Monthly Archives: June 2014
Learning Through Play
bring back PLAY!
“Learning through play with “hands-on, minds-on” approaches (not workbooks) is a powerful way forward. Play gives children space to dream, discover, improvise, and challenge convention. It’s crucial to social, emotional, cognitive and even physical development, helping them grow up “better adjusted, smarter and less stressed.” We know this.
So, where did play go?
Over the last three decades, while schoolchildren K-12 have become better test-takers, they’ve also become less imaginative, according to many experts in education, including Kyung Hee Kim, a professor of education at the College of William and Mary.
In 2011, she analyzed scores from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and found that: “children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different…
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Why Academic Tenacity Matters
LOVE THIS!!
Source: Scientific American, Apr 2014
Academically tenacious students:
- Feel as though they belong in school, academically and socially.
- See the relevance of education for achieving their personal future goals.
- Value effort.
- Seek challenging tasks that will help them learn rather than stick with easy tasks that offer no opportunity for growth.
- View setbacks as an opportunity for learning rather than an indication of their low innate ability or worth.
- Have a number of self-regulation strategies at their disposal to remain motivated and avoid distractions over the short and long haul.
- Believe in their ability to learn and perform.
- Enter the classroom with the goal of mastering the material, not outcompeting other students.
- Have a sense of purpose, and feel that their learning will contribute value to the world beyond themselves.
- Have positive, supportive relationships with teachers and peers.
Don’t Take Notes on a Laptop!
Learning^2 