Monday, November 29, 2010

Empowering Education (Connection)

  This article was a very long but interesting article. While reading this article I noticed a few points reminded me of articles we have read in class.
    
    As I was reading Finns and Oakes was the first article that crossed my mind. In those two articles the talk about tracking and how it teaches the "high" ability kids to think outside of the box while the "lower" performing students have to stick with tedious worksheets that don't force them to think outside of the box. It also talks about by putting students in tracking class rooms you are basically placing them for the outside world as well. In the article that we just read Shor talks about how we need the kids to look beyond what is right in front of them and classrooms should be doing this. "If the students' task is to memorize rules and existing knowledge, without questioning the subject matter or the learning process, their potential for critical thought and action will be restricted". We need to force kids to look beyond the text in front of them and look at the bigger picture. "Not encouraging students to question knowledge, society and experience tacitly endorses and suports the status quo".

 I also found that I could relate this article to Johnson. Johnson tells us to say th word and talk more about different things so that we can have a better understand of what is going on. In this article Shor begins by telling us how we should talk and question why we go to school. "You must arouse children's curiosity and make them think about school". "A school year that begins by questioning school could be a remarkably democratic and critical learning experience for students". By having your class do this it makes them think out side those four walls and it gived them a chance to have a better understanding of why they are there and not just becuase their parents force them to.

  In class I would like to discuss how to come up with fun creative ways to make students think outside of the box.

I found this article to be interesting.

 

 

2 comments:

  1. My blog post was about the connection between Shore and Finn/Oakes too. It was pretty easy to see the similarity between the two. :)

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  2. I liked your connections:) plus that article obviously went with our reading, I skimmed it and found it useful.

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