Key Missing Piece in School Restructuring

[mzteris]

Got this article from one of the best professors I ever had.


Intellectual Foundations: The Key Missing Piece in School Restructuring

Virtually all agree that the teaching and learning of students should enable them to effectively handle not only challenging intellectual content in the classroom but also challenging practical content in everyday life. Virtually all also agree that we need high intellectual standards — with all the components of education aligned to those standards — so that everything adds up in both the minds of the students and those of the teachers. Every dimension of schooling — curriculum, pedagogy, teacher Inservice, school leadership, school vision, and long term planning — should work together so that students have the best possible chance of raising themselves to a high level of personal, ethical, and intellectual performance, and so that teachers are keenly aware of how best to foster these high level performances.

The quality of student learning is the key variable. Nothing else matters if quality learning is not taking place. And understanding what this means requires that we re-discover the importance of the “intellectual” dimension of student performance. We must come to recognize once again — as we did long ago in our dim educational past, before psychology became the dominant discipline in the design of instruction — that education requires doing intellectual work, developing intellectually, achieving intellectual quality, and having intellectual standards.These are ideas we must deeply re-discover, if we are truly concerned with substantive educational change.

For example, in a recent landmark analysis of successful school restructuring, based on four large-scale studies, Newmann and Wehlage conclude that the key to success is “the intellectual quality of student learning.” This they say requires that teachers have “a vision of high quality intellectual work” and explicit “teaching standards” which enable them to “gauge the intellectual quality of the pedagogy” they use.

But, consider, what does this word ‘intellectual’ really convey to most classroom teachers? Is it a word they are comfortable with? Do they think of themselves as being “intellectual?” And what would it take for the “average” teacher to develop a realistic vision of “intellectual work” and of “intellectual quality” in either student work or pedagogy? Make no mistake; this is not a matter of giving teachers sample lessons to emulate. It is not a matter of giving teachers some new definitions of terms.

-MORE- much more...

http://www.criticalthinking.org/articles/intellectual-foundations-the-key-missing.cfm

[Davis_X_Machina]

1. Hoo boy...

...is that going to make enemies. Usually happens when you're right.

I just emailed it all over the place.

(Surprised to see the author puffing shallow crap like Covey's "The Seven Habits..." though.)

[indurancevile]

2. yeah, teachers "aren't comfortable" with intellectual and don't know what intellectual work is.

only homeschoolers understand "intellectual".

what a pretentious piece of crap that article is.