capacity
capitalism
capitation
care ethics
carousel
a teaching approach which has a number of different activities or 'stations' which individuals or groups visit and work on in sequence.
cascading
case study
catchment area
category mistake
central institutions
a term used in 20th century Scotland for a number of higher education colleges, rather similar to polytechnics, centrally funded by government, offering degree-level courses, usually in technical subjects. Many have since become universities in their own right, or merged with existing universities. Those remaining are now known as centrally-funded colleges.
centralisation
charity school
child abuse
child development
child guidance
child protection
choice
citizenship
civil service
civil society
class
class contact
classical conditioning
classroom management
closed question
cloze procedure
co-curriculum
coaching
cognitive
cognitive constructivism
cognitive development
cognitive dissonance
coherence
collaboration
collaborative learning
an approach where learners work on a task together, dependent on and accountable to each other. Each learner contributes to, and benefits from others' involvement in, the activity. It can be seen as aligned most obviously to social constructivist theory. While related to cooperative learning, it is distinguished by the fact there is a common task and a single group result. Cooperative learning can involve separate tasks and individual outcomes although the process may be marked by shared activity and mutual support.
colloquium
commercialisation
common curriculum
common sense
sound, practical judgement which is not based on specialised knowledge or training. While given status in ordinary language, what constitutes 'common sense' for any one social group or culture may actually involve prejudice, superstition or ignorance. Appeals to 'common sense' as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute, therefore, need to be treated cautiously.
communitarianism
communities of practice
communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour. The focus is on the processes of social learning that occur when groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. While it can, and does, refer to all human environments, in education it is particularly used with regard to professional cooperation in various situations. The concept has been developed most prominently by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (see also situated learning).
community
community education
community of inquiry
compacting
an approach, particularly common in the USA, which seeks to tailor the curriculum more closely to specific students by identifying the learner’s prior competence and so determining which parts of a planned programme may be skipped and alternative, more appropriate, activities provided. As can be seen, it is most often designed for high-achieving learners in the specific curriculum area (see also differentiation)
comparative education
competence
competences
competency-based
competition
comprehensive schooling
conative
concept maps
conceptual analysis
concrete operational
conditional
conditioning
conductive education
conflict of interest
congruent teaching
an approach, most common in teacher education courses, where what is being taught is mirrored by how it is taught. For example, teaching students about groupwork is done through the medium of groupwork; another example would be teaching about cooperative learning through having the students cooperate together. The term is sometimes used in the general sense of the expectation that teacher educators should model good practice for their student teachers.
consensus theory
consequentialism
conservatism
consistency
constructivism
a theory which regards learning as an active process where the learner constructs and internalises new concepts, ideas, and knowledge based on their present and past experiences. Learning is not a received object, but a created process. Two main forms of the theory are cognitive constructivism and social constructivism. More generally in the social sciences, it can also refers to a range of approaches which view elements thought to have objective reality as instead being social or cultural 'constructs'.
consumerism
contingent
contingent teaching
continuing professional development (CPD)
in education, the ongoing process whereby teachers and others upgrade and develop their professional knowledge and skills. Nowadays, it tends to refer to an organised system as opposed to being a voluntary or optional extra. Thus, while it may address issues of lifelong learning and personal development, it is also motivated by a political concern for accountability in the public sector generally, and specifically designed to counter the historical phenomenon that teachers, once qualified, had no requirement or incentive to 'improve' or keep up-to-date.
continuous assessment
an ongoing process of identifying the knowledge, skills, or attitudes of a learner as opposed to one based on specific, discrete testing. It is often thought to be a fairer system for those who tend to perform abnormally in tests and it may also be more reliable as it depends on a body of evidence rather than data from a single test. It can be problematic however as it can lack robustness and its reliability can also be affected by subjective teacher impressions.
contracting-out
contractualism
an approach to social and moral theory which understands the state and the rule of law in terms of a reputed agreement between the individual and society, by which certain potential individual freedoms are sacrificed for the mutual benefits which flow from such a 'contract'. It features in the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and informs the work of more modern theorists such as John Rawls. Its influence can be seen in approaches to behaviour management such as school students being involved in drawing up their own school and classroom rules, and more overtly in disciplinary approaches which involve individuals signing contracts regarding their future behaviour.
control
control group
convergent
cooperative learning
cooperative teaching
core
core knowledge
devised by an American educator, E.D. Hirsch, it is a set of cultural facts and information said to form a shared intellectual landcape for learners (in a particular society) and aims to be the core for the school curriculum. Supporters see it as empowering for disadvantaged groups who may not otherwise have access to this sort of knowledge. Critics see it as simplistic (a list of facts with right/wrong answers), potentially narrowing to the curriculum, essentially conservative, and its composition deeply problematic as the selection of what is included tends to favour dominant groups in society and is unlikely to reflect modern multicultural perspectives.
corporal punishment
correlation
correspondence course
correspondence theory
counselling
counter-intuitive
coursework
cramming
crash course
creaming
creationism
creativity
credentialism
crisis management
criterion-referencing
critical consciousness
critical friend
critical incident
critical pedagogy
critical realism
a philosophical view, in modern times associated with Roy Bhaskar (b.1944), which asserts that our knowledge of the world refers to the-way-things-really-are, but in an incomplete, provisional sense which will necessarily be revised as that knowledge develops. It therefore avoids the extreme postmodernist position that any interpretation of reality is as good as any other, avoids the idealist view that there is no external reality, but also avoids the naïve realist or positivist view that there is one single knowable truth 'out there'.
critique
cross reference
cross-curricular
cultural capital
culture
curriculum
cut-off point
in an assessment marking scheme, the score which is the minimum accepted as a pass or for a specific grade.