This blog post of mine originally appeared in Gail and Paul Dennison’s new website Hearts at Play, on Thursday, August 29, 2013.   The Dennison’s are the co-founders of Brain Gym® which has helped so many kids with learning difficulties achieve success in school, home, and life.  I am happy to connect with them on this...Read More

I’ve written a book for educators called The Best Schools: How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice (publisher:  The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, December, 2006).  In this book I suggest that our educational climate has become totally overwhelmed by what I call an “academic achievement discourse.”  This discourse concentrates on accountability, rubrics,...Read More

 A recent book by developmental psychologist David Elkind is entitled The Power of Play, and I would recommend it to parents, educators, psychotherapists, and anyone else who has an interest in play and children.  David Elkind was a disciple of Jean Piaget, the great French structuralist thinker who changed people’s conceptions of how children think.  In this...Read More

Increasingly we’re seeing early childhood education programs veering toward formal academic learning.  This is a distressing trend, inasmuch as it makes young children do things (formal reading and math, computer instruction) that they are not developmentally ready for, and that take precious time away from letting children be children.  There are no critical periods in...Read More

Thirty-five years ago, when I was at the beginning of my teaching career, Piaget was all the rage.  We read his books, and puzzled over how observation of children interacting with real life situations could enable us to understand the development of their minds.  We also were able to catch the tail end of interest...Read More