During my recent visit to the Philippines, I had the pleasure of visiting two exemplary schools that meet my definition of “best schools” as described in my book The Best Schools:  How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice.  They were the Explorations Preschool and its sister school, the Keys Grade School, both in Mandaluyong, part...Read More

When Albert Einstein was four, his father gave him a simple magnetic compass for his birthday.  Later on, in adulthood, Einstein wrote that this simple toy served to unlock his feelings of curiosity and wonder about the world   He said that from that time on he was filled with a desire to ferret out the...Read More

I fly a lot, and when I travel I see a lot of people carrying teddy bears in the airport; not just children; adults too.  Everytime I see somebody carrying one onto a plane, I think of the idea of the “transitional object.”  This term was coined in 1951 by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.  It’s...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

Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development model represents probably the most well-known and highly regarded map of the human life cycle in contemporary western culture.  This theory was first articulated in 1950 in chapter seven (“The Eight Ages of Man”) of his book Childhood and Society, and further developed in later books and articles. Erikson...Read More