421week 3

Monday

The Good Preschool Teacher• “All teachers who enter: Be prepared

to tell your story.” (p. vii)• “If teachers are to continue to grow,

they must at some point begin to study themselves.” (pp. vii-viii)

Ayers’ assumptions• Teachers are a rich and worthy source

of knowledge about teaching—about the details of everyday practice.

• Because teachers are chief instruments of their own practice, self-awareness is valuable, perhaps indispensable

• Teachers draw on training, skills, experience, habit, personal values, art, science, and native wit to do their work.

Darlene• “These kids have a hole in their trust.

That hole needs to be repaired. Some of them, on the street, will just go off with anyone. That’s not trusting, that’s passive and inappropriate. We play a lot of peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek, those kind of things. We kind of go back to the beginning.” (p. 103)

The Craft

ch II: good teaching: building the base

• good teachers learn, each day, to pat themselves on the back and kick themselves in the butt. The trick is to find the right balance.

• “It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” (John Wooden)

good teaching cont.

• the 5! model, like any model, attempts to simplify a complex reality, making it more accessible.

• teaching is a complex activity. But underlying the complexity are some basic ideas. Make sense of these. Make them part of who you are.

• explore cultural images of teaching.

good teaching cont.

• good teaching takes many forms, as do good teachers (good therapists, coaches, carpenters, etc.). Personalities differ. These differences are, in contemporary American culture, exaggerated. Good teachers, as do practitioners of any craft, share basic knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values. The base of good teaching, whatever the surface differences, has great similarities. These similarities are what a craft is.

good teaching cont.

good teaching• requires deep cultural understandings• moves students• is multi-faceted• is demanding• requires a strong invisible base• is explicit• is supportive• is perspectival• is open-minded• takes many forms• is respectful• seeks invisibility

Donaldson review(preface, prologue, ch 1)• no theory in science final• when does school go wrong for kids?– for the whole population, school goes

wrong for some kids– for some sub-populations, school goes

wrong for many kids–schooling goes wrong for most kids at

some time—some recover, some do not• often not the kids who do not

understand, but the adults

chapter 2• who is egocentric, and when?• differentiate findings and claims (16)• what does it mean that something

"makes human sense"? (17)• cold-blooded and warm blooded?• "communicative strivings"? (23)• how are being "highly sensitive to the

listener's state" and being egocentric related? (24)

wednesday

I just wanted to say thanks for making us do all those observations and having us put together binders for our placements. I just had a few interviews, and the principals were impressed with all the work I did. Also I got a job!! Thanks for helping to prepare me for this moment. I am going to be a pre-school teacher in Beardstown, IL at Grand Avenue Elementary School. Most of my students are English Language Learners. Almost all of them speak Spanish, and a few speak French or an African dialect. I'm going to spend the next week setting up my classroom and doing home visits with my students and their families. I'm extremely excited and nervous to start! Any advice for this novice teacher? I'll be sure to keep you updated throughout the year! Thanks again for helping me to reach this moment! Ilyse 12

D 4: failing to reason or understand?• compatibility and incompatibility• class and subclass problem • how do McGarrigle's tasks differ from

Piaget's? implications?• "In any event, the questions the children

were answering were frequently not the questions the experimenter had asked." (46)

D 5: what is and what must be• inference• implications of Cole's experiment

(50)• impossible to take account of this

evidence and at the same time to maintain that children under 6 or 7 incapable of reasoning deductively. If sometimes they do not appear to reason deductively, look more closely. If we can observe them reasoning spontaneously, we must ask why. (52-53)

• if and if and only if• conclusions on 55 & 56

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) www.piaget.org/biography/biog.html

• began as a zoologist• worked in Binet’s lab in Paris, fascinated

by kids’ incorrect answers• first writings 1920’s, becomes known in

US 1960’s• “patron saint” of ECE–seen as supporting core ECE belief:

young children think etc differently from older children and adults–view of young children’s cognitive and

other limitations supports dominant ECE view of early schooling

• meticulous observer of young children• liberated developmentalism in US from

behaviorism and psycho-dynamic theory

• Piagetian theory complex—few people who claim to be Piagetians actually read him

• warm, appealing, handsome person—grandfatherly

• Piagetian tasks amazingly stable– if you give a child a Piagetian task,

she will perform exactly the way the Piaget predicted

Donaldson (20 years after Children’s Minds)

• Piaget chooses to ignore our ordinary, rich “lived experience.” He does not take this to be any part of his concern as a psychologist, and sometimes he treats with scorn the very idea of studying it. . . . The question is whether Piaget's epistemic subject is so shorn of the essentials of human functioning—even of human cognitive functioning—that the theory is quite inadequate. I have come to believe that this is so. (1996, p. 326)