Identifying the need to improve the American education system isn’t enough; schools need strategies to battle their students’ poor performance. And those strategies must include an examination of cognitive learning. In his book “Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom,” John T. Bruer lays out strategies for improving student achievement. Those ideas […]
Two California professors who advocate changing the educational environment to improve learning won the 1993 award. Roland Tharp and Ronald Gallimore describe in their 1988 book, “Rousing Minds to Life: Teaching, Learning and Schooling in Social Context,” a comprehensive approach to retooling education. Tharp and Gallimore suggest three keys to educational development — activity, context […]
By listening to the way children and teen-agers speak about themselves and their lives, Carol Gilligan changed the way educators think about adolescent development and education. That research, revealed in her book “In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,” led to Gilligan’s selection as winner of the 1992 award. In the book, Gilligan […]
“Teachers of young children need to be, above all, storytellers.” That idea, espoused in Kieran Egan’s book, “Primary Understanding: Education in Early Childhood,” has earned the Canadian author the 1991 award. Kieran Egan, a professor of education at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, identifies four sequential stages of human understanding: the Mythic, the […]
Everyone has at least seven intelligences, most of which are overlooked by standard IQ tests. That’s the theory advanced by Howard Gardner, an educational psychologist at Harvard University who has won the 1990 award. In his 1983 book, “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” Gardner distinguishes seven kinds of human intelligence: linguistic, musical, […]
Action first, knowledge after. That’s one of the principles behind a job training program developed by French educator Bertrand Schwartz, whose innovations in social and vocational preparation for disadvantaged youth earned him the 1989 award. “Knowledge only comes into the picture as required by the doing process,” Schwartz said in a 1987 lecture delivered in […]