The lack of pupil voice activities within my work context influenced the introduction of a variety of opportunities for pupils to contribute to the leadership of their year group. In order for pupils to effectively lead, it was necessary to develop within them leadership skills. With the intention of promoting pupil voice, more specifically consultation and engagement (the lack identified by pupils), were used as the main tool to develop the content and delivery of the leadership development programme. This study assesses the extent to which consultation and engagement could be used to aid student leadership development in an inner city secondary school. During the research, pupils contributed the content for the leadership development programme and dictated how and when the content should be delivered. Pupils were given opportunities to exhibit the skills they developed when they acted as Head of Year and led their own research. Assessment of student leaders’ leadership skills along with their personal testimonies suggests that they developed leadership skills. The research shows that the experience, in which pupils were also given a plethora of engagement and consultation opportunities, helped pupils to overcome individual and collective concerns. The research proposes that consultation and engagement can be used to develop leadership within pupils. This can be done through pupil-influenced content, pupil-influenced tools and pupil-influenced-research. This research has proposed a model to develop leadership within pupils and in so doing makes an original contribution to existing pedagogy and knowledge.

Throughout my professional journey, I have encountered many thought provoking experiences which have, not only helped to shape my practice, but have also encouraged me to deeply question my purpose as a leader within education. Children growing up in the 21st century will encounter rapid change within their lives. The question that resonates deeply within me is what and how do we teach them today so that they are better prepared for tomorrow’s world? It is this concern that provides the impetus for this research. The idea of learning being placed at the heart of the core business of leadership is embodied in what is understood as Instructional Leadership. Through practitioner action research, this study investigates the leadership of curriculum change that takes full account of the views of children. It explores the kind of actions that need to be undertaken as a leader to effect curriculum change; actions that serve to locate the child as the lead learner. In developing an inquiry based approach to teaching and learning, this study investigates how resources and the tool and artefacts of teaching are deployed, pedagogical strategies implemented and considers the development of a cultural, emotional and cognitive climate conducive to inquiry learning.

This thesis explores the use of situated, location-based mobile games for supporting learning in the field, to determine how these types of activity can support learners with reference to specific curricular aims, beyond just providing highly engaging and motivating activities. A software toolkit was developed to support the design and deployment of situated mobile learning activities. This was used to design and deploy mobile learning activities for two field studies. The first study used the critical incident technique to identify specific benefits and problems arising from outdoor mobile learning. We found that whilst learners were highly engaged by an outdoor learning activity facilitated by mobile devices, they were engaged only in the surface level of the activity and did not reflect on what they were doing. The second study comprised a grounded theory analysis of learner behaviour in the context of a location-based, enquiry-led learning game designed to overcome the problems found in Study 1 and in other projects. We present an analysis of learner interactions with the environment during an enquiry-led learning activity. Compared to an equivalent paper-based activity, the game helped to coordinate the learners’ activities and unexpected results from game actions prompted learners to reflect on their actions and what they observed. The physical environment also prompted discussion and reflection, but we saw specific problems arising from learners becoming distracted by their previous experience of the environment and by the proximity of environmental features. We discuss these findings and present implications for the design of future mobile learning games.

This study investigated how academic mentoring in two secondary schools in England could support personalised learning. The focus was limited to academic mentoring of year 11 students by members of staff, which aimed to improve academic performance. Academic mentoring was one of the strategies used after the introduction of school accountability measures such as league tables and school targets. School accountability is based upon the policies that are believed to have consequences for educational attainment. The overall picture from literature was that mentoring is difficult to define for specific contexts and is linked to many positive outcomes for mentors and mentees. However the link between achievement and mentoring is problematic due to the limited evidence and the complex interplay between different factors. With the introduction of personalised learning in schools, a new and additional dimension to mentoring was provided besides the enhancement of exam performance. The definition of personalised learning was imprecise and this provided schools with the flexibility to develop initiatives to meet their own needs and context. Despite the research on school based mentoring and its potential outcomes, little was known about how mentoring could support personalised learning beyond the advice and guidance suggested by different models of personalised learning by Hargreaves (2004a) and the DCSF (2008b). This was partly due to the lack of shared understanding of ‘personalised learning’ and which activities could be classified under this term. The aim of the study is to explore how academic mentoring can support personalised learning. The sub-aims are: 1. How do students and staff understand the purpose of mentoring? 2. How does academic mentoring help students achieve their targets? 3. How does mentoring work effectively for different types of students? 4. How do staff understand personalised learning? 5. What might a mode of mentoring look like to support personalised learning? This study adopted a qualitative approach in two case study schools. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with students, of differing abilities and gender, and in groups and individually, at the beginning of the mentoring programme and near the end to identify any changes or similarities in their responses regarding mentoring. Staff completed a questionnaire initially to inform the sample choice then semi-structured interviews were conducted regarding their understanding of the mentoring programme and personalised learning. Interviews and documentation were analysed using NVivo 8 software to identify themes in participants’ responses. An analysis of student and staff interviews, relevant documentation and a staff questionnaire yielded insight into the participants’ definition of mentoring, activities and perceived outcomes of mentoring, the logistics of the mentoring programme, and staff perceptions of personalised learning. The findings of this study suggest that personalised learning and mentoring are poorly understood concepts, but any suggested definitions tended to be context specific. The personalised learning agenda tends to be better understood at the senior leadership level as they are responsible for the integration of the policy into their school. The role of mentor is not viewed in isolation from the other roles a teacher inhabits. However a pre-existing relationship between the mentor and mentee was viewed as the foundation on which to build a successful mentoring relationship. The mentoring outcomes suggested by participants goes part way to preparing students for personalised learning, however there needs to be a consistent approach to ensure that students develop the necessary characteristics to enable them to take responsibility for their learning and progress.

This study carried out as practitioner-research explores the new online collaborative learning experiences of a class of thirty-seven college students studying A-level chemistry in a blended learning context. It is a case-study with a multi-method interpretivist approach using observations, unsolicited meetings, VLE tracking system, students’ reflective journal, online informal discussions, questionnaires, focus groups and individual interviews. The students, used to traditional non-collaborative learning methods in the face-to-face class, demonstrated complex online behaviour patterns. Findings showed that the factors affecting these behaviours were of a situational, infrastructural and persona-related nature. Four key learning dispositions – resourcefulness, resilience, reciprocity and responsibility were identified as persona-related enablers. These dispositions were instrumental for changes in the students as learners. These included changes in epistemological beliefs, study patterns, study habits and above all, in learner roles and learning identities. Notable changes occurred in a group of learners who were initially reluctant to learn from the online environment. This study suggests that online learning can not only support a socio-constructive approach to learning to students in the online setting, but also induces similar student learning behaviours in the face-to-face class. The study also gives evidence of transformation in the academic and the positional student learning identities. The new interacting student learning identities projected a sense of belonging, of being valued and of connectedness in both the online and the face-to-face class community. This research is significant as a study of the impact of online experiences on college students in a blended learning context. Similar research contexts were scarce in the literature. It is valuable to the current teaching community in Malta, where the recent National Curriculum Framework (2012) has emphasised a socio-constructive approach to learning and where several educational institutions have started using VLEs to provide blended learning experiences.

The phenomenon of prior knowledge is deep rooted in the rhetoric of education. There is much discourse within pedagogy about its value and pivotal role in the formulation of new learning. However teachers are not able to use prior knowledge effectively as they do not have a working sense of it, but are using it intuitively and colloquially. While researchers provide a multitude of definitions of prior knowledge, no one has examined its elemental structure in a way that provides a model for teachers to use and support learning. This deficit is surprising as prior knowledge is a universally accepted pedagogical notion. The aim of this thesis is to fill the deficit and establish a structure of prior knowledge. The research was situated within Year 1 primary mathematics classrooms following eight teachers across five schools over one academic year. Using naturalistic research methodology, the data were gathered through audio recordings of the interactions between teachers and children during mathematics lessons. These recordings were analysed using grounded theory and content analysis. The research explored and produced a partial model of prior knowledge emerging from the data which includes at least eight interconnected elements – abstraction, acculturation, cognition, context, individual motivation, metacognition, perception and social group. These can be seen as elements which can shape children’s memory – the central feature of the prior knowledge that they bring to each mathematical task. Children may manifest different degrees of these elements, and possibly of others which did not appear in these data, in different proportions and balances. Such a prior knowledge model, even though it remains partial, gives a deeper understanding to a common but widely misunderstood term. The implications of knowing and understanding more and in more depth about the structure of prior knowledge are potentially far-reaching for children, schools, teachers and curriculum development.

The present study examines „relating‟ between Vietnamese teachers of English (VETs) and native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) when teaching EFL students at tertiary level in Vietnam. The aim is to understand the interpersonal dynamics between them and the factors influencing their relationships. A qualitative research study was carried out employing multiple data collection methods including semi-structured interviews, class observation, note-taking, audio/video recording of classes and interactions, and gathering of documents. Data were collected in two phases. In Phase 1 nine teachers were interviewed about their experiences of team-teaching, including the collection of data on 'rapport sensitive' incidents that they experienced when team-teaching. In Phase 2, two teaching pairs were studied through a longitudinal case study, gathering unfolding, narrative accounts of their experiences of team-teaching during one term. The data were analyzed from power relations and rapport perspectives in order to find out how the pairs related and what key factors influenced their relationships. A wide range of factors were found to impact on the smoothness of the teaching pair relationships, including role-related issues, time constraints and unequal workload share in team-teaching, pedagogic beliefs and teaching methods/styles, and communication issues. However, the teachers often formed good relationships outside class, and this ameliorated the relational challenges they experienced professionally. It is argued that since there has been little detail in the education field on theoretical concepts for analyzing team teachers' relationships and few empirical findings, this study contributes to research on 'relating' in team-teaching and suggests that future research into team-teaching would benefit from drawing on conceptual frameworks from within pragmatics.

In this introduction to the publications selected for examination for the degree of PhD in Education, at the University of Warwick, I will begin by outlining some the contextual influences on my published work. During my career, spanning over 30 years, I have had the privilege to be a head-teacher, local authority adviser, government policy adviser and a researcher. The publications that follow therefore focus on professional collaborative learning from these different vantage points, as these have inevitably influenced my writing.

As of 2015, forty golden years have passed since the language learning strategy (LLS) concept was first brought to wide attention by Joan Rubin (1975). Most previous LLS research, however, has been based on the cognitivist theoretical framework and conducted quantitatively, using survey tools. Surveys have essentially failed to capture the ‘situated experiences’ of language learners and their actual and dynamic use of LLSs across time and space. With the above in mind and being motivated by my personal experiences as one of thousands of Arab students moving abroad to pursue education through the medium of English, this thesis reports on a longitudinal phenomenographic inquiry into Arab university students’ creative efforts and engagement in learning English prior to and after their coming to the UK to attend both short and long academic programmes (i.e. the pre-sessional language course and a postgraduate programme). Underpinned by a sociocultural viewpoint, the inquiry consisted of four research stages, and espoused qualitative research methods for data collection, which lasted for 17 months. A series of individual semi-structured interviews provided the main data, with other qualitative methods such as learner diaries and written narrative supplementing the validity and reliability of the study. For data analysis, Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2013) systematic guidelines for conducting thematic analysis (TA) were adopted to identify and interpret patterns of meaning (themes) across the qualitative data in rich detail. The data revealed that participants’ strategy use was non-static and always directed towards the achievement of a specific learning goal. As LLSs did not operate alone, a conceptual framework was proposed in this study to discern the distinctive features of participants’ situated strategy use in both contexts. This framework was based on Dörnyei’s (2009) distinction between two types of possible selves (i.e. the ideal self and the ought self), Higgins’ (2000) distinction between the promotion and prevention aspects of instrumentality, Malcolm’s (2013) concept of ‘required motivation’ and my own distinction between immature, short-term and long-term learning goals and that of compulsory (i.e. largely regulated by cultural beliefs) and voluntary (i.e. basically internalised within the self) strategies. The participants’ changing language learning goals and associated strategies in their homelands and the UK were largely shaped and regulated by their situated social networks, including family members, teachers, peers and others. The changes in assessment modes and the availability of language learning resources (e.g. technologies) were also found to have mediated their strategy use. This study concludes by providing recommendations for Arab students who are considering pursuing their studies abroad in English-speaking education systems, for study abroad programme designers and teachers in the host country, and for educators in the Arab and Asian countries by suggesting specific practical steps such as ‘adopting a near peer role modelling approach’ and ‘fostering the motivational force of International Posture and National Interest among students’. Further research is needed to examine the key role of contextual realities on learners’ strategy use, and to help teachers provide appropriate support to language learners in particular learning contexts.

This research project primarily focuses on the civic emotions and their relation with educational drama. Emotion and Reason are not always at odds and when combined contribute in the upgrade of our awareness of the world and the intelligence of our decision making processes. Emotions that are beneficial towards others and seem to cherish social solidarity are considered virtues, which are ‘other’-oriented. The practice of such virtues in social life can be regarded as a precious characteristic of a vigorous civic identity. Civic emotions are inextricable from the concept of citizenship, when seen as a bond that unites all citizens in their common space and fate. This thesis explores specifically the fundamental ‘other-regarding’ emotion of compassion, as a natural inclination of human kind which needs to be educated to be expressed appositively. Empathy can be strongly connected to the expression of compassion and becomes the way in which participatory drama works towards the direction of the cultivation of the civic emotions. Justice is viewed as the core essence of every healthy society and should become an irreplaceable trait of each citizen. It is closely related to compassion as the power that triggers the relevant thoughts and motivates kindness in public life. This research venture investigates how educational drama may provide opportunities for the cultivation of the civic emotions but also for the way children perceive the notions of civic emotions as they emerge in the space of educational drama or in real life. My ethnographic study involved a series of drama workshops in a class of students. The data gathered in this case study illustrate the way children face the issue of compassion, portraying the elements that encourage the expression of kind behaviour and also the factors that inhibit the practice of acts of care.