What do kids need to thrive and learn all they need for adult life? Let’s ask Peter Gray! In this two-minute animated summary of a lecture on the value of play, educational researcher Peter Gray gives six fundamentals for self-directed learning. He’s a Research Professor of Psychology at Boston College, specialising in evolutionary perspectives on […]
Remember Susan Cain? You may have seen her fabulous TED talk that I posted a while ago, based on her book, Quiet: the Power of Introverts. The guru on introverts in an extraverted world, she gives ten tips for parenting introverts on her website, and now she’s got some ideas for how teachers can nurture introverts in […]
A warm welcome to Rochelle Gribble, here with an insightful analysis of the recently-introduced, highly controversial ‘National Standards‘ that New Zealand primary schools are now required to report on twice a year. Rochelle is a once-was, sometimes-is, may-be-again secondary teacher. She has a Masters degree in Education and sometimes even gets to use it! However, […]
Hands up if you had a favourite teacher. You can read about some of mine in an earlier post in this series, and plenty of yours are celebrated in the comments below the post. A passionate teacher is gold. Gold. Rita Pierson was one, and in this 7-minute TED talk, she rouses her audience of […]
If you had a six-year-old child, and institutional schooling had never existed, how would you go about preparing them for adult life? In the next few posts on unschooling, I want to tease out a few different issues and discuss them separately. Today it’s the different social experiences schooled and unschooled (or homeschooled) kids have. […]
It is a legal right in New Zealand for all children to have free education that meets their needs. This includes the right to ‘special education’ for people under 21 years old who need extra support, or something different from the usual classroom teaching. The vision statement of the Ministry of Education, in relation to […]
I once read a report describing the quality of education in a variety of countries which concluded that the best curriculum in the world is the one used in New Zealand. I spat my tea. Poppycock. The one used in New Zealand is simply the best in New Zealand. It cannot be compared with the […]
Which of these comparisons are you most interested in discussing further?
I’ve been reminded this week why the ‘un’ in unschooling is not the same as ‘anti.’ First this challenge from Buffalo Mama, who is unschooling/homeschooling her son after traumatic school experiences: “Unschooling,” maybe, can be seen as an attempt to open up the pressure valve and let some of that build up out of everything […]
I’ve become obsessed with reading about unschooling. If I could wave a wand to make any kind of educational approach feasible for my family, at the moment unschooling is at the top of the wish-list. At first I thought unschooling was the latest, hippest word for homeschooling, but no, it’s its own thing: learning without school […]