schools – Halfbaked.Education

Teachers have more power than they think

PeterTJuly 3, 2026Leave a comment

Originally posted 18th April 2019

Schools and teachers are constrained by accountability and assessment regimes. However, in my experience schools and teachers have a great deal of agency - they can and do respond very differently to similar external pressures. For example, in one school I visited the children were doing addition problems on a drill and skill maths app. Once they completed the set of questions the app indicated which were correct/incorrect. The children then proceeded to copy the sums into their exercise books for the teacher to mark. When I asked the teacher why they did this she explained that they needed a paper trail for Ofsted.

In contrast, in another school that I visited the head teacher strongly resisted changing practice for the benefit of the inspectors:the head teacher strongly resisted changing practice for the benefit of the inspectors:

What NP3 Taught Us About Children, Digital Technology, and Schools 1

PeterTJune 15, 2026June 15, 20261 Comment

Between 2014 and 2017, a team of researchers from the Open University, Lancaster, and Manchester Metropolitan universities set out to explore the ways children use digital technology outside school and the extent to which that connects with what happens inside school.

The project was called NP3 — New Purposes, New Practices, New Pedagogy. It was funded by the Society for Educational Studies and ran over two years across 13 primary schools in England and Scotland. More than 100 children and 60 teachers took part. Forty-three 'log children' used digital cameras to capture their home digital technology use and were interviewed individually. More than 20 of their carers were also interviewed. Thirty-one teachers were each observed teaching at least one lesson and interviewed at least twice. It was a substantial piece of work.

What it found was, in retrospect, predictable, but the evidence matters. Schools and children were, in effect, living in parallel digital worlds.

Sociocultural theory – the best explanation of how we learn

PeterTApril 16, 2026June 7, 2026Leave a comment

In Comparing Pedagogical Stances I set out the defining elements of four 'learning theories':

Traditional (A mix of Behaviourism and Information Processing)
Individual Constructivist
Social Constroctivist
Sociocultural

In another post (Analysing 'learning theories') I identified strengths and weaknesses of each of these four pedagogical stances.

PedTech Misconceptions

PeterTMarch 11, 2026June 7, 2026Leave a comment

_{Originally posted 26 Sept 2023}

A growing number of people are starting to talk and write about PedTech – a new approach to thinking about digital technology in education that Fiona Aubrey-Smith and I introduce and explain in our recent book - From EdTech to PedTech: Changing the way we think about digital technologyOpens in a new window. However, it is becoming clear that some of them have misconceptions about the PedTech approach. This post aims to realign some of these mis-understandings.

Alignment matters

PeterTJuly 26, 2025June 7, 2026Leave a comment

This is the first of three brief videos about the importance of alignment in schools. It addresses the questions 'Why does alignment matter?' and 'What needs to be aligned?' as well as defining some key terms.