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Seeks to Improve the Schools For 150 years, schools have succeeded in one thing. They have succeeded in blocking every meaningful positive reform that has been proposed, allowing in only window-dressing changes to palliate public pressures that were upon them at the time. Some of those reforms "did everything right" in how one should go about advancing their cause. Several represented benefits likely as great as those offered by our Modern Maieutic Socratic Method. What makes us think that our (Project Renaissance's) new thrust with Modern Maieutic Socratic Method can do any better? Here is this one point, where the war will be won or lost.
Indeed, we can start winning it today. Productively applying some forms of Modern Socratic Method is wondrously EASIER on and for the teacher than what teachers are doing now. Moreover, teachers
don't have to abandon what they are doing now, nor do they have to
abandon hard-won skills and experience they have built with their
currently used methods. Instead, some of these forms of Modern
Socratic Method provide profound respite to teachers in mid-lesson,
allowing them to regroup their forces and focus and to execute, by
their own preferred methods, the remainder of their current
lesson far more effectively than they otherwise could have.
And to be not harried but instead fresh and flushed with success
and confidence heading into the next class session. This respite-to-the-teacher aspect is unique to what we are offering in Modern Maieutic Socratic Method. The Cooperative Education movement, closely comparable in some respects, offers some really fine teaching methods and, as another form of Modern Socratic Method, is the method closest in nature to what we offer. However, good as it is in most regards, Cooperative Education requires years of study to master, and considerable special skills and attention by the teacher. Also by all reports received thus far, students by our Socratic forms more immediately go to deep levels of understanding in whatever topic is involvedthough admittedly that might be more a function of the individual teachers presently using one form of such a method as compared to the other. Time and testing can determine the answer to that question. We will "win this war" to get better methods used in classrooms, where all other meaningful reform efforts this past century lost it, if and as we find ways to make this information real enough to teachers for them to try itthat our Modern Maieutic Socratic Method is how a teacher can find immediate relief, respite, and opportunity to regroup his or her thoughts in the midst of classroom and school-related pressures... and that this method is also a keen opportunity to immediately observe his or her students in action, grappling with the current information being taught to them. What are all the ways to make it overwhelmingly REAL to teachers how much easier, wholesome, human, and restorative this method is than what they have been doing? Make that point and we can
almost but not quite relegate the remarkable
excellence of our student outcomes to parentheses amd still gain
acceptance. Such excellence of outcomes has not been the deciding
factor in acceptance of methods. The responsesand comfort of those
who serve in the trenches, our classroom teachers, will determine which
methods advance and which join the scores of other reform efforts
in the present limbo of forgotten breakthrough
techniques. We cannot follow the same strategy for reform as was pursued by dozens of other programs and methodologies, some of them indeed truly excellent but all of them defeated by the unresponsiveness of the already-burdened survival-desperate teacher so reluctant to take on yet another load of methods and concerns and attention-absorbers. Sociotectonics sees education about to break in a high-Richter quake. The system appears to be breaking down, or negentropically breaking upward a la Ilya Prigogene, and this is our opportunity to help make it do the latter.
By itself, a well-tended professional reform isn't going to make it through. We MUST go the route of a popular mass movement. We will play our cards for the well-tended professional reform as well,
but we have to do what it takes to create a massive popular movement, first
among teachers and
then also among parents and communities as they
see something positive
finally starting to happen. For education, there are other great developments besides our ownSome needed features of education by Year 2020 which are not yet widely found in our deeply lagging schools How much can your own mind and vision add to what is listed here? This catalog is only a seed-starter for your own further perceptions as we attempt to explore toward a more hopeful future a future where our schools, after 100 years of totally resisting and defeating any meaningful reform (as distinct from stylistic, trivial and window-dressing “reforms”), have finally made the adjustments in our schooling which will make our society, culture and civilization once again viable and this time truly human. Here are a few of those features, not widely found in our schools today but which must be quite soon if we are to make it into a truly human future:
C. Characterization: The Project Renaissance based methods have pursued development not only of greater effectiveness and depth of understandings, but of simplicity and ease of use in teaching and learning. Some of the techniques can be learned and applied to advantage, literally in mere seconds. This simplicity, immediacy and ease of use may be the means to finally achieve overdue reform throughout the educational system. Presently our new book, 3 Easy Tactics To Use In Your Classroom is the leading example of this drive to utterly useful simplicity.
C. Distinction: Modern Socratic-type methods, and indeed most of our learning methods (as well as are our Creative Problem-Solving and creativity-evoking methods), are ways to get at subtler awarenesses to bring those awarenesses into useful focus. These types of method differ in that the modern Socratic is more directly verbal while Projective Screening orients around external visual perceptions.
B. Status: developed in tandem with and almost as well as is modern maieutic Socratic method, but this field is still new, wide open for further development, and there are professional careers to be made in this context.
C. Statuswide open, virtually untouched, and with practically a universe-full of computer programming and gaming skills already developed and ready to pour into this application. Professions and fortunes to be made in this context also.
It is increasingly apparent that, like "deliberate creativity", "intelligence" in all its forms can be learned and built and, so to speak, “earned” by deliberate practice. This excuse for discriminating, against any group of people, on the assumption that certain innate traits are necessarily inborn and unchangeable, has finally crumbled now that brain plasticity is so widely recognized, though the significance of that in all quarters has not yet apparently penetrated most people's thinking.
Also, the face-to-face
interactions and shared reactions provide
a ratification process for what is being
learned. Ratification is
needed at two levelsone’'s peers, and the
authoritative instructor
or facilitator. Without these factors involved in
the process, it is
much harder for the various learnings
to 'take.' A very basic principle here should be incorporated into distance learning
programs: Interrupt the best existing recorded
lessons in every
subject at key points, with Socratic challenges and
questions,
cueing students (face-to-face, two or three of them per
computer
terminal,) to focus on and articulate and develop their
key
awarenesses relative to that point in the lesson. All
students
should be in the presence of and have at
least one other student face-to-face, or be with a small group of co-learners, to
whom to articulate their responses to such provoking
or evoking
questions, and to hear out and interact with the
responses of their peer(s).
D. Sources are, as with Modern Maieutic Socratic LearningProject Renaissance; the Center for Modern Socratic Innovation; the widespread abundance of CPS programs and techniques; and Cooperative Learning. The free lessons from M.I.T. have gained some fame, and lessons of varying quality are available from many institutions of learning from all over, thousands of sources.
(1) For eye training, Developmental Optometry. (2) For held-breath underwater swimming, Project Renaissance (3) For entrainment functions, various meditations and the sound-and-light machines. (4) For brain states, various meditations and Suggestopedia (5) Also revisit the classical works of neurophysiologist Donald O. Hebb, whose studies of how the brain and nervous system learn makes up much of the basic knowledge of the fields of psychology and educational psychology today. Very little of those (or of other classical findings) has yet found its way into classroom application but a little ingenuity in this area could itself have immense consequences.
This working brief is adapted from proceedings of the 2010 Double Festival, 18th annual conference of Project Renaissance, coinciding with the publication release of Win Wenger’s new book 3 Easy Tactics for Use in Your ClassroomTeach Smarter, Not Harder. This briefing implements the strategy described in the opening of this paper, whereby a reform of classroom methods which yield great results with students is also bringing respite and reward to teachers as well, and which is immediately and easily implemented by a wide range of teachers. This boon to teachers should lead to much broader use in schools and classrooms than occurred with other positive reform movements which did great things for studentsbut which were opposed by teachers who felt distracted, harried and overworked and who saw such reforms primarily in terms of being yet more extra work burden on them. If this strategy succeeds, progress and spreading success in our schools should also enable other worthy additional reform methods and programs to come into play. Using even just a few of these together in various synergistic combinations should lead to some very nice positive outcomes well beyond reach of any single methodology working alone, and an education system fit for a fully human future.
We would like to hear from
representatives of some of these
other breakthrough methods and intended reforms, to
explore
areas of possible cooperation including that of how we
might
help toward creating easy-tactics versions and
strategies for
their own methodsa way how their resource, like
ours, may
be enabled to serve the needs of many more students and
teachers than presently are being reached. The
job to be
done is larger than all of us put together: we'd best
make a
start on it.
You may freely copy this brief in whole but not in part, including its copyright for use with others whom you care about.
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