Rethinking Schools and Renewing Energy for Learning presents a comprehensive view on the major challenges educators face in the 21st century, and the ways in which schools can make a difference. It describes key principles that can serve as guidelines for tackling those challenges in an effective and manageable way, looking both at what children should learn, and what they want to learn. Drawing on research, policy-related literature, and a wide range of practice-based examples, the book addresses various topics, such as goals, pedagogy, assessment, equity, policy, and the role of technology in learning. The book suggests that schools can be as rewarding and fulfilling as they have been in the past and gives examples of how this can be accomplished. Rethinking Schools and Renewing Energy for Learning will be of great interest to academics, postgraduate students, teacher educators, and scholars in the field of education, specifically interested in primary education, secondary education, teacher education, and education policy.

Rethinking Schools and Renewing Energy for Learning presents a comprehensive view on the major challenges educators face in the 21st century, and the ways in which schools can make a difference. It describes key principles that can serve as guidelines for tackling those challenges in an effective and manageable way, looking both at what children should learn, and what they want to learn. Drawing on research, policy-related literature, and a wide range of practice-based examples, the book addresses various topics, such as goals, pedagogy, assessment, equity, policy, and the role of technology in learning. The book suggests that schools can be as rewarding and fulfilling as they have been in the past and gives examples of how this can be accomplished. Rethinking Schools and Renewing Energy for Learning will be of great interest to academics, postgraduate students, teacher educators, and scholars in the field of education, specifically interested in primary education, secondary education, teacher education, and education policy.

Throughout the world, equity and excellence in education is a major issue of concern. International comparative studies such as those carried out by OECD (PISA) have launched a worldwide debate on the effectiveness of educational systems (macro level), schools (meso level) and teachers (micro level) in terms of enhancing equity and excellence. Inspired by the OECD research and spurred by national policy-making, quantitative and qualitative research studies have recently been conducted in different parts of the globe aiming to provide deeper insight into the crucial variables that have an impact on equity, excellence or both. Among the variables that have been identified as crucial in this respect are the pupils' gender and their socio-economic and linguistic background, teachers' expectations, cognitions and pedagogical approach in the classroom, parental support, financial aspects, educational policies (e.g. priority policies, multilingual policies, early start policies), and variables related to the structure of the educational structure and system (e.g. compulsory school age, comprehensive systems, support structures, system variables enhancing spread of learners). This volume aims to compile a rich collection of research-based contributions, providing a state-of-the-art resource on what we know about this topic today.

Throughout the world, equity and excellence in education is a major issue of concern. International comparative studies such as those carried out by OECD (PISA) have launched a worldwide debate on the effectiveness of educational systems (macro level), schools (meso level) and teachers (micro level) in terms of enhancing equity and excellence. Inspired by the OECD research and spurred by national policy-making, quantitative and qualitative research studies have recently been conducted in different parts of the globe aiming to provide deeper insight into the crucial variables that have an impact on equity, excellence or both. Among the variables that have been identified as crucial in this respect are the pupils' gender and their socio-economic and linguistic background, teachers' expectations, cognitions and pedagogical approach in the classroom, parental support, financial aspects, educational policies (e.g. priority policies, multilingual policies, early start policies), and variables related to the structure of the educational structure and system (e.g. compulsory school age, comprehensive systems, support structures, system variables enhancing spread of learners). This volume aims to compile a rich collection of research-based contributions, providing a state-of-the-art resource on what we know about this topic today.

For the past 20 years, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has attracted the worldwide attention of researchers, curriculum developers, teacher trainers and language teachers. However, much of the available literature and research has been from a psycholinguistic perspective, driven by the desire to understand how people acquire a second language. Far less research has been carried out as to whether TBLT works for real teachers and real learners in a classroom environment. This book aims to offer a unique contribution by uniting a discussion of task-based pedagogical principles with descriptions of their application to real life language education problems. It provides an account of the many challenges and obstacles that the implementation of task-based language education raises and discusses the different options for overcoming them. The book contains a substantial body of new research from Flanders, where the implementation of TBLT has been a nationwide project for the past fifteen years in primary, secondary and adult education.