Self-evaluation is going global. This book describes what happened when teams of school students from across the world embarked on the trip of a lifetime to explore the school lives of their international contemporaries.
The students involved in The Learning School project used a variety of tools to evaluate the learning, motivation and self-evaluation abilities of school students in the UK, Sweden, Japan, Germany, the Czech Republic, South Africa and South Korea. From the easy freedom of the Swedish school to the highly structured day in the Czech Republic, this study shows that success and effectiveness in education really is in the eye of the beholder.
The results of this study have significant implications for school leaders and managers, policy makers and academics, and all those concerned with school improvement. This lively and accessible book makes intriguing and important reading, raising fundamental questions about how we judge quality and effectiveness in teaching and learning.

'Self-Evaluation in the Global Classroom is an extraordinary and uplifting read ... This is an intriguing and many-sided tales, told partly by the students, partly by the teachers and the students they observed and partly by two educationalists.' - Times Educational Supplement

'The first important aspect of the book, and it is electric, is the status it accords to the views of students ... It is this according of status, of importance, to the student voice that is John MacBeath's gift to us ... Classroom layout, the structure of the school day, how subjects and lessons are perceived, affective measures of schools, how different students react to lessons, how different lessons differ - it is all here. Yet, in a way, this is all mere illustration of the power of the student view to inform teaching and learning. That is what this book is about and why you should buy it.' - Improving Schools

'an original approach to seeing what is going on in schools. It has pressed the role of the observer and reporter in a culturally challenging way on to fresh young eyes and minds ... The book deserves to be read once by a whole range of people involved in the education enterprise and we should all be aware of the existence of this growing adventurous international project. The book is a great testimony to the achievement of those who dreamed up the idea, got funding for it and for those who participated in it.' - British Journal of Educational Studies

John MacBeath is a Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.