Education Readings
By Allan Alach
I welcome suggested articles, so if you come
across a gem, email it to me at allanalach@inspire.net.nz
What the Fidget Spinners Fad Reveals About Disability Discrimination
‘Autistic people (and others with developmental disabilities) have
been fighting a war for decades. It's a war against being forcibly, often
brutally, conditioned to behave more like neurotypicals, no matter the cost to
our own comfort, safety, and sanity. And those of us who need to stim in order
to concentrate (usually by performing small, repetitive behaviors like, oh I
don't know, spinning something) have endured decades of "Quiet Hands"
protocols, of being sent to the principal's office for fidgeting, of being told
"put that down/stop that and pay attention!," when we are in fact
doing the very thing that allows us to pay attention instead of being horribly
distracted by a million other discomforts such as buzzing lights and scratchy
clothing.’
Arts education is vital to help foster creativity and innovation
‘I have a dream that this nation will achieve its full creative and
economic potential and that Arts
What Does it Mean to Be Educated?
‘Seeing all this, would a modern Rip van Winkle even send his kids
to school? Or would he see school as helplessly behind the times and opt for a
radically different path to give his children the education they actually
needed to thrive in the modern world?’
Reading Readiness Has To Do With The Body
‘We know that our little ones walk and talk on their own timetables.
No rewards or punishments are necessary to “teach” them. Yet children are
expected to read, write and spell starting at five and six years old as if they
develop the same way at the same time. Academics are pushed on young
children
with the assumption this will make them better students. This approach is not
only unnecessary, it may be contributing to problems such as learning
disorders, attention deficits, and long term stress.’
Response: 'The Toughest Part of Teaching Is…'
‘What do you think is the toughest part of teaching and how do you
deal with it?
Teaching has no shortage of tough moments. What are the most
common ones, and how can we best get through them?’
http://bit.ly/2rj4qbq
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| This is so true - the further away from the classroom the easier to give advice |
Contributed by Bruce Hammonds:
How Children
Naturally Learn
From Wayne Morris
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| Thanks for sharing Wayne |
6 Traits of
Life-Changing Teachers
‘In education
there’s a lot of talk about standards, curriculum, and assessment—but when we
ask adults what they remember about their education, decades after they’ve left
school, the answers are always about their best teachers. So what is it about
great educators that leaves such an indelible impression?’
How People
Learn: An Evidence-Based Approach
‘Teachers will
always need to use their knowledge of students and content to make professional
judgments about classroom practice. However, we believe the art of teaching
should also be informed by a robust understanding of the learning sciences so
that teachers can align their decisions with our profession's best
understanding of how students learn. Unfortunately, our education system is
rife with misconceptions and confusion about learning. So let's clear away the
myths and focus on well-established cognitive principles and their implications
for the classroom:’
Why
Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age
‘There is a
tendency to dismiss handwriting as a nonessential skill, even though
researchers have
warned that learning to write may be the key to, well,
learning to write.
And beyond the
emotional connection adults may feel to the way we learned to write, there is a
growing body of research on what the normally developing brain learns by
forming letters on the page, in printed or manuscript format as well as in
cursive.’
From Bruce’s ‘goldie oldies’ file:
Testing our way into the 19thC!
‘Those with their minds firmly fixed in a
patronising, mechanistic, or technocratic approach, always see measurement as
the ultimate way of guaranteeing progress.Like any simple solution to a complex
problem it is wrong -and has been proved so. Standard based teaching was the
approach of education in Victorian times - each class was called a standard (
standard one etc) that you progressed to if you passed the test. In the early
days, in the UK, teachers were paid by results their students gained in the
tests. Maybe that is next on our 'new' governments agenda.’http://bit.ly/2rW9kHM
Cathy Wylie outlines new wave of change for New Zealand Schools!
‘In 1989 an ‘earthquake’ hit education in the form of ‘Tomorrows
Schools’.Now, almost three decades later, A NZCER chief
researcher Cathy Wylie has written a definitive and compelling story of school
self-management .Cathy answers the questions: What was the real effect of ‘Tomorrows
Schools’? Has the New Zealand Schools system improved as a result? And what
changes are needed now to meet our expectations of schools?’
A Question Based Curriculum
‘I wonder what would happen if all the expert’s curriculums
disappeared; and all the standardized tests? And, with them, all the
technocrats who believe that everything needs to measured and turned into data.
Anyway such people never bothered to measure anything important such as,
curiosity, love of learning and persistence; the very things that mark out
successful innovative individuals Instead consider what would happen if we
decided to create entire curriculums from student question and concerns?’
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