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Deeply integrating digital technologies in pedagogy and learning is associated with changes in classroom roles, relationships and actions that can challenge established teacher routines. This paper presents the findings of an eight-month case study of teachers transforming pedagogy to enact their design for personalised digital learning. Participating teachers reported that established classroom routines for managing behaviour and monitoring student engagement were challenged, and along with changes in classroom roles, this resulted in disorientation and uncertainty, but also created opportunities to consider new routines. This paper proposes that Dual Systems theory can be used to conceptualise the role of routine in teacher practice and the emergent challenges of transforming pedagogy with digital technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seek to build a framework with which researchers can track the trends in charter school specialization and parents can better understand their options. This report examines the entire charter school population operating in the 2018–19 school year and calculates the rate of specialization among charter schools based on key terms found on their websites and marketing materials. For the purposes of this paper, we defined a "focus" as a deliberate form of specialization. We categorized charter schools' foci into three categories. Schools with a "curricular focus," utilize a specialized core curriculum beyond the standard history, science, ELA, and math. Schools with a "pedagogical focus," utilize a specialized method of teaching. Lastly, schools with a "student body focus," serve a nonstandard student body. Within these three categories of foci, we identified nine unique curricular foci, eleven pedagogical foci, and five student body foci. Because many schools have multiple foci across the three categories, we considered the complete combination of a school's specialized foci to be their "model." We found a total of 68 specialized models. In total, roughly two thirds of all charter schools use a specialized model of some sort. The top specialized models were single-focus models: "Personalized Learning" (389), "High Expectations" (370), "STEM" (368), "Classical" (257), and "Art" (223). We provide a comprehensive list of all school models, their definitions, and other relevant information in this report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining two metaphors we argue that apart from official educational policy, there exists a palimpsest of cumulatively added prior policies sedimented in teachers' pedagogy, in addition to quasi-official phantom policies formed at the local level. We argue that these affect teachers' practices and beliefs in ways that may run counter to the desire of policy-makers to change educational regimes. Using research from a two-year long professional development project with teachers from two Singaporean secondary schools, we contend that while the top is busily redesigning the education system in general, and language and literacy teaching in particular, in ways that foster enquiry and higher-level work with a wide range of texts, in the micro-context of the classroom a long-standing instrumentalist logic prevails. We conclude that innovators need to be very cognisant of the legacy of past written and unwritten policies embedded in teachers' practices and beliefs when planning and engaging in professional development work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]