Over the past thirty years, I’ve sought to explain to educators and parents that each child is a natural genius, born with innate curiosity, creativity, playfulness, imagination, wonder, wisdom, and many other qualities besides.  As many great thinkers have pointed out, the challenge is not how to get our children to be creative or curious,...Read More

In this blog post, I’d like to talk about what they call ‘’value added’’ measures in school reform.  Basically, this means judging teachers according to the standardized test results that their students get over the course of the year.  First, let me say something about the term ‘’value added’’ because at first glance an unassuming...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

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

The theory of multiple intelligences as developed by Dr. Howard Gardner has received a drubbing over the past 15-20 years for not being ”evidence based.”  Elsewhere I described my objections to this term as it is being used in education.  But suffice it to say in this post that when we look at the Latin...Read More