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Classroom videos can make instructional practice public, cultivating collaborative, critical teacher discussions. However, video-based learning also involves a risk--the risk of hurting one's own or a colleague's public image, or face. In this study, we investigate the role of face threat and face management in teacher professional learning in 16 cases of video-based discussions in six school-based teacher teams. We present findings about the prevalence of face-work, which inhibits or mitigates face threat, as well as an account of various face-work strategies. We illuminate the role face-work plays In shaping opportunities for teacher learning, by analyzing in detail one video-based discussion. This linguistic ethnographic analysis suggests that face threat and face-work in video-based learning are inevitable and have the potential to both catalyze and constrain productive pedagogical discourse. The study demonstrates the critical role of face-work in video-based teacher learning, and the feasibility of investigating it. Keywords teacher learning, professional development, problem-based teacher education, discourse analysis, Video-based professional development (PD) has generated much interest and enthusiasm in the past couple of decades (e.g., Beisiegel, Mitchell, & Hill, 2018; Gonzalez, Deal, & Skultety, 2016; Hatch & Grossman, [...]

This article problematizes a broad consensus in favor of importing popular culture into classrooms as a means of engaging students, transforming interactional norms, and facilitating student understanding. A literacy lesson in which an English primary school teacher invoked the televised talent show X Factor, in organizing the class to provide feedback on student writing, was videotaped and subjected to detailed linguistic ethnographic analyses. The ways in which teacher and students drew upon and managed the possibilities and constraints posed by the mixing of X Factor and classroom feedback discourse genres are investigated. Although the incorporation of X Factor led to heightened student involvement and significant changes in classroom interactional patterns, its overall effect on opportunities for student learning was mixed. The article offers a conceptual framework for contrasting discourse genres and for examining the realization of these genres in classroom interaction., A brief reference to popular culture led to momentary disruption of the norms, roles, and discourse customary in Ms. Leigh's (all teacher and student names are pseudonyms) Year 5 classroom. [...]

This article examines a questioning pedagogy that is being tested as a part of a school reform model in 12 Israeli schools. Topics addressed include how questioning inspires creative activity, elaboration, and motivation, and how educators can compose fertile questions that undermine assumptions, impart knowledge, and promote further research.

This paper uses a case study of an Israeli teacher leadership initiative to explore a mode of educational governance that employs 'bottom-up' logic and discourse. The authors analyse the origins of this initiative, and – through a policy-making ethnography of the initiative's enactment at the district level – show how it is sustained and governed through 'top-down' structures and strategies. The authors use the term 'bottom-up governance' to describe a hybrid mixture of discourse that valorises grass-roots leadership, of governance through actors' autonomy and reflexivity, of enactment by a complex array of external and internal educational actors, and of initiation and control by central government, which provides insufficient, temporary and unstable resources. Their analysis highlights the conflicted and complex role of mid-level policy-makers in this mode of governance, as well as the simultaneous pursuit by the Israeli education system of centralisation and decentralisation, and 'weak state' and 'strong state' strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts at educational reform too often and incorrectly separate teaching and control issues, practically guaranteeing the failure of progressivist efforts. Traditional disciplinary technologies and teaching techniques usually coincide, while progressivist teaching methods undermine traditional discipline and must offer alternative classroom supervision methods.

Within current educational discourse, dialogic pedagogy is diametrically opposed to teaching to the test, especially the high-stakes standardised test. While dialogic pedagogy is about critical thinking, authenticity and freedom, test preparation evokes all that is narrow, instrumental and cynical in education. In this paper, we argue that such positioning of dialogic pedagogy as antithetical to testing is detrimental to attempts both to foster dialogue in classrooms and to constructively manage the high-stakes standardised tests that are compulsory in so many schools. Drawing on an extended case study of dialogic teaching in one London primary school, we argue that while standardised testing is indeed an impediment to dialogic pedagogy, it does not follow that dialogue is impossible or undesirable within the testing context. By adopting an ironic stance towards the test, teachers can fulfil test preparation mandates while maintaining dialogic ideals and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International comparative testing, such as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), has considerable impact on policymakers, the media and the general public. A central assumption underlying PISA is that global variation in students' academic performance is attributable to national educational structures and policies. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the problematic nature of this assumption. Rather than critiquing it from the outside, we turn the tools, data and presumptions of the current discourse of international comparisons upon themselves, showing that this assumption is refuted by analysis of immigrant student test scores. Data from the PISA 2009 tests show that Chinese immigrant students in New Zealand and Australia achieve math scores that are more similar to those of students in Shanghai than to their non-immigrant Australian and New Zealand peers. Thus, cultural background appears to be more consequential for the educational attainment of Chinese immigrant students than exposure to the educational systems of Australia or New Zealand. We discuss limitations of our analysis, using them as basis to discuss the shortcomings of PISA more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the school inspection as a political ritual for the management of tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes. At the centre of the article is a case study of how teachers in an allegedly failing working-class English primary school coped with issues of social class, educational success-and-failure and an Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspection and related accountability measures. National educational policy – relative performance data and inspection – generated a crisis within the school, and intervened in teacher discourse about the role of social class in pupil attainment. Whereas previous scholarship on OFSTED and inspections has emphasised their harmful effects on teachers and teaching practice, the current article broadens the focus from regulatory to political issues, from specific schools to the stability of the educational order more generally. Based on this case study, situated within a broader analysis of shifting discourses about social class and education in English educational policy, I argue that (1) the current regulatory regime makes ‘failure’ inevitable, thereby posing a symbolic problem for policy-makers and politicians; (2) by identifying failure and allocating blame, the inspection ritual fulfils an important symbolic function; which (3) serves to buttress the legitimacy of the neo-liberal educational order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

English education policy-makers have targeted classroom time as a key area for regulation and intervention, with 'brisk pace' widely accepted as a feature of good teaching practice. We problematise this conventional wisdom through an exploration of objective and subjective dimensions of lesson pace in a corpus of 30 Key Stage 2 literacy lessons from three classrooms in one London school. Systematic classroom observation produced an anomaly: the lessons we experienced as fast-paced were rated objectively as slowest, and vice-versa. We contrasted the fastest and slowest episodes in the corpus, demonstrating that for these episodes the accepted measure of pace primarily reflected differences in utterance length. Linguistic ethnographic micro-analysis of the episodes highlighted predictability, stakes, meaning and dramatic performance as key factors contributing to pace as experienced. We argue, among other claims, that sometimes accelerating pupils' experience-and learning-necessitates slowing down the pace of teaching, and that government calls for urgency may, perversely, make lessons slower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]