By Tim Waddington One of the more vexing challenges in Social Studies education is teaching children how to write, you know, well. This post intends to support your thinking about what works, doesn’t work, and cannot work. In many lessons with a focus on writing, including those I abashedly confess are mine, one regularly sees the […]
Category: Imaginative Historical Education & Inquiry (IHI): Activities & Insights
Posts exploring the intersection of imagination, Imaginative Education, Historical Education/Humanities, and inquiry. Philosophic discussion & practical ideas across the social sciences.
The Uses And Abuses Of “Constructivism” As A Pedagogical Concept
By Tim Waddington What’s in word? Quite a lot, it turns out. Sometime during the spring of 1597, William Shakespeare ironically stuffed the phrase “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” into the hopelessly smitten and abundantly naïve mouth of fair Juliet, thereby expressing the latter’s rather convenient indifference to her Romeo’s […]
Path Dependence: Explaining Our Collective Resistance to Curricular Innovation
By Tim Waddington and Riley Hill In case you missed it, there’s a bright and shiny new path being forged in curriculum studies both here in British Columbia and in several jurisdictions across the developed world. Premised in student-centric, postmodern and constructivist thought, the notion of Concept-Centered curriculum and instruction has gained traction in response […]
Look Out! A Spontaneous Eruption Of Cognitive Tools!
By Dr. Tim Waddington **DISCLAIMER** You are not going to make it all the way through to the end of this blog, guaranteed! Anyone with even limited teaching experience will attest that the following scenario is true, … can feel true, … has the unsolicited air of ‘truthiness’ lurking about it. Every teacher, even […]
Was Literacy Just A Phase?
By Dr. Tim Waddington If the cultural phenomenon of blogging has taught us one thing, surely it is that the old divide between producers and consumers of knowledge-content is growing increasingly irrelevant. However, if the cultural phenomenon of blogging has taught us two things, the ability to generate pithy, unjustifiable bombast as clickbait for a […]
Aristotle And A Leather Jacket: An Example of Concept-Centered Teaching
The new BC Curriculum calls for the organization of learning around strong Concept Centres. Here’s an example of what that can look like in practice. By Dr. Tim Waddington S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is a genuinely engaging novel for young readers. For those of you somehow unfamiliar – spoiler alert – the novel follows two groups of teens in […]
