goconstructivism

ABOUT: The purpose of this site is to act as a repository and sounding board for discussions around the theme of Constructivism in Education

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

FROM LITTLE THINGS BIG THINGS GROW

Gurindji strikers at Wattie Creek, next to the sign that they had made to assert their claim over their lands. Photo: Brian Manning.

Gather round people let me tell you a story 
An eight-year-long story of power and pride 
British Lord Vestey and Vincent Lingiari 
Were opposite men on opposite sides

You probably know these as the opening lyrics to the 1991 Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody song, From Little Things Big Things Grow. It is one of Australia's most important songs and most Aussies will know it - if not from its radio play or performances from Paul and Kev around the nation, then from its use by grassroots movements around Australia and in advertising campaigns.

The story told by the song is one of the greatest this wide brown land has known and one that sadly too few Australian's know. It's a story that is everything we lionise in Australia; mateship, courage, the battler, a fair go, the underdog getting one over the powerful and a happy ending where the hero wins. This is the story of the Gurindji Strike! The hero; Aboriginal man Vincent Lingiari as he led the Gurindji, Ngarinman, Bilinara, Warlpiri and Mudbara peoples on a long, courageous battle for justice.

Monday, January 16, 2012

FOXCONN, APPLE AND QUESTIONS THAT NEED ANSWERS

"This American Life" Goes Undercover at Foxconn, Reveals Harsh Conditions at iPhone Factory

Mike Daisey was a self-described "worshipper in the cult of Mac." Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.
Read more: 


In response Apple has published a list of its suppliers for the first time as it looks to head off criticism over how workers are treated, BBC news reports.






MASADA


Masada (Hebrew for fortress), is situated atop an isolated rock cliff at the western end of the Judean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea. It is a place of gaunt and majestic beauty.
On the east the rock falls in a sheer drop of about 450 meters to the Dead Sea (the lowest point on earth, some 400 m. below sea level) and in the west it stands about 100 meters above the surrounding terrain. The natural approaches to the cliff top are very difficult.
The only written source about Masada is Josephus Flavius’ The Jewish War. Born Joseph ben Matityahu of a priestly family, he was a young leader at the outbreak of the Great Jewish Rebellion against Rome (66 CE) when he was appointed governor of Galilee. He managed to survive the suicide pact of the last defenders of Jodfat and surrendered to Vespasian (who shortly thereafter was proclaimed emperor) – events he described in detail. Calling himself Josephus Flavius, he became a Roman citizen and a successful historian. Moral judgment aside, his accounts have been proved largely accurate.

On the Nature of Things By Lucretius Written 50 B.C.E

Titus Lucretius Carus (c 99-55 BCE) is known as the author of the poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Other than that, virtually nothing is known about Lucretius other than what can be deduced from the poem itself. From this source (some 7,400 hexameter lines), he appears to have been a well-educated Roman who had traveled as far as Sicily and avoided falling victim to the murderous politics of his time. His poem was an attempt to popularize the “obscure discoveries” of Epicurus, who lived about 240 years earlier. By doing this, Lucretius provided what is now the fullest surviving exposition of Epicurean philosophy. In it, Lucretius argues that the darkness of the mind brought about by superstitious fears should be scattered by a dispassionate view of the inner laws of nature.

Friday, January 06, 2012

TEACHING FOR THE FUTURE

Teaching guidelines for the future

















Of the ten guidelines for teaching and preparing young people for the 21st Century prepared by Australian researchers Beare & Slaughter, eight refer to important features of Steiner Waldorf education:


1. Appropriate imagery - choosing metaphors with care and imagination
2. Teach for wholeness and balance - holistic paradigm;
3. Teach identification, connectedness, integration - epistemological inter-connectedness;
4. Develop individual values - value the individual;
5. Teach visualisation - development of the picturing imagination;
6. Empowerment through active hope - distinguish between faith and hope;
7. Tell stories - use story telling and mythology as powerful teaching tool; and
8. Teach and learn how to celebrate - celebrate festivals.


Or, to summarise the spirit of the above in the words of Rudolf Steiner:

The need for imagination, a sense of truth
and a feeling of responsibility ---
these are the three forces which are the very nerve of education.

Steiner on RUDOLF STEINER EDUCATION

Friday, December 30, 2011

WHAT IS A STEINER SCHOOL

WHAT IS A STEINER SCHOOL


October 22, 2011

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

LOS ALTOS, Calif. — The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.
This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.
The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.
“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196 children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”
Mr. Eagle knows a bit about technology. He holds a computer science degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google, where he has written speeches for the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt. He uses an iPad and a smartphone. But he says his daughter, a fifth grader, “doesn’t know how to use Google,” and his son is just learning. (Starting in eighth grade, the school endorses the limited use of gadgets.)
Three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech connection. Mr. Eagle, like other parents, sees no contradiction. Technology, he says, has its time and place: “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.”
While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.
On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.
Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.
In second grade, students standing in a circle learned language skills by repeating verses after the teacher, while simultaneously playing catch with bean bags. It’s an exercise aimed at synchronizing body and brain. Here, as in other classes, the day can start with a recitation or verse about God that reflects a nondenominational emphasis on the divine.
Andie’s teacher, Cathy Waheed, who is a former computer engineer, tries to make learning both irresistible and highly tactile. Last year she taught fractions by having the children cut up food — apples, quesadillas, cake — into quarters, halves and sixteenths.
“For three weeks, we ate our way through fractions,” she said. “When I made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone, do you think I had their attention?”
Some education experts say that the push to equip classrooms with computers is unwarranted because studies do not clearly show that this leads to better test scores or other measurable gains.
Is learning through cake fractions and knitting any better? The Waldorf advocates make it tough to compare, partly because as private schools they administer no standardized tests in elementary grades. And they would be the first to admit that their early-grade students may not score well on such tests because, they say, they don’t drill them on a standardized math and reading curriculum.
When asked for evidence of the schools’ effectiveness, the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America points to research by an affiliated group showing that 94 percent of students graduating from Waldorf high schools in the United States between 1994 and 2004 attended college, with many heading to prestigious institutions like Oberlin, Berkeley and Vassar.
Of course, that figure may not be surprising, given that these are students from families that value education highly enough to seek out a selective private school, and usually have the means to pay for it. And it is difficult to separate the effects of the low-tech instructional methods from other factors. For example, parents of students at the Los Altos school say it attracts great teachers who go through extensive training in the Waldorf approach, creating a strong sense of mission that can be lacking in other schools.
Absent clear evidence, the debate comes down to subjectivity, parental choice and a difference of opinion over a single world: engagement. Advocates for equipping schools with technology say computers can hold students’ attention and, in fact, that young people who have been weaned on electronic devices will not tune in without them.
Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Boards Association, which represents school boards nationwide, said computers were essential. “If schools have access to the tools and can afford them, but are not using the tools, they are cheating our children,” Ms. Flynn said.
Paul Thomas, a former teacher and an associate professor of education at Furman University, who has written 12 books about public educational methods, disagreed, saying that “a spare approach to technology in the classroom will always benefit learning.”
“Teaching is a human experience,” he said. “Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”
And Waldorf parents argue that real engagement comes from great teachers with interesting lesson plans.
“Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers,” said Pierre Laurent, 50, who works at a high-tech start-up and formerly worked at Intel and Microsoft. He has three children in Waldorf schools, which so impressed the family that his wife, Monica, joined one as a teacher in 2006.
And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?
“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”
There are also plenty of high-tech parents at a Waldorf school in San Francisco and just north of it at the Greenwood School in Mill Valley, which doesn’t have Waldorf accreditation but is inspired by its principles.
California has some 40 Waldorf schools, giving it a disproportionate share — perhaps because the movement is growing roots here, said Lucy Wurtz, who, along with her husband, Brad, helped found the Waldorf high school in Los Altos in 2007. Mr. Wurtz is chief executive of Power Assure, which helps computer data centers reduce their energy load.
The Waldorf experience does not come cheap: annual tuition at the Silicon Valley schools is $17,750 for kindergarten through eighth grade and $24,400 for high school, though Ms. Wurtz said financial assistance was available. She says the typical Waldorf parent, who has a range of elite private and public schools to choose from, tends to be liberal and highly educated, with strong views about education; they also have a knowledge that when they are ready to teach their children about technology they have ample access and expertise at home.
The students, meanwhile, say they don’t pine for technology, nor have they gone completely cold turkey. Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates say they occasionally watch movies. One girl, whose father works as an Apple engineer, says he sometimes asks her to test games he is debugging. One boy plays with flight-simulator programs on weekends.
The students say they can become frustrated when their parents and relatives get so wrapped up in phones and other devices. Aurad Kamkar, 11, said he recently went to visit cousins and found himself sitting around with five of them playing with their gadgets, not paying attention to him or each other. He started waving his arms at them: “I said: ‘Hello guys, I’m here.’ ”
Finn Heilig, 10, whose father works at Google, says he liked learning with pen and paper — rather than on a computer — because he could monitor his progress over the years.
“You can look back and see how sloppy your handwriting was in first grade. You can’t do that with computers ’cause all the letters are the same,” Finn said. “Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.”

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

ORGANIC SCHOOL GARDEN PROJECT

FROM LITTLE THINGS BIG THINGS GROW-A FREE RESOURCE FOR SCHOOL GARDEN PROGRAMS!

From the Biological Farmers of Australia.

Lesson 1: Quiz; Nutrition; Germination 

with Greg James from Farmer's Choice Organics, Murwillumbah -New South Wales Australia. 

 

 

 

 


Planting seeds
Seedlings stages


The first two baby seed leaves-dicotyledon

Our seedling raising mix ready for our school garden project.



Baby seed beds



Which seed is singing my song?

Cheers to the seeds

Mix it with love.

Greg's famous seed mix.

Everything is done by hand with love and care.

The magic recipe.

Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.








Who wants to be involved? EVERYONE!

Greg's green classroom








Getting water wise with Dan.



In the heart of a seed buried deep..

a giant tree lay fast asleep.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People -of Dr. Stephen R. Covey


 SUMMARY OF THE SEVEN HABITS
Habit 1:  Be Proactive
Change starts from within, and highly effective people make the decision to improve their lives through the things that they can influence rather than by simply reacting to external forces.

Habit 2:  Begin with the End in Mind
Develop a principle-centered personal mission statement. Extend the mission statement into long-term goals based on personal principles.

Habit 3:  Put First Things First
Spend time doing what fits into your personal mission, observing the proper balance between production and building production capacity. Identify the key roles that you take on in life, and make time for each of them.

Habit 4:  Think Win/Win
Seek agreements and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases where a "win/win" deal cannot be achieved, accept the fact that agreeing to make "no deal" may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees and avoid inadvertantly rewarding win/lose behavior.

Habit 5:  Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of interpersonal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of one's own experience. Rather, it is putting oneself in the perspective of the other person, listening empathically for both feeling and meaning.

Habit 6:  Synergize
Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, one often can solve conflicts and find a better solution than would have been obtained through either person's own solution.

Habit 7:  Sharpen the Saw
Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.

Friday, June 24, 2011

ICPALER

About OLSEL

ICPALER Framework


.


 (Munro, 2007)

Ideas
Words Words have meaning
Parts of words have meaning
Vocabulary as a meaning network
Sentences Simple sentences describe an event
Variations of the simple sentences description of an event.
More complex sentence ideas
Discourse The cohesion of the text, genre
Topic Main Theme

Conventions
Phonological The rules governing the combining of sounds into words
Grammatical The rules governing the combining and unpacking of words in sentences
Genre The rules governing the combining and unpacking of sentences in discourse
Purposes
Manage and Direct How we start, maintain, and end conversations
How we take turns,
How we stay on the topic
How we adjust to fit audience and context
How we “read” in a message its intended meaning
Listen and Speak 
Between the Lines
How we use idioms and metaphors
How we extend a language exchange
Judge how much information to give
Judge what others might know during the conversation
Adjust to Context and Audience Select appropriate words and conventions
Use the context to assist understanding
Link ideas in relation to a particular context
Identify goals for an oral communication
Use Language for Different Goals Infer goals for an oral communication
Use language to extend a language exchange
Use language to request agree, confirm, compliment etc.
Ability to Learn
Opportunity to learn language experiences
Able to perceive oral language
Able to use symbolism (concrete to abstract thinking)
Ability to link ideas (eg.  cause-effect)
Ability to conceptualize and categorise
Ability to sequence and order
Ability to generalize learning to other contexts
Expressive and Receptive Language
Expressive and Receptive aspects of the communication

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Multisensory Approaches to Teaching Math

As William Glasser, world-renowned psychiatrist and theorist, stated, individuals learn 10 percent of what they read, 20 percent of what they hear, 30 percent of what they see, 50 percent of what they see and hear, 70 percent of what they discuss, 80 percent of what they experience, and 95 percent of what they teach others. Dr. Glasser emphasized the importance of using all the senses in education. Multisensory approaches lead to better attention to task, greater recall of information, and deeper understanding of concepts.

Friday, March 04, 2011

Mumford And Sons - Awake My Soul

Thursday, November 11, 2010

ANTHONY ROBBINS

Anthony Robbins
Entrepreneur, Author & Peak Performance Strategist

World Authority on Leadership Psychology





For the past three decades, Anthony Robbins has served as an advisor to leaders around the world. A recognized authority on the psychology of leadership, negotiations, organizational turnaround, and peak performance, he has been honored consistently for his strategic intellect and humanitarian endeavors. His nonprofit Anthony Robbins Foundation provides assistance to inner-city youth, senior citizens, and the homeless, and feeds more than three million people in 56 countries every year through its international holiday "Basket Brigade." Robbins has directly impacted the lives of more than 50 million people from over 100 countries with his best-selling books, multimedia and health products, public speaking engagements, and live events.

Friday, October 22, 2010

THE VIRTUES PROJECT




The Vision of The Virtues ProjectTM is to serve humanity by supporting the moral and spiritual development of people of all cultures, by helping them to remember who they really are and to live by their highest values.
 
The Mission of The Virtues ProjectTM is to provide empowering strategies that inspire the practice of virtues in everyday life through programs of excellence and simplicity which support people of all ages to cultivate their virtues -- the gifts of character.

NIDOTHERAPY

Nidotherapy is devoted to changing the environment in all its forms so a better fit is established between a person and every aspect of their surroundings.  In this context environment refers not only to the physical environment – where you live and work – but also the social and personal environment, so covering every aspect of your interaction with your surroundings.  Although we have been aware of the important environment and its effect on mental health for many years we have not examined it systematically in the scientific sense and worked out which are its important elements and which might be cast aside. 

Saturday, September 18, 2010

NINE BRAIN-COMPATIBLE ELEMENTS THAT INFLUENCE LEARNING

ABSENCE OF THREAT/NURTURING REFLECTIVE THINKING
COLLABORATION
ADEQUATE TIME
ENRICHED ENVIRONMENT
MEANINGFUL CONTENT
CHOICES   
IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK 
MASTERY/COMPETENCE  
MOVEMENT TO ENHANCE LEARNING


MASTERY/COMPETENCE