“The most admirable of reforms cannot but fall short in practice if teachers of sufficient quality are not available in sufficient quantity…Generally speaking, the more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teacher’s task becomes; and the better our teaching methods, the more difficult they are to apply.”
Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (1970)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“attribution: The ways in which an individual understands the sources of success, difficulty, or failure. Often, people with learning disabilities attribute their successes and failures to factors they do not control, such as luck, the nature of the task, or their own inadequacies. By contrast, successful learners tend to attribute failure or success to their own level of effort and perseverance, and see themselves as having control over the outcomes of their work.
Attribution theory provides an approach to understand the difficulties with motivation experience by some people with learning problems, and also suggests that direct guidance in changing attribution styles may be helpful to those with learning disorders.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Now that I’ve written it, I am having a hard time imagining where I will use this lesson plan on developmental delay. If you can use it, here are the short reading and vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that drive this lesson. If you’d like a slightly longer version (more vocabulary words, and three more questions) of these documents, you can find them here.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Grammar * Rhetoric * Logic * Arithmetic * Geometry * Music * Astronomy/Cosmology
The Seven Liberal Arts divide between the trivium of logic, rhetoric, and grammar and the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry and cosmology. The Trivium were the arts considered necessary for the creation of an active citizen of the ancient world, well educated enough to be able to analyze what was being said, check it for rationality and to be able to speak and answer in his turn. With the addition of the quadrivium by the scholastics of the early medieval age, the whole basic course structure and purpose of a university education was established—which was to create an aware citizen. The system endured, more or less unchanged, right through to nineteenth-century Europe.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Rationalism: 1. The doctrine associated especially with the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), and the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von. Liebniz (1646-1716) that it is possible to obtain knowledge by reason alone, that there is only one valid system of reasoning and it is deductive in character, and that everything is explicable in principle by this form of reasoning…. 2. The more general view that everything is explicable in principle by one system of reasoning. 3. A general commitment to reason as opposed to faith, religious belief, prejudice, tradition, or any other source of belief that is without foundation in reason. Rationalist: one who believes in or practices rationalism (1, 2, 3). Rationalistic.
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“In identifying important organizing principles, it is necessary to note that the criteria, continuity, sequence, and integration apply to the experiences of the learner and not to the way in which these matters may be viewed by someone already in command of the elements to be learned. Thus, continuity involves the recurring emphasis in the learner’s experience upon these particular elements; sequence refers to the increasing breadth and depth of the learner’s development; and integration refers to the learner’s increased unity of behavior in relating to the elements involved.”
Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“Cognitive Dissonance: A major cognitive theory propounded by Leon Festinger in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957). The theory addresses competing, contradictory, or opposing elements of cognition and behavior: for example, why do people continue smoking, when they know that smoking damages health? Festinger suggests that individuals do not believe so much out of logic as out of psychological need—a kind of psycho-logic. He argues that, striving for harmony and balance, there is a drive towards consonance amongst cognitions. Dissonance reduction may happen either through a change in a person’s behavior or a shift in attitude; thus, in the example cited above, either they stop smoking, or else modify their knowledge, for example, to the belief that ‘most people who smoke don’t die young and so aren’t really at risk.’ The theory is almost tautological in postulating some inner need for consistency, and has been criticized for ambiguity, but it has been enormously influential.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Here is a lesson plan on oppositional-defiant disorder along with the short reading and vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that comprise its work. If you want a slightly different–and a bit longer–version of these materials, you can find that here.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Practice, exercise, are involved in the acquisition of power, but they do not take the form of meaningless drill, but of practicing the art. They occur as part of the operation of attaining a desired end…. All genuine education terminates in discipline, but it proceeds by engaging the mind in activities worthwhile for their own sake.”
How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
Here’s another teaching support as a table of scripted activities structures I grabbed a couple of years ago from R. Keith Sawyer’s (ed.) book The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Before you blow this off like I probably would after reading the adjective “scripted”, let me point out that this isn’t scripted curriculum like the crap that various educational “innovators” or “entrepreneurs” all too frequently shill in our schools, but rather structured methods of inquiry that are, in fact, scholarly in structure.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.