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The purpose of this paper is to review the variation in methods used to analyse lessons in order to improve teaching and learning.

It addresses the question of how observations of lessons can be analysed, and what approaches and methods are applicable in the analysis of collected data in lesson and learning studies.

In lesson studies, the focus of research varies, the content and context of lessons vary and a variety of qualitative methods are applied in the analysis of lessons. Lesson study is proving to be a versatile research approach to the development of the quality of teaching and learning.

This review provides an overview of some qualitative methods of content analysis used as analytic tools in the studies presented in this issue of the journal.

New educators may feel overwhelmed by the options available for engaging students through classroom participation. However, it may be helpful to recognize that participatory pedagogical systems often have constructivist roots. Adopting a constructivist perspective, our paper considers three meta-practices that encourage student participation: designing activities, leading others, and assessing peers. We explored the consequences of these meta-practices for important student outcomes, including content knowledge, engagement, self-efficacy, sense of community, and self-awareness. We found that different meta-practices were associated with different combinations of outcomes. This discovery demonstrates the benefit of studying meta- practices so as to reveal the nuanced effects that may arise from pedagogical choices. In addition, an understanding of meta-practices can help leadership educators to be more discerning and intentional in their course designs.

This research aims to examine the educational philosophy of teachers in classrooms. Teachers' educational philosophy influences the power balance, course content function, student and teacher roles, responsibility for learning and assessment purposes and processes. The research also analyzes whether gender, qualification, specialization and experience significantly influence classroom educational philosophies.

The study utilized a quantitative research design, utilizing data from 193 teachers working in a public higher education institution in the Sultanate of Oman. The study utilized a survey method to solicit data from the respondents. Besides utilizing descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation, the study used analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-test to test the hypotheses.

Analysis revealed an instructional strategy's preference, including elements of both teacher-centered and student-centered educational philosophies. Elements of progressivism, constructivism, reconstructivism and perennialism are more relevant in the teacher's instructional design. The results show no significant differences in teachers' pedagogical philosophy that exist based on gender, specialization and experience. However, teachers' age significantly influences their educational philosophy preferences.

This research centers on a public higher education institution in the Sultanate of Oman, with a particular focus on the Department of Business Studies. This resarch delimits its discussion on teachers' chosen educational philosophy. Other possible factors may also impact student retention and effective teaching and learning.

This research offers valuable insights to academicians, higher education administrators, and policymakers. Specifically, this research emphasizes the significance of employing a blended approach, which incorporates both student-centered and teacher-centered educational philosophies, to enhance student engagement, retention, and effective teaching and learning.

This research emphasizes the importance of educators' adoption of a blended educational philosophy in promoting student retention and engagement within higher education institutions. To achieve desirable outcomes, policymakers in higher education must ascertain which educational philosophy is most effective in the classroom. Additionally, ensuring congruence between preferred educational philosophy and teachers’  instructional practices is vital in facilitating effective teaching and learning.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind among teachers in higher education in the Sultanate of Oman. The outcome of this study helps detail the specific strategies teachers deploy and categorize into various educational philosophies.

School violence can cause or exacerbate individual and collective trauma. Trauma-informed school approaches offer schools and educators guidance for how to respond. In this chapter, we provide an overview of trauma-informed school approaches and their contributions to healing individual and collective trauma. We begin this chapter by addressing the complex intersection of disability and trauma, and the unique implications of school-based violence for students with disabilities and their teachers. We then define trauma-informed care, describe current short- and long-term trauma-informed school approaches, and explain the aims of these approaches at individual and collective levels. Next, we locate trauma-informed responses to school violence in a context of systemic trauma and share considerations for disrupting the systemic conditions that perpetuate trauma and school violence. We discuss critiques of the trauma-informed care movement and conclude with recommendations for scholars pursuing research in this area.

Research on the association between individual characteristics of undergraduate students, drop-out and delayed graduation is still evolving. Therefore, further evidence is required. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper reports on an empirical study examining the relationship between students’ individual characteristics and delayed graduation. The analysis is based on a sample of 1,167 students who have registered on and have completed a full-time undergraduate programme in Italy. Using a Probit model, the findings document the individual, background and environmental indicators that play a role in explaining delayed graduation.

The study observes that students who commute to university perform better than those residing on campus. Other factors increasing the probability of completing the undergraduate programme on time include individual characteristics (e.g. gender and age), student background (family income, education), institutional environment (teaching and research quality) and student satisfaction. Finally, some policy implications are discussed.

A direct policy implication of these findings is that supporting academic staff in order to enhance their performance in both research and teaching has a positive effect on the performance of the students.

This paper contributes to the debate on the impact of institutional quality on students’ performance, aiming to address the question of balance between teaching and research orientation.

The UK is a popular educational hub for international students from different parts of the world. These students often face different transitional challenges, which have a significant impact on the success or failure of their studies. The purpose of this paper is to systematically investigate the issues and challenges confronting international students in the UK in their efforts to acquire academic knowledge and achieve personal development.

A total of 104 UK-based international students in five higher education institutes in London from 25 countries participated in this study. The study was undertaken qualitatively through 21 semi-structured and 13 focus group interviews.

The findings reveal that the process of transitional adjustment is affected by various issues, all of which determine the duration of the students’ involvement in each stage of the transitional process. International students in the UK experience language/accent-related difficulties; impaired communication; and a difficult adjustment to the British education system and culture.

The extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the limited scope of the research.

In choosing to study in the UK, international students primarily seek to obtain a qualification, other life experiences, and cultural assimilation. The students’ parents, institutions and the UK authorities (such as the Department of Education) have an important role in ensuring that the students achieve success. While the roles of parents and the UK authorities are not the focus of this paper, their supportive roles certainly allow students to complete the different stages of the process of transitional adjustment quickly and smoothly.

The study offers valuable insight into understanding the challenges facing international students in acquiring knowledge in a foreign land. The paper contributes to the pedagogic literature on this topic by proposing a three-stage scaffolding model.

This study aims to examine how critical love theory is operationalized in K-12 classrooms to support Black children. The authors use BlackCrit and a conceptual framework of critical love to describe the strategies educators used as pro-Black pedagogies of resistance.

The authors conducted a thematic analysis to identify how critical love praxis is used by K-12 educators as a tool to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism as defined by the framings of BlackCrit theory. The authors produced a literature synthesis of qualitative research that responds to this study’s research questions: How are critical love theories operationalized? What educator practices do researchers identify as material manifestations of critical love?; and How and to what extent do critical love praxis address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistorical approaches to social transformation as defined by BlackCrit theory?

Critical love theories manifest as critical love praxis. Educators used critical love praxis to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism by cultivating and supporting the co-creation of homeplace for Black students in K-12 education. Homeplace is cultivated through critical love praxis as classroom-focused, person-focused and politically focused approaches.

This study’s findings extend current theoretical research on critical love by describing its material form in K-12 education and by identifying how a critical love praxis can work to directly challenge anti-Blackness. The authors find implications for their work in teacher education and teachers’ in-service professional development.

In Brazil, over 4.7 million women enrolled in university in the year 2017. However, Brazilian women have been consistently overrepresented in humanities and care majors and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Given that observed gender differences in math-intensive fields have lasting effects on gender inequality in the labor market, and that observed gender variations do not necessarily associate with differences in innate ability, in this paper we explore the paths of societal gender bias and gender differences in a Brazilian university.

We conduct a social experiment at a University in Southeastern Brazil, applying the gender-STEM Implicit Association Test.

We found that women in STEM are less likely to show gender-STEM implicit stereotypes, compared to women in humanities. The results indicate a negative correlation between implicit gender stereotyping and the choice of math-intensive majors by women.

The stereotype-congruent results are indicative of the gender bias in Brazilian society, and suggest that stereotypes created at early stages in life are directly related to future outcomes that reinforce gender disparities in Brazil, which can be observed in career choices.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and contextualize the processes of leadership development through mentoring in a Leadership Learning Lab (“the Lab”) and to explore the implications and applications of the Lab's approach as a social learning space.

The authors used a constructivist grounded theoretical approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with participants in the Lab, which operated out of a leadership center in a mid-sized Canadian business school.

The findings show that participants used their individual life experiences to practice leadership development through mentoring in a social learning space of prescribed uncertainty. The participants identified with becoming flexible, self-actualized leaders by learning to view their own experiences and those of their Lab partners through a leadership lens.

This study contributes to an understanding of the “doing” of leadership development in a social learning space and highlights three relational processes through which leadership development emerged through mentoring: rapport-building, democratization and reflection.

Most university students, if not all, develop a preconception about any academic course before taking it. This preconception undeniably affects students’ performance by influencing their motivation. As a result, learning can be minimized. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of students’ preconception about the difficulty of an engineering course – taught by the same instructor – for a period of seven semesters by analyzing the results of survey questionnaire completed at the beginning of every semester. This approach allows the instructor to assess students’ preconception that is built by former students’ feedback and hence control the impact on students’ motivation which influences their learning performance.

By analyzing the surveys’ results, the instructor gets a close idea about how the course is perceived. When students harbor misconceptions that constitute difficult barriers to learning, it becomes necessary to take action like adjusting the way of teaching the corresponding course’s content, or ultimately changing the course instructor for a couple of semesters.

The adopted survey-based strategy implicitly helps the instructor to correct inaccurate preconceptions before they become crystallized misconceptions, while in case of a very positive preconception, one can continue to enhance the course level with even more challenging evaluations (e.g. exams). However, in case of a persistent misconception, a midterm survey would further help the instructor to better adjust the way the course is taught by objectively considering the obtained inputs from a considered C/D/S set (i.e. continue doing what was helpful/do start doing what would be beneficial/stop doing what is not working).

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no study has investigated the evolution of – or at least – students’ preconception built by former students’ feedback about the difficulty of a course despite its direct influence on students’ motivation and hence on students’ performance, thus filling an important gap in the literature. Indeed, one general positive aspect of students’ preconception research is the attention it has brought regarding the absolute necessity for teachers and researchers to be well grounded in both content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.