Learning Fundamentals


The "learning fundamentals" expressed by Peter Gray serve as an eye-opening look at the state of today’s educational culture: we seem to be doing almost everything completely contradictory to what he advises. I was actually cynical when I first heard about the Sudbury Valley School, because I assumed it was the type of school where the extremely wealthy seek out an alternative education, away from public schools and traditional private schools, the type of school you hear Silicon Valley executives sending their children. Given their backgrounds of privilege and opportunity, it really isn’t surprising that the schools for the children of the wealthy can produce the best outcomes; I was surprised to learn that the Sudbury school is non-selective, enrolls students from a wide array of socioeconomic backgrounds, and operates on half the budget of the local public schools. I thought it would be useful to organize Gray’s learning fundamentals into a table and to compare them to the culture of today’s public schools and propose how they could be implemented in the existing school climate.



References

 Camp Stomping Ground. (2015, December 4). Peter Gray - Self-directed learning fundamentals. Youtube. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/YoE480mzrk0

 Gray, P. [Chicago Ideas]. (2015, June 30). Peter Gray: Mother nature's pedagogy: Insights from evolutionary psychology. Youtube. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/G2BAJ_svbhA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding the Impact of Technology - A Reflection

Image
The proliferation of internet connected devices and digital media has made technology an integral part of contemporary life in the developed world, with practically every daily human endeavor having the ability to being augmented by technology. As we benefit from the presence of technology in the various facets of our lives, we also need to be aware of the issues of digital footprints, access, and the effects of technology on our behavior and well-being. Communication and the sharing of information has been revolutionized by social media; we can synchronously connect with other individuals from anywhere in the world. This has given us unprecedented access to information and to each other, affecting many fields, including business, education, and healthcare. A lay person can easily connect with a leader in any field on Twitter, creating a type of access and interaction that was impossible before social media. Using social media, the average person can express their views publicly the sa
Read more

Elements of Digital Citizenship - A Reflection

Image
The proliferation of new forms of technology and media in the 21st century, such as smartphones and social media, has left us in a new age of innovation in our lifestyles, bringing with it a digital world. The natives of this new world are Generation Z, the generation born around the turn of the millenium and the years after. They have always known a world where technology was integrated into daily life and are faced with new challenges previous generations did not have to face. To meet these challenges of membership in the digital s paces of this new world they inhabit, they need to develop a new skill set, that of digital citizenship. I would define digital citizenship as the  application of principles that impact digital lifestyles, habits, consumptions and interactions in order to sustain and improve digital communities (Heick, 2018; Ohler, 2011; Ribble, 2015). Ribble (2015) discussed how digital citizenship needs to be modelled, promoted and cultivated in students at all
Read more

Educators and Mass Media - A Reflection

Image
" Copyright Symbols " ( CC BY 2.0 ) by  MikeBlogs As educators we need to be mindful when using the work of others, and also appropriately model this to our students. This is part of practicing and modeling ethical behavior, which is important to the idea of citizenship, both digital and not. The two major behaviors we need to avoid when using works created by others are plagiarism and copyright infringement. Plagiarism is the act of presenting another person's work as your own and not giving them credit. Plagiarism can be  a word for word duplication of another person's work or using their ideas in your own work without giving them credit. Copyright infringement is when a work that is under protection of copyright law is used without the permission and compensation to the copyright holder, infringing of the rights granted to them by the copyright. While both these acts can be thought of as fraudulent and unethical behaviors, copyright infringement is illegal a
Read more