Yoram Harpaz and Adam Lefstein

Communities of Thinking;

  • critical, creative, inquisitive
  • skills, dispositions, understanding
  • in the disciplines
  • with others

Atomic pictures of (traditional) teachers concepts of education:

  • learning is listening
  • teaching is telling
  • knowledge is an object
  • the mind is a container
  • to be educated is to know valuable content

How we think is not necessarily how we behave.

Effective teaching

  • Involvement and understanding in the process, and of the product

Conditions necessary

  • Intrinsic motivation - the passion to learn - authentic problems, personalise the problem, turn the curriculum into problems - undermine, the world behaves according to own expectations.
  • Alignment - we need to be put out of alignment to learn - contents and process match student profile and skills - appropriate and challenging.

  • Environment - dialogic - knowledge is distributed in other people's minds - informative, ongoing, feedback.

  • Attribution - ability and will vs other people or luck, poor learners blame others, luck - good learners blame ability or effort - incremental learners vs entity learners, poor learners see learning as a whole and will give up, good learners see learning as incremental and will take steps.

Atomic pictures of teachers concepts of education (now):

  • learning is being involved and understanding
  • teaching is providing conditions for effective learning
  • knowledge is a structure, a story that works, a connection to our internal world
  • the mind is an activity and meaning making - create stories -being educated is learning how to relate to knowledge - with enthusiasm, with curiosity, in critical ways.
changed October 3, 2007