How Children Fail [SLIDES]

How Children Fail [SLIDES]

by | Dec 16, 2024 | Leadership and Vision, Learning and Teaching, Quotes, Slides | 0 comments

I have read or revisited a number of education books in recent years as I’ve been visiting innovative, deeper learning schools all around the world. I could recommend many, but I keep returning to How Children Fail by John Holt. Below are 52 quotes from the book (click on the arrows to move through the album). I invite you to dive deep into – and reflect upon – each of these and their relevance to children and schooling today. Remember that Holt wrote all of this in 1964…

Individual slides are available for download here.

Thoughts?

How Children Fail

We know what happens when we care about our learning

We know what happens when we care about our learning

by | Dec 11, 2024 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes | 1 comment

Below is a snippet from A.J. Juliani’s blog post, The relevancy problem: What can we do to make learning meaningful? I encourage you to read the entire post, which is an excerpt from his upcoming book, Meaningful and Relevant: Engaging Learners In An Era of Distraction. I already can tell that the book is going to be amazing.

We already know what works and doesn’t work.

Kids are not normally engaged in lectures, textbooks, homework, and traditional assessments. 

Our best learning experiences as adults didn’t happen when compliance was the focus either.

We know what happens when kids can tap into relevancy, and curiosity, and solve problems.

We know what happens when students get to work on challenges that are meaningful.

We know what happens when learners dive into an authentic curriculum and project-based learning experiences.

We know what happens when kids CARE about their learning. Because we know what happens when WE care about our learning.

I think that A.J. says this really nicely, particularly those last couple of sentences. I encourage all of us to lean into this angle when talking with parents, policymakers, and others who think that grades, test scores, and compliance are more important than children’s interest and engagement.

Why School? (now free!)

Why School? (now free!)

by | Nov 27, 2024 | Leadership and Vision, Quotes | 1 comment

Twelve years ago Will Richardson published Why School?, a short but incredibly impactful ebook that has strongly influenced my own thinking about learning, teaching, and schooling. Published by the folks who run the TED conferences, it contained gems like:

What doesn’t work any longer is our education system’s stubborn focus on delivering a curriculum that’s growing increasingly irrelevant to today’s kids, the outmoded standardized assessments we use in an attempt to measure our success, and the command-and-control thinking that is wielded over the entire process. All of that must be rethought. Now.

AND

In this new narrative, learning ceases to focus on consuming information or knowledge that’s no longer scarce. Instead, it’s about asking questions, working with others to find the answers, doing real work for real audiences, and adding to, not simply taking from, the storehouse of knowledge that the Web is becoming. It’s about developing the kinds of habits and dispositions that deep, lifelong learners need to succeed in a world rife with information and connections. The emphasis shifts from content mastery to learning mastery.

The Why School? ebook was only available as a Kindle version but disappeared from Amazon a while back. Will posted recently that he regained the copyright and that it now can be downloaded for free. I am greatly appreciative of Will’s willingness to reshare it with the world again.

Here is the link to download the book as a PDF. If you haven’t read much of Will’s work before, or if it’s been a long time since you have, you’re in for a real treat.

Happy reading!

A feeling that they must please the grownups at all costs

A feeling that they must please the grownups at all costs

by | Oct 17, 2023 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes, Slides | 0 comments

What hampers their thinking, what drives them into these narrow and defensive strategies, is a feeling that they must please the grownups at all costs. The really able thinkers in our class turn out to be, without exception, children who don’t feel so strongly the need to please grownups. Some of them are good students, some not so good; but good or not, they don’t work to please us, but to please themselves. (Holt, How Children Fail, p. 29)

For children, the central business of school is not learning

For children, the central business of school is not learning

by | Oct 12, 2023 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes | 0 comments

The valiant and resolute band of travelers I thought I was leading toward a much-hoped-for destination turned out instead to be more like convicts in a chain gang, forced under threat of punishment to move along a rough path leading nobody knew where and down which they could see hardly more than a few steps ahead. School feels like this to children: it is a place where they make you go and where they tell you to do things and where they try to make your life unpleasant if you don’t do them or don’t do them right. For children, the central business of school is not learning, whatever this vague word means; it is getting these daily tasks done, or at least out of the way, with a minimum of effort and unpleasantness. Each task is an end in itself. The children don’t care how they dispose of it. (Holt, How Children Fail, p. 38)

Let’s double down on math and reading!

Let’s double down on math and reading!

by | Sep 1, 2023 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes | 0 comments

If a certain kind of teaching failed to produce learning the first time, why will it suddenly produce it the second time? In many cases the children, now ashamed and angry as well as bored and confused, will do even worse than before… (Holt, How Children Fail, p. 3)

Let’s double down on math and reading block! Let’s extend the school day or calendar! Let’s require kids to attend summer school! Let’s force children to repeat a grade!

But whatever we do, let’s don’t change students’ learning experience. Just more of the same… (and if we are changing the learning experience during those times, perhaps – just perhaps – we should have been doing that in the first place?).

Students fail because they are afraid, bored, or confused

Students fail because they are afraid, bored, or confused

by | Aug 31, 2023 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes | 0 comments

[Students] fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused. They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their heads like a cloud. They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities, and talents. They are confused because most of the torrent of words that pours over them in school makes little or no sense. (Holt, How Children Fail, pp. 5-6)

Why do we assume the worst of children?

Why do we assume the worst of children?

by | Aug 28, 2023 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes | 0 comments

I’m going to start posting some quotes here from John Holt’s How Children Fail, which is a classic education text about student learning (that most educators have never read?)…

The bad things we assume about other people tend to become true, become “self-fulfilling prophecies.” Many people seem to think that the way to take care of children is to ask in any situation what is the most stupid and dangerous thing the children could possibly do, and then act as if they were sure to do it. (p. 81)