Stober, Wildflower and Drake (2006) call for coaches to 'begin integrating evidence from both coaching-specific research and related disciplines, their own expertise, and an understanding of the uniqueness of each client ... into a coherent body of knowledge that applies to and guides coaching'. This study does this by looking into the work of the Nottinghamshire Solution Focused Coaching team and how teacher coachee view effective coaching. Q-methodology (Stephenson, 1953) is a Quali-quantalogical technique able to describe in detail the range of views around a topic. This research used Q-methodology to examine teacher views on effective Solution Focused Coaching with EPs. By-person factor analysis of the Q-sorts of 27 teachers suggested 3 different viewpoints on effective Solution Focused Coaching (SFC) and some key ideas held in consensus across the views. The viewpoints were found to differentiate across three themes; whether coaching involved developing action plans; where the goals for coaching emanated from; and the coachee's engagement with the confidentiality offered. The consensus statements showed a preference for a focus on strengths, skills, and what is helping at present; of receiving strength-based feedback; and on identifying elements of goals being in place. Working with client strengths has been highlighted in the therapy outcome literature and the study is theorized with reference to this and the concept of "therapeutic alliance". It is suggested that effective SFC might involve the EP constructing a "coaching alliance" and combining this with a focus on client strengths to provide a foundation for SFC. The descriptions of the viewpoints, and consensus ideas, are offered as resources for exploring the practicalities of such an approach. Whilst being the semantic and subjective products of human thought, the views operant in the study can be said to be "as real, as substantial, and as difficult to get around as any thing the natural world puts in our way" (Watts, 2007). Such a linguistic turn is expanded upon through exploration of educational psychology as social construction. Suggestions are made about how EPs could interpret social constructionism in their practice.

This study examines culturally diverse groups, teams formed by home students and international students completing group tasks in Higher Education, referred to as mixed groups. This investigation differs from previous studies, and hence contributes to the existing knowledge in the field, in that it combines observational data and the use of Activity Theory as an analytical framework for furthering our understanding of group dynamics and task completion of mixed groups. This research addresses four research questions: what are students' experiences of mixed group work? What are the group dynamics in mixed groups? How do students mediate during mixed group work? What factors influences task completion in mixed groups? The study is based upon two group case studies, consisting of a non-assessed written group task and an assessed group presentation. Both case studies involved postgraduate students within the same British university. Qualitative analysis of observation and interview data revealed that students had different experiences of their group work, even among co-workers. Few group interactions were related to discussing cultural issues, highlighting the limitations that mixed group work may have in fostering internationalisation. The group dynamics described include students' interactions around: achieving a common understanding of the task, sanctioning members and conflicts regarding tool use. Both home and international students mediated in task completion in the following ways: a) acting as sources of knowledge, b) helping other members to understand the activity, and c) helping others use and learn about artefacts required in the completion of the group task and other university activities. Factors that appeared to influence mixed group work (MGW) included international students' self confidence in their spoken English, familiarity, students' positioning of self and other colleagues, expected roles, task and assessment design, and students' engagement in clarification during task completion. Some of these findings are consistent with existing literature. Finally, Activity Theory (AT) as an analytical framework was found to be useful.

This thesis argues that Donald Winnicott's theory of transitional space and play casts new light upon the ontological dimensions of students' experiences of transition within Higher Education. Winnicott enables the illumination of the different ways that students might react, cope and personally develop when faced with similarity, difference and change, demonstrating this can have powerful influences upon the facilitation and hindrance of individuals’ transitions. The qualitative case study, conducted at a Russell Group University, involves an in depth exploration of eight second-year undergraduate Biological Science students' transitional journeys during their study of one module. The students' study included designing their own experiments, working with others, presenting orally, analysing their data and individually writing a scientific report, as part of a creative group project. I argue throughout this thesis that this module invited learners to engage in adult, transitional academic play spaces. Here, learners had the freedom to risk putting him or herself into relation with sameness, uncertainty, difficulty, challenge and change. The study reports that the potential and enjoyment of transition, as Winnicott proposed, might be only fully realised when the conditions are 'good enough' in the mind of the learner. This involves achieving a delicate balance between firstly, the provision of a teaching and learning environment that provides the freedom and opportunities to engage with transition and secondly, the capacities of students to engage with change which might include, toughness, resilience and a will to learn. In the light of the empirical findings it is argued that students' transitional journeys are both idiosyncratic and complex and students emerge in different ways. It is found that at this stage in their degree study all students required the sensitive support of teaching staff in order to have the confidence to engage within transitional space.

The 21st century is considered an era of information explosion. Information and communication technology is developing fast and penetrating into everyone's life and daily living. Governments of countries all over the world have invested huge amounts of money into the development of ICT in teaching and learning over the past 20 years. The Hong Kong government, with no exception, has invested huge sums of money alongside the declaration of initiatives for implementing the use of ICT into teaching and learning. However, the progress is still lagging behind the expectation despite the money and human resources invested. The implementation involves not only the introduction of a tool in changing classroom practice and pedagogy, but also a paradigm shift. The complexity of change, as Fullan (2001) describes it, is far beyond people's expectations. This multi-phase single case study on the implementation of using ICT in teaching and learning in a secondary school in Hong Kong attempts to look at the process of change through the lens of Activity Theory (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999). It is argued that Activity Theory, as a dynamic and evolving body of thought, is a suitable framework for analysing change by describing and comparing the components of the system, the focal school, at different phases, in order to understand the change process or development. The concept of contradiction which is the driving force for development is given serious consideration in order to more fully understand teacher change. By presenting the focal school as a chronological series of activity systems at the three phases, comparisons of the components, subject, object, outcome, tools, rules, division of labour and community are studied, using the framework suggested by the Activity Theory. A thorough analysis of the relationships between the components helps to capture a holistic view of the activity system and the change process. Factors that might have facilitated or inhibited the change are identified along the way and interpreted in order to better understand the cultural and historical factors that have caused the present situation. An Activity Theory analysis of the contradictions that have driven development at different phases helps to reveal the change process and factors affecting the implementation.

In this project I explore two teachers’ experiences, as ‘key informants’, of educational technology in a UK inner-city comprehensive school. I examine the meditational role of technology in these teachers’ activities and suggest that such an examination can improve what we understand about educational technology at the school. I discuss how technology is socially shaped and therefore not neutral, and of technologically mediated change being ecological change (Postman, 1992). I examine discourses of ‘techno-romanticism’ which locate technology as a transformational panacea for educational challenges - discourses which seemingly ascribe technology its own agency. This thesis challenges such viewpoints, and the technological hegemony they support, by examining technology not as state-of-that-art but as the ‘state-of-the-actual’ (Selwyn, 2010a). The project was an in-depth examination of the experiences of two key informants using a case study, ethnographic research design, with interview and observational methodologies generating qualitative data. I have positioned the project as both critical in its examination of technology, and sociocultural in its epistemology – in particular drawing on Sociocultural psychology (Wertsch 1991) and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as the theoretical framework, and ‘activity theory’ (Engeström, 1987b, 1999a) as the analytical lens. The analysis has two stages – the first being a ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) coding and categorisation of contextual data; the second the modelling of activity systems, and the identification of contradictions and conflicts in those systems. My analysis is of the key informants’ experiences, provides a reading of how technology mediates not just the ‘what’ of these teachers’ activities, but also the ‘how’ and ‘why’. I challenge the dominant discourses and assumptions of the inevitability of technological improvement. In doing so, I call for the educational technology research community to be both sympathetic toward what technology means for these teachers’ professional identities, and critical of overly technocentric school environments.

The main aim of this research was to investigate how children's collaborative storytelling could be scaffolded through technologically mediated resources and how these resources can be made more effective by scaffolding around them. The benefits of providing children with resources, encouraging them to construct their own representations and to interact with each other while they make their story were investigated with respect to the quality of their subsequent storytelling. The first piece of work presented in this thesis is a qualitative case study aimed at exploring how the collaborative storytelling task could be resourced with and without technology, as well as the effectiveness of scaffolding around the technology through adult guidance, and whether the potential benefits could be maintained once the additional guidance was withdrawn. Although the study found that the (technology mediated and non-technological) resources provided did not support for children's engagement in discussion and storytelling, providing scaffolding around these resources was effective at promoting discussion and good collaborative storytelling. Specifically, adult guidance designed to encourage children to articulate their story ideas through questions was shown to benefit children's engagement in discussion and the quality of their collaborative storytelling. Moreover, the children continued to engage in discussion and to produce well structured, rich and coherent stories once the additional guidance was withdrawn. The second study presented in this thesis was of an experimental nature. It built on the findings from the case study by employing more structured resources as well as making the task more ecologically valid for the children through the introduction of a real audience and the matching of the participants with familiar peers (i.e., school mates). The study investigated the benefits of encouraging children to construct their own representations by comparing a task where children were presented with pictures they could manipulate and a task where children were encouraged to construct their own dynamic drawings over these pictures. The study found that children's collaborative stories were longer when the children were encouraged to construct their own dynamic drawings. The stories were also qualitatively better, as they contained more structural elements and were richer in style. However no differences were found between the stories in the two tasks with respect to extent to which children were able to build coherently on each others' contributions. This is argued to have been due to the fact that little shared understanding was established among the children about their collaborative story as a result of a lack of engagement in interactive discussion. The third study was also experimental in nature, and it investigated the benefits of complementing children's construction with scaffolding specifically aimed at encouraging them to discuss their story as this was being made. The study compared a task where children making a story together were encouraged to construct their own dynamic drawings with a task where they were also required to use a set of question prompts to discuss their ideas. It was found that when they were required to engage in reciprocal questioning, the children discussed their story more. The quality of the children's collaborative stories was also better when the children were supported through question prompting. Not only were the stories longer, but they also contained more structural elements and were richer in style. Moreover, when they were telling their stories, the children built more coherently on each other's contributions. Finally, a correlation was found between the number and type of questions asked by the children while they were making their stories together and the quality of the stories produced. These findings suggest that the engagement in discussion combined with the construction of dynamic drawings encouraged children to articulate and elaborate on their story ideas, therefore enabling the production of longer and better stories. Also, the children's engagement with each others' ideas may have facilitated the establishment of a shared understanding about the collaborative story, thus making it possible for children to build on each others' ideas during storytelling.

Teacher motivation can be conveniently interpreted within a framework of motivation theories that are related to the fulfilment of needs (Herzberg, 1968, Maslow, 1954, McClelland, 1961). This thesis argues that mid-career teachers’ motivation is context-specific and relates to the fulfilment of teachers’ needs. Grounded in phenomenology and drawing on semi-structured interviews with twelve mid-career teachers, six headteachers, and six focus groups with thirty-eight students in six lyceums in Cyprus, this qualitative study presents the factors that can motivate secondary teachers with 11 to 20 years of teaching experience to become (more) active in their schools. These factors which constitute the key findings of my study and the contribution of my study to the field of teacher motivation are: the ‘moderators’: recognition, inspection for evaluation, personal life, and experience; and the ‘needs motivators’: satisfaction, collaboration, fairness, and decision making. The ‘moderators’ may determine the extent to which teachers’ ‘needs motivators’ are fulfilled. This study makes a significant contribution to policies designed to enhance leadership practices related to the motivation of mid-career teachers.

This thesis lifts the lid' on the educational practices within a medical education programme, which is based upon a Problem-Based learning (PBl) approach. It is an ethnographic case study that sets out to understand the practice and facilitation of PBl situated within a hybrid curriculum at a graduate-entry medical programme in England. Data was collected by audio-visual recording of PBl sessions, audio recording and observing facilitator meetings and through the author's experiences as a participant observer working as a facilitator within the research setting. The study exposes a variety of PBl practices within a single curriculum setting that have not previously been examined in detail within medical education, in particular through use of direct observational methods. The findings pose a challenge to a core educational objective, upon which the 'PBl' programme was founded, that being to develop students' skills as self-directed learners. While this is highlighted within the literature as a central component to the PBl process, the findings raise questions about how these assumptions are reflected in the practice of PBL.

The research question which guided this exploratory case study is, in essence, looking at causes in non-implementation of change, specifically consideration of how confidence and emotions have been factors not taken into account when considering Continued Professional Development programmes and the implementation of the ICT initiative. The research was carried out as a three-case case study. There was no intent in this study to determine causal effects. Rather, it was more to consider the role of factors such as confidence, what part it plays and how this could impact on Continued Professional Development (CPD) which would lead to effective classroom practice. In considering such an approach, the questions of what constitutes change and confidence and how it is manifested in the classroom situation will be considered using a 3D mathematical metaphor to help demonstrate change. The data gathering was accomplished through a number of different instruments: a survey questionnaire based around the questionnaire used by the IMPACT project (slightly modified to take account of the different project) (Harrison, et al, 1998). The specific information obtained from the instrument included specific computer uses, computer experience and training background; Pre- and Post-classroom observation interviews; a free response narrative; and to aid in communicating their thoughts on their current attitude and usage of ICT and to further help gain an insight as to the affect of emotion on ICT diffusion, each participant was also asked to complete a mind map task (Buzan and Buzan, 2003) based around the main subject of “Computers and Me”. The case study suggests that effective CPD for an ICT initiative is best approached through a bespoke programme taking into account teachers’ individual emotional needs, backgrounds and experiences.

This case study examines the changing role of the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority with a view to identifying the way forward for it to enhance its effectiveness and inform future assessment development. The research questions are: 1)What functions do public examinations serve in Hong Kong and how effectively are they serving these functions? 2)What is the role of the Authority in the education system of Hong Kong and how effective is it in delivering this role as expected by its stakeholders? A historical approach is adopted to trace and analyse the development of public examinations through literature and document review. In order to gain new insights into the implicit forces working behind public examinations and form a more balanced view of examination bodies, reference is also made to the internal documents of the Authority. It has been found that due to an exponential growth in public education since the 1970s against a background of rapid social changes, the functions expected of public examinations have expanded from those of a selective school system to include also those of an inclusive one. Despite improvement measures introduced by the Authority over the years, it was only until the introduction of an education reform initiated by the Tung Chee Hwa Government in the 2000s that more fundamental changes towards the inclusive end have been brought about. To enable this to be effectively done, three critical success pre-requisites on the part of the Authority can be identified: first, the technical competence to design assessments that can reconcile the traditional functions with the more progressive ones; second, the strategic competence to ensure the intended use of assessments is within the acceptability limits of the value systems of the concerned stakeholders and the society as a whole so that it is more likely that the assessments are used as expected; and third, if necessary, take steps to manage or narrow the differences. Being structurally segregated from school education by design, the Authority was expected by the Government, its creator and the most influential stakeholder, to be the gatekeeper of the education system when it was established. Since the 2000s, with a much closer partnership with the Curriculum Development Institute, the introduction of the TSA and HKDSEE as cornerstones of the education reform, and provision of support of an unprecedented scale to schools in respect of assessment implementation, it is argued that the Authority has effectively become the Government’s quality monitoring and enhancement agent of the school education system. For other stakeholders, with the HKDSEE recognising a much broader range of student abilities while up-keeping the selection function and widely recognised internationally and locally, the Authority has transformed itself from a gatekeeper to a gateway in addition, enabling our youngsters with different potentials to pursue their future through multiple pathways. Looking ahead, apart from continuing with the success pre-requisites, this thesis recommends that the Authority should lever its achievement in Hong Kong to establish itself internationally for further enhancement of its organisational capacities.