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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. Other reforms have
required expensive professional skills, experience,
training, often expensive equipment, expensive materials, and have demanded scarce attention and time from teachers.
In contrast, besides all the benefits -
both immediately felt and actual
- experienced by the students, there are all
the benefits - both immediately felt and actual - which
are experienced by the
teachers. The teachers like this modern
maieutic Socratic experience so well that the teachers' labor union for
their city has endorsed this reform in teaching method!
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. Modern maieutic Socratic Method also allows teachers the opportunity to casually observe their own students in action.
The easy kind of observation
which gives them a far clearer picture of how
their students are receiving and
handling current lesson content than can be
obtained through all that clutter
of paperwork ordinarily used in
most classrooms. This provides another form
of respite for and saving of the teacher's
attention.
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 involved - though
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 it. - The information that 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 responses - and 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. If teachers start looking at this on their own motivation, the war is won. If the teachers do not find personal motivation,
or find their way TO personal
motivation through all the confusions and bitter bickering now burdening them, no matter how excellent our outcomes are the war will be lost the same way it was lost by each of the other many worthy reforms
which could not make
their way through the schools the past hundred or
so years.
Conversely, alert individuals who are both bright and well-positioned may spot this unique aspect in what we propose, and
identify a winning ticket.
We could see this method adopted with sudden surprising
speed, and will need
to prepare for this eventuality, both in terms of
availability and of quality control.
Correspondingly, once the doors are opened for one meaningful positive reform, several or many others may also be able to
enter and flourish. The
next few years could become an astonishingly positive
period in the history
of our schools.
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 Own. Some 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:
1. Modern maieutic Socratic Method, techniques for “drawing forth” into the focus of consciousness one’s subtler awarenesses,
where they can be
made readier use of.
A. Source - (1) Win Wenger and Project Renaissance, and the Center for Modern Socratic Innovation. (2) Cooperative Learning Movement, longer and more complex to learn and handle, but already accepted in several previously well-funded parts of the Establishment.
(3) All CPS and creativity-related methods which, like Socratic Method generally, are methods for figuring out things - hundreds of such methods currently exist.
B. Status: Development is under weigh but the field is still new. Major texts and training programs are already readily
available. The student body
of the first school
to use Win Wenger's version of these techniques, on
average is according to
tests gaining substantially better than four years
per year in academic achievement.The eightfold
increase in rate of gain
recorded in one especially enjoyable and
stimulating class is expected to
become the new norm for average performance.
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.
2. “Projective Screen Techniques,” use external visualization with “points of resonance in the environment,” to detect and
develop subtle internal
attitudes and awareness
A. Examples - (1) Rorschach Inkblot Test used as a CPS method or a “Superlearning” technique (2) “CrabApple” and “Problem-Solving Woodswalk” from Project Renaissance. B. Status: wide-open, virtually untouched for development, professions and careers to be made.
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.
3. Spontaneous Inner Imagery, as distinct from directed visualizations, is probably the most sensitive of all methods for reaching, detecting, and working with one’s subtlest and deepest
awarenesses, whether for
creativity-related and problem-solving purposes or
for educational ones.
A complete curriculum of instructions how to learn,
perform and teach
ImageStreaming (the main form which works with this
spontraneous
inner imagery, is contained in a cluster of interlinked
articles at these
three sites: http://www/winwenger.com/welcomeIS.htm,
and
http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm, and http://www.winwenger.com/followups.html A. Source - nearly all of this has developed from the work of Win Wenger and Project Renaissance, and is embodied in
various texts,
audio courses, web site exhibits and training
programs, as offered by
Project
Renaissance and, from New York State, the Center for
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.
4. Train Basic Skills via Computer Games. An initial example is “Brainware
Safari,” which uses a well-designed
sequence of
computer games to
train up each of forty-one basic cognitive skills.
Mathematical “times tables,” grammar, language and
second-
language skills, indeed everything now done as a drill
in school, can
and will soon be organized into such computer games and
developed
with ease and entertainment instead of drudgery.
Computer software
is infinitely replicable and is therefore headed
toward inexpensiveness
and universal availability. The computer can be
infinitely patient, and
attunes readily to individual and changing
differences, conserving the
work of teachers toward more human uses in
education.
A. Most important, “BrainWare Safari”-like softwares can make it not only feasible but easy to train up invaluable skills
now beyond reach of
schools and educational systems.
> Examples:
- Mozart-like
internal musical skills and, to varying levels,
- musical
performance skills.
- The best
forms of Fast Math.
- Repairing or enriching key aspects of human development. B. Sources: http://www.brainwareforyou.com/education C. Status - wide 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.
5. Neurophysiological Development, repair and enrichment. Where most of the above relates to improvement in the
information contents
and programming of the human brain, this topic
addresses how to
improve the basic equipment with which we perceive and
think. The
recent surge of scientific studies in brain
plasticity has finally given
overdue “permission” for researchers, clinicians,
educators, and
high-achievement coaches to think about how to
elevate “intelligence”
in all its forms and to an apparently limitless
extent.
A. Initial Source: Glenn Doman's Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, in
Philadelphia.
B. Status: Well-developed within certain sectors of application. This field is otherwise virtually untouched,
wide open for far-ranging
developments. C. Further significance: Our experience of being human, necessarily involves as much of
our intelligence as is available, not
only intellectual but in all dimensions - - -
- - A main basis for discriminating against some people, and in favor of some exclusive ingroup, has been the assumption that
some
people are not intelligent and there is nothing which
can be done
about that. Thus it is held that there are some
sectors of life to which
they must not be admitted because they will only
stumble around
and make messes. 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.
6. Application of Modern Socratic Technique to Distance Learning. Already, contemporary electronics and the Internet
have brought us
the circumstance where the best lessons on any
subject or topic,
developed anywhere on the planet, can
be disseminated everywhere
on the planet to everyone on the planet.
Combine this implication with this further one stemming from recent experiments where homeless street children, in
every
instance where the raw equipment was made
available to them,
quickly taught themselves and each other how to
get onto and
browse the Internet! We believe you can see much of the
near-
immediate future of education just in this combination
of two very
powerful implications.
- -The one key missing ingredient in distance learning, however, has been lack of face-to-face live interaction
with other
participants in the lesson or class,
especially with a re-processing
of the lesson contents to induce Socratic interchanges.
Learners
need to interact with each other - and if possible
with the instructor
- on a face-to-face live basis, for all the
reasons that they need to
interact with the content material in order to
actively learn and
assimilate it. Further, the face-to-face interaction
and shared
reactions both liminal and subliminal, provide
entire dimensions of
context for the learning. All human learning is in and through context.
Also, the face-to-face
interactions and shared reactions provide
a ratification process for what is being
learned. Ratification is
needed at two levels - one’'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. Every
student
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 his responses to such provoking
or evoking
questions, and to hear out and interact with the
responses of his
peer(s).
B. Organizing such facilitation: While the interactions with the original professor or teacher are usually mostly
only one-way,
from the instructor to the student,
- any reasonably competent facilitator who can follow simple instructions, whether or not he knows the subject
at hand himself,
- can induce students in his presence into a depth of understanding in the subject almost as great as if
they were in an
intensive small-group seminar directly with a
highly expert
instructor.
Thus, two new services will emerge on the education scene, each with almost the impact of the internet
itself. One service
organizes and preps or “Socratizes” the
best available distance-
learned lessons. The other - and it can be the
same organization
providing it - organizes students into face-to-face
groups, each
student working from his own or a shared computer terminal, and providing those groups a facilitator with
general facilitation skills
to nurture the best-quality exchanges among those students. C. Status: the lessons exist but as yet are not prepped in this fashion. Effective methods for Socratic facilitation
have been
simplified and made more effective. This
combination, however,
is as yet untouched, and is wide open for
development.
D. Sources: are, as with Modern maieutic Socratic Learning - Project 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.
7. Function-Boosters: are there performance-boosters for intelligence, thinking and perceiving, which
are counterpart to
steroids used and misused to boost physical strength
and
performance? The answer is, yes. - And like steroids,
there are
a variety, some with harmful side-effects, also
affecting different
people differently, also whose use raises serious ethical questions, also increasingly difficult to enforce
strictures
against their use.. This is the one sector we
definitely do not
recommend for immediate application, but in this
listing of
breakthrough features which must characterize the
near future
of education, it is definitely one which is in great need of research, including research to clarify
our choices. This may
also be the sector with the highest potential of
promise for the
future of humanity.
8. There is a potpouri of other methods and applications. Any one of these may prove to be as revolutionary as the above
are likely
to be.
> Eye training,
developed from behavioral or developmental
optometry and
ophthalmology - how smoothly our eyes track and
work together controls how readily we access different
kinds of
information.
> Held-breath underwater swimming increases respiratory capacity, the ability to sustain and work through a
thought or
perception, attention span and awareness span, and
through
boosting circulation to the brain, improving the
physical condition
of the brain itself.
> Entrainment of various
brain functions and brain states
can facilitate learning. Learning can be much
better tailored to
meet widely differing individual student
needs, intelligences and
characteristics.
> Etc.
A. Sources - (1) For eye training, Developmental Optometry. (2) For held-breath underwater swimming, Project Renaissance (3) For entrainment functions, various meditations and the sound-&-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. 9. Improved Content of Learning, as distinct from improved methods of teaching and learning.
A. Examples from a much larger field - (1) General Systems Theory and Chaos Theory, especially effective for developing an understanding of
dynamics which
applies in every subject and topic - a ready-made easy
recognition
basis that in effect constitutes a highly
accelerated learning method for those subjects and topics. (2) Teaching Reading, Math, etc. to babies, through parents and older siblings, and through a network
of volunteers
trained to work with babies and toddlers in
families' homes and
to make highly visible the child being competent with
his tutor.
(3) As young as possible, induce the child to go meta to his own thoughts and perceptions,
stimulating, enriching and
accelerating his emergence and development.
(4) From as early as possible, a solid and exploratory grounding in the Epistemological Continuum and in
other key
branches of philosophical inquiry. Branches
whose universal
questions relate to and provide highly retrievable
conscious
"sticking points" for more elements of experience
throughout
life.
(5) Quick math, easily accounting for the range of concrete mathematical operations.
(6) A vocabulary for emotions and feelings, and techniques for emotional relief and self-control such
as the
(7)
Such basic social vistas as that afforded by non-
including one's own problems, and including
the community’s.
(9) Restoring music and the arts as being crucial in the curriculum to supporting and redeveloping key intellectual skills and brain functions.
(10) Restoring playground recess and more systematized forms of phys-ed such as yoga or Tai Chi to
the curriculum,
moderate physical exercises which improve intellectual
function as well as health, and which also support
other
functions and values.
------------------------------------------------
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
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 students - but 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 methods - a 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.
From where you are and from what you know, what can you do to bring such a future nearer?
-------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2011 by Win Wenger, Ph.D., wwenger101@aol.com, http://www.winwenger.com You may, however, freely copy this paper - in whole, but not in part, including this copyright notice - to share with people whom you care about. |
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