By: Alvaro Fernandez
Joanne Jacobs, educator, blogger and author of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds, participates today in our Author Speaks Series with an excellent article on how “Schools won’t improve until administrators and teachers can admit the problems, analyze what’s going wrong and try new strategies. Students won’t improve if they think they’re “special” just the way they are.” Enjoy, and feel free to add your comment to engage in a stimulating conversation.
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The First Step Is Failure
By Joanne Jacobs
When self-esteem became an education watchword in 1986, I thought it was a harmless fad. I was wrong: It wasn’t harmless. Many teachers were persuaded that students should be pumped up with praise, regardless of their performance. Schools lowered expectations so students couldn’t fail. Everyone got an “I Am Special” sticker. Till the standards and accountability movement kicked in, students often were judged by how they felt about learning not by whether they’d actually learned something.
Read the rest of this entry »
By: Alvaro Fernandez
Brandon Keim writes a nice post on The Future Science of Altruism at Wired Science Blog, based on an interview with Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Brandon provides good context saying that “Scientists, said Grafman, are understanding how our brains are shaped by culture and environment, and a mechanism of these changes may involve fluctuation in our genes themselves, which we’re only beginning to understand”. (more on this in our post Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nurture).
And gives us some very nice quotes from Dr. Grafman, including
- “One of the ways we differentiate ourselves from other species is that we have a sense of future. We don’t have to have immediate gratification…. But how far can we go into the future? How much of our brain is aimed at doing that? [...]“
- “Other great apes have a frontal lobe, fairly well developed, but not nearly as well developed as our own. If you believe in Darwin and evolution, you argue that the area grew, and the neural architecture had to change in some way to accommodate the abilities associated with that behavior. There’s no doubt that didn’t occur overnight; probably a slow change, and it was one of the last areas of the brain to develop as well. It’s very recent evolutionary development that humans took full advantage of. What in the future? What in the brains can change?”
- “The issue becomes — do we teach this? Train people to do this? Children tend to be selfish, and have to be taught to share.”
The UC Berkeley magazine Greater Good tries to answer that question with a series of articles on Gratitude. I especially enjoyed A Lesson in Thanks, described as Read the rest of this entry »
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