teaching – 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.

The Innovative Pedagogy Framework

PeterTJune 15, 2026June 15, 2026Leave a comment

Originally posted 5th December 2018

One of the challenges facing the NP3 team was how to describe and differentiate between the pedagogical practices in the classrooms that we were researching. In essence, what were the key features of practice that needed to be considered in order to differentiate between the teaching in each setting? The obvious answer seemed to be to use core theories of learning and development as the basis for a framework to help us compare pedagogy across contexts. Patricia Murphy therefore devised the Innovative Pedagogy Framework, starting with the following theoretical positions:

Traditional (Behaviourist/Information Processing)
Constructivist
- Cognitive/Piagetian
- Radical
- Social
Innovative (Sociocultural)

Is teaching a profession?

PeterTJune 7, 2026June 7, 2026Leave a comment

[This post was originally published in 2014]

We assume that digital technology can improve education and that ‘the challenge’ is how to bring innovative technology and educational professionals together. However, the research evidence shows that despite massive investment digital technology has not resulted in significant improvements in learning experiences or attainment in education (e.g. Luckin et al., 2012) [http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/decoding-learning].

Is teaching atheoretical?

PeterTApril 18, 2026June 7, 2026Leave a comment

A common claim, often heard from teachers themselves, is that teaching is atheoretical. The argument runs that what teachers do in classrooms is craft, judgement, and experience, not theory. Theory is for academics. Practice is what counts.

There may be an element of truth in this, however the claim, taken at face value, is wrong, and the way it is wrong matters.