Ireland's government placed a renewed focus on the teaching and learning of numeracy with the publication of a national strategy in 2011. Whole-school planning for numeracy was already a requirement for disadvantaged schools also known as Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) in Ireland. This single site case study explored how a…

Purpose: School-based programmes face a variety of personal, environmental and organisational challenges to implementation. Stakeholders can provide crucial contextual information to improve implementation. The purpose of this paper is to explore teachers' perspectives on implementation through a bottom-up participatory process.…

Based in a time of major curriculum reform, this article reports on a qualitative case study of teacher professional development (PD) in the Republic of Ireland (ROI). Five mathematics teachers in an Irish secondary school were introduced to and participated in successive cycles of school-based lesson study (LS) over the course of one academic…

This study uses boundary crossing in activity theory as one normative framework for opening a deliberative inquiry in new discursive spaces to elicit "gender awareness" in teachers' practices. We illustrate this framework by drawing from data in one European teacher education project. Seven case studies were conducted and data were…

The role of faith-based schools is increasingly debated within a context of school reform, rights and plurality in multi-ethnic societies. The Catholic schooling system in the Irish Republic (always referred to as Ireland in the text) represents an interesting case internationally because of the extent to which Catholic education is structurally…

The Education Act (1998) is a key policy document in Irish education, emphasising the rights, roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders, including parents, teachers and pupils in schools. Since 1998 the Department of Education and Skills (DES) has stressed the need to introduce an increased role for teachers and pupils in decision-making. It…

Over the past decade, there has been greater attention placed on the potential value of peer support models, particularly in school contexts. This paper uses the case study of an Irish school-based peer mentoring programme to identify the added value that peer led models of social support for children and young people offer in a school setting.…

This research study developed curricular specific open educational resources (OERs) for the teaching of poetry at Junior Certificate level in Irish post-primary schools. It aimed to capture the collaborative design and development process used in the development of the digital resources and describe and evaluate the implementation of the resources…

More than 10 years have passed since the first introduction of the term "digital natives" in Prensky's (2001a, 2001b) two seminal articles. Prensky argues that students today, having grown up in the Digital Age, learn differently from their predecessors, or "digital immigrants". As such, the pedagogical tools and methods used…

Information and communications technology (ICT) has become an acknowledged and integral part of everyday life for many people. As research shows, the use of ICT in appropriate contexts in education can add value to teaching and learning by enhancing the effectiveness of learning itself and being a significant motivational factor in the students'…

Technology education in Irish post-primary schools is undergoing significant change. In recent years the syllabi of all technology-related subjects have been revised. A new subject, Design and Communication Graphics, has replaced the traditional Technical Drawing subject. This new subject aims to develop students' spatial awareness and graphical…

This article explores how the nature of history as a subject has shaped the subcultural identities of the eight teachers in the History Department of an Irish post-primary school. Using a biographical, cultural and micropolitical framework popular within symbolic interactionism, this case study is based on data gathered over three years from…

This monographic series volume contains two separate monographs. "The Training of Student Teachers in Discovery Methods of Instruction and Learning," (John Heywood, Sarah Heywood) discusses the polarization of discovery learning and expository teaching. It describes a unit in the applied psychology of instruction, commonly known as…