Steph Ainsworth
Biographic Data
| ID | 3843868 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steph Ainsworth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steph |
| FAMILY NAME | Ainsworth |
| SIGNATURE | AINSWORTH S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Manchester Metropolitan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0739-6485 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
What are the possibilities for promoting teacher resilience at the school level? Insights from the co‐development of a participatory approach in England
Alongside the growing teacher supply crisis, there are widespread concerns about the mental health and well‐being of teachers, leading to a growing interest in the concept of teacher resilience. In this article, we investigate the possibilities for promoting teacher resilience at the school level using a novel participatory approach. We report a process of ecology mapping conducted with eight project partner schools, which informed the co‐develop…
Methodological approach to evaluating the DreamBox Reading Plus intervention
Background Improving reading skills in primary school pupils is a crucial focus for educators, researchers, and policymakers worldwide. Within the United Kingdom many schools are opting to use “evidence-based” reading programs to deliver or supplement the teaching of reading. This article reports a protocol for a rigorous efficacy study of DreamBox Reading Plus, an online adaptive program aimed at improving reading fluency, comprehension, and voc…
Towards an aesthetics of grammar learning
The last few decades have seen growing interest in the field of disciplinary aesthetics. While the physical sciences and mathematics have attracted significant interest in this area, relatively little attention has been given to the aesthetic potential of learning about the structure of one’s own native language. Within this paper, we bring together ideas from evolutionary aesthetics, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience to explore the questio…
New perspectives on middle leadership in schools in England – Persistent tensions and emerging possibilities
To afford school middle leaders meaningful opportunities to initiate change, we must provide them with the space and flexibility to engage with agentic and creative responses to policy and practice. Whilst we argue that the tensions identified in Bennett’s seminal reviews persist, there may, nonetheless, be opportunities for school middle leaders to creatively influence educational agendas. Through engaging in a critical interpretative synthesis …
Multimodality and Multilingualism
Decentring the ‘resilient teacher’
The teacher retention crisis has led to a strong discourse around the need for teachers to ‘build their resilience’, which places the responsibility for coping at the feet of the individual teacher. Contemporary research, however, supports a social-ecological approach, which takes account of environmental influences within the resilience process. This study draws upon five focus groups (28 teachers) to present evidence for complex interdependenci…
Global versus phonemic similarity
There is long-standing debate about the extent to which children cognitively represent words in terms of global properties or phonological segments, yet few studies have investigated how children's sensitivity to phonemic versus global similarity changes over time. The current study uses a mispronunciation-reconstruction task to measure both types of sensitivity within a cross-sectional (N = 90, aged 3;2 to 5;7) and longitudinal sample (N = 23, a…
Difficulties assessing knowledge of grammatical terminology
This paper starts by reporting on the design and trialling of an informal, low-stakes test designed to assess the knowledge of grammar terms of pre-service primary school teachers following the UK’s National Curriculum, the results of which were used to inform the design of a series of optional grammar classes. The test proved surprisingly difficult to design, and the final version contains many flaws, some predictable and some less so. In this p…
Affective knowledge versus affective pedagogy
In recent years, there has been growing interest in the role of affect within education. Within this paper, the authors make a distinction between affective pedagogy, which they refer to as ways of teaching that are designed to evoke particular emotional states, and affective knowledge, which they refer to as aspects of knowledge or knowing which seem to bring forth particular emotions organically. Using explicit grammar knowledge as a test case,…
Quantifying teacher resilience
Previous research has identified individual and contextual level factors that may promote resilience in teachers; however, little is known about their relative importance in predicting measures of positive adaptation. Questionnaire data were collected from 226 UK teachers. Relative importance analyses identified a number of significant predictors of job satisfaction, burnout, and wellbeing. The results suggest that contextual influences on teache…
Contrasting Explicit With Implicit Measures of Children's Representations
Current theories of phonological development make contrasting predictions about the role of vocabulary growth and orthographic knowledge in the emergence of segmental phonological representations. Testing these predictions in children is made difficult by the metacognitive nature of tasks used to assess phonological representations. In this study, we used novel tasks to measure the sensitivity of 88 children (3 years 2 months-5 years 7 months) to…
Quantifying teacher resilience
Previous research has identified individual and contextual level factors that may promote resilience in teachers; however, little is known about their relative importance in predicting measures of positive adaptation. Questionnaire data were collected from 226 UK teachers. Relative importance analyses identified a number of significant predictors of job satisfaction, burnout, and wellbeing. The results suggest that contextual influences on teache…
Quantifying teacher resilience
Previous research has identified individual and contextual level factors that may promote resilience in teachers; however, little is known about their relative importance in predicting measures of positive adaptation. Questionnaire data were collected from 226 UK teachers. Relative importance analyses identified a number of significant predictors of job satisfaction, burnout, and wellbeing. The results suggest that contextual influences on teache…
Contrasting Explicit With Implicit Measures of Children's Representations
Current theories of phonological development make contrasting predictions about the role of vocabulary growth and orthographic knowledge in the emergence of segmental phonological representations. Testing these predictions in children is made difficult by the metacognitive nature of tasks used to assess phonological representations. In this study, we used novel tasks to measure the sensitivity of 88 children (3 years 2 months-5 years 7 months) to…
Affective knowledge versus affective pedagogy
In recent years, there has been growing interest in the role of affect within education. Within this paper, the authors make a distinction between affective pedagogy, which they refer to as ways of teaching that are designed to evoke particular emotional states, and affective knowledge, which they refer to as aspects of knowledge or knowing which seem to bring forth particular emotions organically. Using explicit grammar knowledge as a test case,…
Difficulties assessing knowledge of grammatical terminology
This paper starts by reporting on the design and trialling of an informal, low-stakes test designed to assess the knowledge of grammar terms of pre-service primary school teachers following the UK’s National Curriculum, the results of which were used to inform the design of a series of optional grammar classes. The test proved surprisingly difficult to design, and the final version contains many flaws, some predictable and some less so. In this p…
Decentring the ‘resilient teacher’
The teacher retention crisis has led to a strong discourse around the need for teachers to ‘build their resilience’, which places the responsibility for coping at the feet of the individual teacher. Contemporary research, however, supports a social-ecological approach, which takes account of environmental influences within the resilience process. This study draws upon five focus groups (28 teachers) to present evidence for complex interdependenci…
Global versus phonemic similarity
There is long-standing debate about the extent to which children cognitively represent words in terms of global properties or phonological segments, yet few studies have investigated how children's sensitivity to phonemic versus global similarity changes over time. The current study uses a mispronunciation-reconstruction task to measure both types of sensitivity within a cross-sectional (N = 90, aged 3;2 to 5;7) and longitudinal sample (N = 23, a…
Multimodality and Multilingualism
Towards an aesthetics of grammar learning
The last few decades have seen growing interest in the field of disciplinary aesthetics. While the physical sciences and mathematics have attracted significant interest in this area, relatively little attention has been given to the aesthetic potential of learning about the structure of one’s own native language. Within this paper, we bring together ideas from evolutionary aesthetics, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience to explore the questio…
New perspectives on middle leadership in schools in England – Persistent tensions and emerging possibilities
To afford school middle leaders meaningful opportunities to initiate change, we must provide them with the space and flexibility to engage with agentic and creative responses to policy and practice. Whilst we argue that the tensions identified in Bennett’s seminal reviews persist, there may, nonetheless, be opportunities for school middle leaders to creatively influence educational agendas. Through engaging in a critical interpretative synthesis …
Methodological approach to evaluating the DreamBox Reading Plus intervention
Background Improving reading skills in primary school pupils is a crucial focus for educators, researchers, and policymakers worldwide. Within the United Kingdom many schools are opting to use “evidence-based” reading programs to deliver or supplement the teaching of reading. This article reports a protocol for a rigorous efficacy study of DreamBox Reading Plus, an online adaptive program aimed at improving reading fluency, comprehension, and voc…
What are the possibilities for promoting teacher resilience at the school level? Insights from the co‐development of a participatory approach in England
Alongside the growing teacher supply crisis, there are widespread concerns about the mental health and well‐being of teachers, leading to a growing interest in the concept of teacher resilience. In this article, we investigate the possibilities for promoting teacher resilience at the school level using a novel participatory approach. We report a process of ecology mapping conducted with eight project partner schools, which informed the co‐develop…
Psychology (7 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Pedagogy (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (3 works) · Grammar (3 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (3 works) · Resilience and Mental Health (3 works) · Cognitive psychology (2 works)