The Education Continuum

New edition of Getting the Buggers to Write out tomorrow!

The third edition of this bestselling book by education superstar, Sue Cowley, includes new material on writing in the Digital Age, creative ideas for getting boys to write and cross-curricular writing projects. There is also a brand new companion website, where you’ll find lots of useful extras, including advice about the teacher as writer – how you can use your writing skills beyond the school.

Sue also has a website dedicated to celebrating writing and the joy it brings to all. Sue is currently holding a writing competition, but entry closes soon. Why not have a go at entering it and you could win a copy of the new book! Check it out here.

 

Melanie Wilson
Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)

Born to Learn

A source of constant frustration for many teachers, are the reams of guidelines, inspection criteria and advice which lapse into lengthy, indecipherable discourse. Information is more available now than in has ever been – the latest research is disseminated within minutes via online newspapers and comment is free. How are we to devise and implement an effective model for education amidst so many conflicting findings and views?

This was the question on John Abbott’s mind when looking back over 20 years worth of research from the 21st Century Learning Initiative into the relationship between format schooling and informal learning outside of the school gates. The answer has come in the form of a series of short, thought-provoking animations, narrated by British actor Damian Lewis and aimed, quite simply, at getting straight to the point on educational issues.

For John Abbott, the “crisis” of education has not arisen simply from bad teaching, but from the failure of the wider community to engage and nurture the imaginations of young people. It is rather more a crisis of society’s committment to young people and their individual idiosyncracies and spiritual needs. The result is an education system in desperate need of finding ways to ensure creative energy is nurtured, and young people come out with confidence, a forward-thinking attitude and the ability to think outside the box and adapt to an ever-changing world in which following in the footsteps of your parents and teachers might just leave you floundering.

But John Abbott needs little help in stating his claim. Born to Learn - http://www.born-to-learn.org/ - takes the theories behind Abbott’s best-selling book Overschooled but Undereducated: How the crisis in education is jeopardizing our adolescents, and turns them into short and accessible nuggets of thought. No legislative provision, he argues, which is not fully understood by the people, will ever effectively reform an outdated system. The animations are aimed at summing up years of research and turning them into a Call to Action – a creative solution for unlocking the creative potential of future generations.

Rosie Pattinson

Editorial Assistant

What If ...?

 
On Wednesday, Rosie Pattinson and I were proud to attend the book launch for Peter Worley’s excellent ‘The If Machine: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom’ at the Institute of Education. There was quite a turnout of various ages and levels of fame, with comedian and broadcaster Robin Ince; Philosopher of Education, Michael Hand; Editor of Philosophy Now, Rick Lewis and Editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, Julian Baggini all in attendance – but it was the incredibly articulate children who had experienced Pete's philosophy sessions previously who stole the show.

Pete facilitated an enquiry from the book which left everyone scratching their heads and most of us using parts of our brains that felt underdeveloped, at best. But perhaps this is the point. Most children in the UK do not get to do any philosophy in their formal education – I certainly didn’t. A few lucky souls have the opportunity to study it at A level, or in the IB but it is a subject largely absent from lower secondary and primary education.

In the book, Pete explains with remarkable simplicity and clarity how children can be taught to identify necessary and sufficient conditions, to avoid circular definitions, to focus on falsifying rather than verifying general claims, and, above all, to ‘if’.

‘Iffing’ is Pete’s term for the technique of bracketing concerns about the truth of a claim in order to investigate its conceptual implications or entailments. And surely that is the greatest intellectual skill that any human being can learn in this age of information and opinion overload – to be discerning and to question the validity of everything they are told to take at face value. Learning to philosophise is precisely a matter of acquiring and practicing these techniques – something that few of us have ever done before.

Michael Hand referred to Pete’s first book as ‘The best book of its kind currently available … An invaluable resource for teachers wanting to try out some philosophy in their classrooms … A significant contribution to educational theory’. I would, of course, agree with these three endorsements, but would like to add one of my own. This is a book of inspirations – for teachers, children and anyone interested in the World and the power of the mind. It has certainly inspired me, and I hope that it will inspire many others in the months and years to come.

Peter Worley will be partaking in a roundtable on philosophy for children at the LSE on 23 June. Check back on the blog for further details later in the year.

Melanie Wilson
Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)