Smart Schools
Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Perkins reveals the common misguided strategies students use and offers teachers and parents advice on how they can help their children.
Although there has been a great deal of impassioned debate over the sad state of American education today, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how children actually learn to think. But, as David Perkins demonstrates, we cannot solve our problems in this area simply by redistributing power or by asking children to regurgitate facts on a multiple choice exam. Rather we must ask what kinds of knowledge students typically acquire in school.
In Smart Schools, Perkins draws on over twenty years of research to reveal the common misguided strategies students use in trying to understand a topic, and then shows teachers and parents what strategies they can use with children to increase real understanding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A curriculum based on vague notions of cultural literacy won't work for the same reasons that rote learning doesn't--because people accumulate knowledge through understanding, argues Harvard cognitive learning theoretician Perkins, who here plumbs the essences of learning, understanding and knowledge. Summoning recent pedagogical research, he addresses teachers, setting forth fresh goals and showing how to help students apply new knowledge beyond the classroom. Thinking leads to knowledge, as do effort and the right mental images, Perkins stresses. He offers the novel idea (to which many may object) that teachers need larger and fewer classes so they will have more time to build their own knowledge base. And teachers shouldn't have to cover every fact in a textbook, either, he adds. Instead, he contends that they should expend more effort helping students learn their ``metacurriculum,'' which is how they learn. This is an enjoyable read, peppered with interesting examples.
