Search

Previous research has identified individual and contextual level factors that may promote resilience in teachers; however, little is known about their relative importance in predicting measures of positive adaptation. Questionnaire data were collected from 226 UK teachers. Relative importance analyses identified a number of significant predictors of job satisfaction, burnout, and wellbeing. The results suggest that contextual influences on teachers' ability to thrive within the profession are just as important as individual factors. Any intervention designed to develop teacher resilience should therefore focus on improving the professional environment as well as looking at ways to enhance teachers’ personal resources.

There is long-standing debate about the extent to which children cognitively represent words in terms of global properties or phonological segments, yet few studies have investigated how children's sensitivity to phonemic versus global similarity changes over time. The current study uses a mispronunciation-reconstruction task to measure both types of sensitivity within a cross-sectional (N = 90, aged 3;2 to 5;7) and longitudinal sample (N = 23, aged 3;2 to 5;1). The results show that children's sensitivity to phonemes increases over the first two years of school but does not reach adult levels. The findings indicate that global similarity relations remain important throughout development and support the idea of multi-level representation.

To afford school middle leaders meaningful opportunities to initiate change, we must provide them with the space and flexibility to engage with agentic and creative responses to policy and practice. Whilst we argue that the tensions identified in Bennett’s seminal reviews persist, there may, nonetheless, be opportunities for school middle leaders to creatively influence educational agendas. Through engaging in a critical interpretative synthesis of school middle leadership literature, we consider how the subjectivities of such leaders are discursively constructed. We argue that a culture of performativity has diminished opportunities for middle leaders in English schools to develop a strong sense of agency, educational ideology and authentic professional responsibility. However, a current governmental focus on subject knowledge may have opened spaces for a collegial agency, despite the prevailing neo-conservative policy discourse. We thus identify, the potential for movement beyond a discursive position to one where school middle leaders take greater responsibility for developing practice to align more closely with their educational values. Utilising a dialogic theoretical perspective we examine how middle leadership in English schools is currently practiced and mediated in relation to the changing political landscape, and suggest that seemingly contradictory positions provide a fruitful site for new research.

In this chapter we provide a critical and conceptual analysis of the challenges of teaching and learning first language grammatical knowledge in initial teacher education in England, based on an exploratory project aimed at helping trainee teachers with little formal linguistic education gain adequate knowledge of grammatical terminology. Beyond the Anglophone world, this may not seem problematic: ‘most countries in Europe … see grammar instruction as an important part of their school curriculum; and the same is true of previous European colonies such as Brazil’ (Hudson 2016: 289). However, between around 1960 and 2000 learning about formal grammar was largely absent from schools in England and in much of the English-speaking world (Hudson & Walmsley 2005), so many British teachers lack knowledge about grammar (KAG). Recent changes to the English primary curriculum mean teachers do now need some declarative knowledge of grammar terminology. In this chapter we describe our attempts to help our student teachers learn grammatical terminology, using an innovative pedagogy based on investigative learning, conceptual understanding and dialogic investigation, focused around carefully designed exemplars. Subsequent sections contribute to wider debates about the inadequacies of current accounts of what grammatical knowledge is and how it may be assessed in educational contexts, the limitations of terminology-driven teaching methods, and the potential for applied linguistics to further inform the development of knowledge about grammar in schools.