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presidential primary candidate:
professor of psychology and education:
WHAT DO WE WANT CHILDREN TO LEARN?
Beyond basic literacy and numeracy, it has become next to impossible to predict what kinds of knowledge people will need to thrive in the mid-21st century....[T]he only defensible answer to the question of what we want schools to accomplish is that they should teach students to use their minds well, in school and beyond (Kuhn, 2005). The two broad sets of skills I identify as best serving this purpose are the skills of inquiry and the skills of argument. These skills are education for life, not simply for more school (Anderson et al., 2000). They are essential preparation to equip a new generation to address the problems of the day.
Deanna Kuhn, Professor of Psychology and Education Teachers College
Is Direct Instruction an Answer to the Right Question?
a response to Why Minimally Guided Instruction Does Not Work (pdf file)
EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 42(2), 109–113
Apparently Mike Huckabee has not set foot inside an ed school any time within recent memory.
bonus observation: I might actually be willing to pay more taxes to stop the extraordinary professional development and ongoing education teachers "require."
Starting with the workshops on writing to learn in math and science. I would pay to have my district's science and math teachers not attend another one of these things.
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"The two broad sets of skills I identify as best serving this purpose are the skills of inquiry and the skills of argument."
And these skills don't require anyting more than "basic literacy and numeracy"? The rest is just for "more school"?
I give him a 2 on his rubric for inquiry and argument.
This video is from a group called EducationVotes and the first thing he talks about on the video is teacher pay.
The Kuhn paper is intriguing. First she says the Sweller, Clark, Kirschner study is flawed and in fact a study she has done (in press) shows that the long term effects of discovery learning allow students better contextual applications, whereas direct instruction only has short-term beneficial effects. I'm wondering how she conducted that study. Guess I'll have to wait for it to be published. Where is it going to be published? Why in Phi Delta Kappan, that bastian of self-serving constructivism, where else?
Until that eventful day of PDK publication, we must therefore satisfy ourselves with one of the conclusions of the paper that she just had published in Educational Pscyhology:
"Educators have long been concerned about whether students
are motivated to learn and whether teachers know how to teach. Perhaps we are now at a point at which we should focus attention on what it is that students may be motivated to learn and why they wish to do so. What do they see as
the value of this learning? Only then are we in a position to
contemplate how best to help them achieve their goals."
Uh, let me guess. If a student sees no value in algebra, we don't teach it to him/her? Time to bring out the Summerhill book by A.S. Neill again. Wait; let me warm up by reading a little Kurt Vonnegut to get myself in the mood.
The semi-bewildering thing about all this for me is that there are about five people on the planet who know this is going on.
You, me, and some of our chums, basically.
Everyone else is Mike Huckabee. School is about transmission of our knowledge to the next generation so when we die the stuff we know doesn't die with us.
The irony of the reproduction-of-knowledge concept is that transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next is the basis of cultural evolution, which may be one of the few aspects of human life that actually may distinguish us from other animals...(though I wouldn't bet on it myself!)
Apparently it's
Ed just watched the video and said, "When you have a right-left consensus on all this it's really bad."
I'm glad to hear a historian saying that.
Ed: "When you have right and left saying that what we need is more professional development.....just think how much better X would be if he/she hadn't had all that professional development..."
At a recent board meeting a K-5 teacher ran through a litany of writing workshops she'd attended. (Calkins was on the list.)
This is "writing workshops" as in how-to-teach-writing-workshops.
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