaders across 17 different countries, the chapters explore particular themes and viewpoints on lessons learned during the pandemic, including case studies to examine copying mechanisms, insights into the transition to remote teaching, and the creative lessons that were learned. By taking an international perspective, it represents a key contribution to the scholarship of social work leaders from around the world concerning how institutions transitioned to remote learning and teaching and how these lived experiences and new discoveries are contributing to and influencing current practice. As such, it will appeal to social work educators, researchers, and field educators around the world with interests in experimental curriculum and field practice.

This book challenges common understandings of boredom and disengagement in classrooms, taking a relational approach to boredom which looks beyond the usual distinctions between in-school and out-of-school practices. The book explores how a sociomaterial perspective can provide an alternative analysis of boredom as performative, and as a phenomenon assembled in space and time rather than as a psychological attribute of the individual student. This perspective explores the affective experience of learning and how it is created in the classroom through assemblages of people, technology, objects and environment and the differing relations within them. Drawing on empirical data from a case study which compares formal learning and digital gaming practices in a group of secondary schools in England, the book suggests that by altering the affordances and constraints available in learning situations we can prevent boredom and disengagement emerging in the classroom. This innovative book proposes that the mobility and dynamism of game spaces offer us new ways to re-imagine engagement in learning and will be of relevance to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of teaching and learning, digital gaming, educational philosophy and educational technology.

Comparing High-Performing Education Systems provides original insights into the educational structures, ideologies, policies, and practices in Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Taking as its basis their global reputation and consistently strong performance in formal assessments, the author provides an in-depth analysis and comparison of these three education systems that draws on cutting-edge research. Chapters explore the dominant cultural and educational norms in Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong to give a wider picture of these high-performing education systems. The performance of students in international large-scale assessments such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is considered, alongside an exploration of attitudes to schooling, tutoring, and assessment. The book shows how Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong exemplify an East Asian Educational Model (EAEM). Such a model – is rooted in and shaped by Confucian habitus: unconscious and ingrained worldviews, dispositions, and habits that reflect the standards of appropriateness in a Confucian Heritage Culture; aspires high performance: a balance between academic excellence and holistic development; and utilises educational harmonisation: the art of bringing together different and contradictory means and ends to achieve desired educational outcomes. Informative and thought-provoking, this book is a useful reference for policymakers, researchers, educators, and general readers on high-performing education systems, school reforms in East Asia, Confucian influences on education, and cross-cultural policy learning and transfer.

Interest in complexity theory, a relation of chaos theory, has become well established in the business community in recent years. Complexity theory argues that systems are complex interactions of many parts which cannot be predicted by accepted linear equations. In this book, Keith Morrison introduces complexity theory to the world of education, drawing out its implications for school leadership. He suggests that schools are complex, nonlinear and unpredictable systems, and that this impacts significantly within them. As schools race to keep up with change and innovation, he suggests that it is possible to find order without control and to lead without coercion. Key areas: * schools and self-organisation * leadership for self-organisation * supporting emergence through the learning organisation * schools and their environments * communication * fitness landscapes This book will be of interest to headteachers and middle managers, and those on higher level courses in educational leadership and management.