Students' learning environments often change during school career, due to school transitions and the introduction of educational innovations, causing discontinuity in teaching and learning. Success of students entering a new learning environment depends in part on their prior expectations of education, as these influence later perceptions.…

This publication examines the influence of learning outcomes on teaching practices in vocational education and training (VET) through data from case studies across 10 countries: Bulgaria, Ireland, France, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and Finland. The research reveals that, while national policies across the…

The question what the focus of climate change education should be has been debated by academics and policy makers. However, this debate is informed to only a limited extent by empirical research on the position of teachers. Based on interviews with nineteen experienced secondary geography teachers in the Netherlands, nine orientations were…

The practice of citizenship education has predominantly been studied in general education. This article details an interview study of citizenship education of teachers in prevocational education in the Netherlands. We investigated whether and how vocational teachers reflected on their goals and teaching practices in citizenship education. Teachers…

The aim of this study is to gain empirical knowledge about how the Bible functions in the context of Protestant Christian primary schools in the Netherlands. It presents the results of an empirical explorative and qualitative study on the perceptions of teachers and school administrators (directors and internal supervisors) on the goals of Bible…

While Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is recognised as an effective approach worldwide, its implementation in foreign language (FL) classrooms remains difficult. Earlier studies have identified factors impeding CLT implementation, such as a lack of communicative lesson materials or teachers' more traditional views on language learning. In…

Personal and social development constitutes an important goal of physical education (PE) curricula worldwide. Few studies have analysed how PE teachers perceive and operationalise personal and social development goals in their lessons. This study sought to investigate the implemented curriculum of in-service PE teachers, that is, how PE teachers…

Purpose: This paper aims to learn how sustainability and the circular economy were being integrated into the curriculum of a Dutch university and to transfer that knowledge back to a US university business school curriculum. Given the resistance toward integrating sustainability into the US business school curriculum, the Dutch university served…

This article investigates how 12 upper-elementary school teachers dealt with the occurrence of a terrorist attack in their city during school hours and in the immediate aftermath. All teachers were interviewed shortly after the terrorist attack about their goals, dilemmas, and pedagogical strategies employed in the classroom. We found that during…

Although the notion of universal human rights allows for the idea that states (and supranational organizations such as the European Union) can, or even should, control and impose restrictions on migration, both notions clearly do not sit well together. The ensuing tension manifests itself in our ambivalent attitude towards migration, but also…

In the past two decades, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has seen a surge in uptake, especially in European schools offering forms of bilingual education. This article reports a study investigating practitioner and specialist perceptions about the goals and practices of CLIL in the Netherlands, one of few countries where CLIL…

The overall aim of the study was to gather evidence on effective policy reforms for broad competence development in school education, including better achievement of basic skills. The six key objectives are: Objective 1: To understand the key features of policy design and implementation of reforms for broad competence development and achievement…

Context: Collaboration within school teams is considered to be important to build the capacity school teams need to work in a data-based way. In a school characterized by a strong collaborative culture, teachers may have more access to the knowledge and skills for analyzing data, teachers have more opportunity to discuss the performance goals to…

The aim of this study was to describe how teacher educators design and implement group learning activities (GLAs). We used the Group Learning Activities Instructional Design (GLAID) framework to analyse their descriptions. The GLAID framework includes eight components: (1) interaction, (2) learning objectives and outcomes, (3) assessment, (4) task…

The diversity of students' achievement levels within classrooms has made it essential for teachers to adapt their lessons to the varying educational needs of their students ('differentiation'). However, the term differentiation has been interpreted in diverse ways and there is a need to specify what effective differentiation entails. Previous…