Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore opportunities to develop higher-order thinking for students in social studies, with a focus on teachers' content coverage and support for engaging in social studies analysis. Design/methodology/approach: A video study using naturalistic classroom observations of 80 social studies lessons was conducted…

ECEC settings are children's first contact with early education, and ECEC teachers are expected to encourage and support children's early literacy development. This study aims to pilot test the self-assessment tool Social Language Environment -- Domain, (SLE-D), in order to gain more knowledge about teachers' strategies when teaching literacy.…

The current study -- guided by the overarching research question "What aspects of successful teaching unfold in students' descriptions of the teachers that they perceive as being really good teachers?" -- is situated within a larger research project aimed at extending knowledge about successful teaching and teachers. It builds on 20…

Poetry is a key element of many literature curricula but poetry teaching is something with which many teachers struggle. Research indicates that teachers lack experience of poetry as well as subject knowledge and that current high-stakes testing poses challenges. While previous research has investigated teachers' experiences through large…

This article is based on data generated in an ethnographic study of gender in a Swedish preschool. Drawing on Judith Butler's understanding of performativity and (un)doing of gender, a new theoretical concept, "situated decoding of gender," is further developed by showing how the material and spatial dimension of the educational practice…

In this article, we focus on smartphone use initiated by students during lessons, with the aim of deepening the knowledge of when and why this use happens. Our methodological approach is video-ethnographic. The empirical data consists of 20 focus students in 9 upper secondary school classes, comprising 70 h of video material. The results show that…

Instructional quality is a research topic that has received increased attention over the past decades. However, despite evidence for its importance to student learning, few studies are designed to examine patterns of prevalent instruction. The present study aimed to enhance the understanding of instructional quality in Swedish lower secondary…

This participatory design-based research study addresses the relational character of the physical learning environment and pedagogical practice in the context of a design project carried out at a Swedish upper secondary school. Three teachers initiated the project with the intent to introduce student centred pedagogy and increase active learning.…

The article draws on body pedagogics and considers that teaching and learning experiences and outcomes are directly related to the different characteristics of movement behaviour. In this article movement behaviour specifically centres on a sloyd (handicraft education) teacher's walk through the classroom. The analysis illuminate the specific…

This study emerged from the abrupt shift to online distance teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic and reports of "Mother Tongue Instruction" (MTI) in Sweden, where online distance teaching was initially introduced in MTI only. In Sweden, MTI is offered to students whose parents/caregivers speak languages other than Swedish on a daily…

Quality in early childhood education is an important topic in many countries. Research suggests that high-quality preschool provides many long-term benefits for young children and society. How to measure early childhood quality however can be problematic. One approach has been the use of the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERS), an…

Child engagement has been defined as active participation in classroom routines, appropriate interactions with the environment and it also predicts academic achievement. Therefore, it is necessary to identify predictors of engagement over time. Moreover, cross-cultural data is needed to provide a global picture of the quality of Early Childhood…

This study examines classroom task instructions--phases traditionally associated with noninteractional objectives and operations--and reveals their composition as interactionally complex and cocrafted. Analyses of video sequences of task instructional activity from three different secondary school lessons show that student questions routinely…

This article explores practices of othering through formations of normative sameness in discussion-based seminar classrooms. It takes literary scholar Stanley Fish's question, "Is there a text in this class, or is it just us?", back into the classroom to explore the formation of a "just us," an imagined homogeneous interpretive…

Teachers may face considerable challenges when implementing socio-scientific issues (SSI) in their classroom practices, such as incorporating student-centred teaching practices and exploring knowledge and values in the context of socioscientific issues. This year-long study explores teachers' reflections on the process of developing their…