Robin Alexander is Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, and Professor of Education Emeritus at the University of Warwick. He taught in schools and colleges in different parts of Britain before moving to the University of Leeds where he later became Professor of Education. He currently directs the Primary Review, the most comprehensive independent inquiry into English primary education for 40 years: its final report will be published by Routledge in 2009.

Robin Alexander is well known for his advocacy of the cause of primary education and for his penetrating studies, going back to the early 1980s, of thinking, policy, practice and research in this crucial educational phase. Internationally, his standing rests no less on his comparative research on culture, policy, schools and classrooms, and on his seminal contributions to the fast-growing field of pedagogy. Among teachers his development of dialogic teaching as a means of enhancing the quality and learning potential of classroom interaction is also proving highly influential.

Essays on Pedagogy brings together some of Robin Alexander’s most powerful recent writing, drawing on international research to illustrate his view that to engage properly with pedagogy we need to apply cultural, historical and international perspectives, as well as evidence about how children most productively learn and teachers most effectively teach. The book’s themes include: the politicisation of school and classroom life and the dangers of the new ‘pedagogy of compliance’; the benefits and hazards of international comparison; educational dichotomies old and new and how to transcend them; the rare and special chemistry of the personal and the professional which produces outstanding teaching; the centrality of high quality talk to learning and teaching; and how pedagogy might respond to a world which, for the children of today and tomorrow, looks increasingly perilous.

This is a book for teachers and students who see themselves as thinking professionals rather than as mere classroom technicians who dutifully comply with official views of ‘best practice’. Its strong and consistent international perspective will also be of interest to educational comparativists, and is an essential response to globalization and the predicaments facing humanity as a whole.

Robin Alexander’s other books include: Culture and Pedagogy (Blackwell 2001), Towards Dialogic Teaching and Education as Dialogue (Dialogos 2004 and 2006), Learning from Comparing Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Symposium Books, 1999 and 2000), Policy and Practice in Primary Education (Routledge 1997), Versions of Primary Education (Routledge 1995), Changing Primary Practice (Falmer 1987), Change in Teacher Education (Holt Saunders 1984), Primary Teaching (Cassell 1984), The Self-Evaluating Institution (Methuen 1982). Robin Alexander is on the editorial board of Teaching and Teaching Education, International Journal of Educational Research, and Asia Pacific Journal of Education. He has had a long association with education and education reform in India and has published in that country as well as in the UK, Australia, China, France and the United States.

Routledge is pleased to be publishing the two volumes of the final report arising from the already influential Primary Review in spring 2009. The report will draw on a vast body of specially collected and commissioned evidence, and the work of over 100 researchers and advisers led from 2006-9 by Robin Alexander. The first volume will contain the Review’s analysis, conclusions and recommendations, while the second will provide an unrivalled compendium of research in primary education and an important resource for years to come. On the strength of massive media coverage of the Review’s 29 interim reports between October 2007 and May 2008, we are sure that this two-volume final report will provoke considerable interest. Watch the Routledge Education website for further details