Books for Prep | |
 - Integrated ApproachI use How People Learn in my graduate school class entitled Applied Learning for School Leaders. The strength of this book as a text is that it looks at learning holistically, rather than subject by subject. The three principles can be used to guide understanding of learning whether it is in reading, mathematics, social studies, or science. Additionally, school leaders see the entire school, so approaching the subject holistically accommodates their needs better. My students like the book and express that it is more readable than the usual text book. Since their backgrounds are varied, the integrated approach also gives them lots of entrances into the material. I highly recommend this book for classes concerned with updating the knowledge base of practicing educators. Rating: - Don't believe everything you readThe review offered by Michael J Edelman is a good example of what happens when a person reads a book with an opinion already formed. Generally, that person finds what they need to confirm their opinion, whether it is actually there or not. Although this reviewer does have a point in that the analysis presented in the book is not exactly the stuff of a PhD thesis, or the research terribly modern in every case, it is inappropriate to concoct supposed "contradictions" from the book (that are not actually contradictions if you are willing to be a careful reader) and then use a gross simplification of the debate on reading to slam educational psychology while trumpeting those who have "spent time in the classroom" (i.e. teachers) as the only people who know anything about education. If the reviewer actually had experience in both situations, he would know that a great deal of research in educational psychology is in fact done in a classroom setting, in cooperation with teachers and administrators. My advice: if you are looking for an introduction to the cognitive aspects of teaching and learning, this book will work well for you. Otherwise, look elsewhere. Rating:  - An important book for all people in education Learning is such a natural thing for humans. In a matter of months, the typical human baby goes from being unable to make a sound to being able to understand and use language. After a few years, the neurological connections in their brains are largely completed and all of their senses become active. Many if not most of the basic sensations have been experienced and recorded. However, beyond the universal aspects of human learning, it becomes a very individual experience. The kind of learning that is done in school appears to be beyond what humans are genetically and physiologically designed to do, which means that it cannot be applied en mass. Unfortunately, that is what the public education strategy has been since it was implemented. The development of the factory, where workers had to be punctual, reliable and able to follow detailed instructions, meant that workers had to be interchangeable. Therefore, a public education was designed to be one that tried to mold everyone into the same final product using a standard approach to learning. That strategy was actually very successful for almost a century, where the United States and other developed countries went from limited to almost universal literacy. However, in the last several decades, with the rapid development of new knowledge and specialties, that approach has proven inadequate. It is time to consider new ways of learning, and that begins with learning the different ways that humans learn. The first step, described in detail in the book, is to understand that a newborn baby possesses more ability to learn that was ever realized before. Once experiments were developed that made it possible to measure feedback from infants, it was learned that they were far more aware of their world than previously thought. This is important, in that it demonstrates an important aspect of fundamental patterns of learning. From much of the research cited in the book, it is clear that in our modern society, the standardized curriculum is counterproductive and standardized tests to measure the value of that curriculum are invalid. When the goal is to pass a standardized test, especially when there are penalties for failure, students and teachers alike naturally fall into a basic mindset to prepare for the test. This tends to create an emphasis on rote memorization, stifles learning, and prevents the development of an agile mindset. There is an enormous amount of research, much of which is cited in this book, that strongly suggests that the best education is one where people are forced to resolve situations and problems that present a bit of uniqueness. Environments that are varied and present new situations on a regular basis lead to a greater amount of intellectual stimulation and smarter creatures. This holds for all animals, from rats to humans. While technology can be a tremendous aid, it is not a cure-all. Like all strong medicine it must be administered in intelligent doses. That point is also covered very well in the book. One other very interesting point dealt with cultural differences. A speech-language pathologist was working in an Inuit school and one-third of the class was considered to be in need of assistance by a non-Intuit principal, "because they did not talk in class." However, the "problem" was resolved when the pathologist consulted an Inuit teacher, who cleared it up by saying, "Well-raised Inuit children should not talk in class. They should be learning by looking and listening." This is a very important book for all people involved in education. The educational tactics that served us well in the past are no longer appropriate. By reading and studying the research findings summarized in this book, all stakeholders in education can learn how to more efficiently transfer knowledge into those who want it and need it. Rating:  - Less than meets the eye"How People Learn" is both a simple summary of some recent research in the cognitive sciences and an argument for how teaching should be done. This is currently a very popular topic in the educational industry, as educators look for justification in the cognitive literature for the rather ad-hoc educational theories of the past 40 or 50 years. Most of this volume is devoted to a fairly low-level- let's say High School level- review of selected literature form the cognitive and neuropsychological literature of the last few decades, and as far as it goes, it's not bad. It's spotty, certainly, and musch of it is very old, but the lay reader will still find much of it interesting and informative. But the final chapter- Conclusions- is a tremendous disappointment, at least for this reader. Half the conclusions offered are so simple, and so obvious, as to be laughable. The other half are either contradictory or simply unjustified. Consider this gem: "Transfer and wide application of learning are most likely to occur when learners acheive an organized and coherent understanding of the material; when the situations for transfer share the structure of the original learning; when subject matter has been mastered and practiced; when subject domains overlap and share cognitive elements; when instruction includes specific attention to underlying principles; and when instruction specifically emphasizes transfer." Translated, that means that people can best use things they learn when they've learned them very well, that practice helps, and that it helps to learn something in a way similar to how you're going to use it. Or this: "The predominant indicator of expert status is the amount of time spent working and learning in a subject area to gain mastery of the content" That's Edu-Speak for "the best way to learn material is to practice it" The author then concludes with an attempt to justify the "new approaches to teaching" that had their genesis in the ed school of the 60s and 70s in a way that in no way follows what was found in the last 230 pages: "Traditional education has tended to emphasize memorization and mastery of text. Research on the development of expertise, however, has shown that more than a set of general general problem solving skills or memory for an array of facts is necessary to acheive deep understanding..." Wait a minute. Didn't we just learn that people who learn things best are those who practice them? The biggest problem with this book is that it, like so many education books, is written by people with a lot of time in schools of education, but little or no time in a classroom or a basic psychology lab. The authors misinteprret the findings of others, they ignire a few centuries of existing knowledge, and they tend to use an overly complex terminology that parodies the language of psychology. And they confuse the principles of basic learning with the techniques and strategies of more skilled practitioners. Sometimes the results are merely amusing, but often they have tragic consequences. A perfect example is to be found in the great whole word vs. phonetics debate of the past twenty years. Some education researcher came across the interesting tidbit that skilled readers don't sound out words; they recognize whole words at a glance. This was seized on by the education community, and within a short time phonics were out, whole word was in, and reading acquisition skills plummeted. The educators, amazingly enough, missed the obvious: That the skills required for initial acquisition are very different from the strategies used later on. Even the best readers rely on phonological skills when they encounter new words. If all you learn is whole word, there's no way for you to learn on your own or to sound out new words. Despite the overwheling data in favor of phonetics, Ed schools still push the supposedly superior whole-word teaching method. (The tremendous commercial success of the "Hooked on Phonics" program should be evidence enough regarding which method works better.) As anyone who has actually read the cognitive memory and learning literature of the past few decades will tell you, there are a number of facts regarding learning that are pretty much undisputable. One is that all learning is essentially unconcious. The brain tries to make patterns from repeated stimuli, and to associate these patterns with other patterns. Another is that repeated presentation strengthens these associations. This is something that's been demonstrated down to the cellular level back in the 1960s (Hebb, et al) What this means is that initial learning is all about repetition, and lots of it. The best way to learn to play clainet is to practice clarinet, and the best way to learn to perform multiplication is to practice the heck out of your multiplication tables. You can use all the audio-visual aids, enrichment activies and voyages of self-discovery you want, but the only way to acquire inital skills is through repetition. Somehow, this message still hasn't gotten through to the education schools. Rating: - Very much an agenda setting bookAs someone reading this outside the US, I found the agenda in the book quite interesting. Unsurprisingly about one third of the text is taking up with issues in mathematics and science teaching - a source of major concern in the industrialised West. Lots of advice on principles and techniques (more limited) are offered to the reader. The book's style is that of a report. Topics are numbered and flagged in bold print for your attention. The subsequent text expands on the issues at hand. A valuable component of the book is the number of case studies it references, and one presumes these have been carefully selected. Overall as a review of 'learning sciecne' I found this a most impressive work. My major quibble with it is that the chapter of Brain and Mind sticks out like a sore thumb, and personally I didn't take it to bring anything to the debate in the rest of the book. In association with Amazon.com | |