Each year, thousands of enthusiastic and hope-filled candidates enter various Teacher Education and Professional Development Programs across the country. If they are anything like my own younger and admittedly saltier self, they arrive with idealistic and sometimes even radical notions about becoming a more engaging, caring and generally ‘better’ kind of teacher than they perceive […]
Tag: #IEhistory
Understanding Inquiry as the Practice of Freedom
In an attempt to more adequately understand the nature of inquiry, one eventually – and quite necessarily – runs into questions of philosophic purpose. Fortunately enough for us, educational theory isn’t terribly shy in this regard. Economic utility, building a peaceful and pluralistic society, and honouring students’ nascent potential all have staked their claim to […]
King William I, The Conqueror…Of Great Writing!
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 […]
The Place Of Wildness And Wonder In Critical Thinking
By Ira Rabois What is critical thinking? One element of critical thinking that most everyone agrees on is “higher order thinking,” which includes evaluating the appropriateness of evidence, the truth of propositions, and the soundness of arguments. But is this enough? I think you need to add imagination, mindfulness and empathy, and to think of critical […]
A Better Way To Teach History
By Robin Ulster and James Denby (IdeaDriven.org) Those of us who teach history are, in a sense, magicians. We dedicate ourselves to conjuring and bringing to life events from the past – at times thousands of years old. The tools of our conjuring act are traditionally books, some websites, and the occasional movie or song. Oh, […]