Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a German philosopher, linguist, poet, and autodidact who wrote The Ever-Present Origin, an interdisciplinary survey of human and cultural consciousness that was decades ahead of its time. His integral perspective did not deal with the stages of a human life per se (e.g. birth to death), but rather focused on the...Read More
What is tacit knowing? As I pointed out in my last blog post, it’s ”knowing more than we can tell.” One of the best examples comes from oral language. We all learned to speak based on tacit learning experiences. How is it that we can effortlessly put one word right after the other without breaking...Read More
There’s all this talk of ‘’best practices’’ in education but nobody talks about worst practices. Here’s something that I think qualifies as a ‘’worst practice’’ – it involves educators’ propensity to teach mostly explicit knowledge as opposed to tacit knowledge. Scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi bases his understanding of ‘’tacit knowing’’ on the principle ‘’that...Read More
I’m getting fed up with the term ”data-driven instruction” that I keep hearing and reading about in the educational media. To help articulate exactly why the word conjures up such a disagreeable sensation in my gut, I’ve listed seven reasons why the word should be stricken from every educator’s vocabulary. ”Data-driven instruction” is a term...Read More
A lot of recent research supports the systematic teaching of phonemic awareness in beginning reading programs. The problem is that phonics lessons can get awfully dull, with teachers pointing to the letter and having kids say the sound, or students poring over phonics worksheets that ask them to match the right letter to the word,...Read More
Ken Wilber is known as one of the founders of ”integral psychology” which refers to an attempt to formulate a theory of the psyche that incorporates ideas from both psychology and spirituality. Perhaps Wilber’s most well-known model of human development, or ”spectrum of consciousness” is rather simple, based as it is on three different levels: ...Read More
Homework is considered to be part of the natural order of things in school. But in the past twenty years or so there’s been an increasing amount of criticism about its function and use (see for example, Alfie Kohn’s The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing). I too believe...Read More
One of the reasons that I’ve been enthusiastically teaching and writing about Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences for the past thirty-four years, is that it is so easy to understand and apply to one’s own personal life. In this post, I’d like to demonstrate this to you by outlining how you can learn just...Read More
Jane Loevinger (1918-2008) was an American psychologist working in the 20th century who focused on the idea of ego development across the lifespan. According to Loevinger (who worked as an assistant to Erik Erikson in graduate school), the ego (originally formulated by Sigmund Freud) was not a ”thing” but rather a ”process.” Loevinger believed that...Read More
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