Jacques Duez : The pleasure of the real questions

I have completed the list of the interview transcripts below, that have been published on the website on http://www.desimages.be/spip.php?article404

• 01 - le chemin pour devenir professeur de morale
• 02 - l’invention d’une pratique vidéo avec les enfants
• 03 - ne pas garder de savoir en réserve
• 04 - la caméra introduit de la distance
• 05 - rencontrer l’humanité à travers un écran
• 06 - la correspondance comme effet de montage
• 07 - une égale capacité à dire ce que l'on ressent
  
• 08 - le savoir et le vivant
  
• 09 - paroles de proximité, paroles populaires
• 10 - l'existence de ceux qui ont la parole
• 11 - les rencontres avec des artistes
• 12 - le plaisir des vraies questions
• 13 - problèmes des retrouvailles
• 14 - sauver sa peau face au pouvoir
• 15 - l’univers infini des personnages
• 16 - ne pas faire du journalisme
• 17 - être vivant, se casser la figure, faire ce que l’on ne peut pas (published sept. 7th 2010)
  
  

I find chapter 12 very interesting and also funny. Translated it's entitled "the pleasure of the real questions" It includes a reply to to a child saying "Jacques, with you we haven't learned anything." - absolutely great!
I reminds me of a situation where Frank Trierweiler and I coached a group of teachers who were supposed to reflect on an evaluate their teaching strategies and concepts. In the final session one of the teachers said that she hadn't learned anything out of all this. I don't remember my reply but I remember that I was frustrated. Jacques in his situation wasn't. Read it for yourself it's worth it.

The picture has been taken by Christian Schwarz during the evening dedicated to Jacques Duez on April 15th. Thanks to you Christian.

Jacques Duez has died

Jacques Duez has died Monday 2nd of February 2010.
It's difficult to find words to express how sad I am that I will not have the chance to meet with you again as we planned to do it the last time we met, and the last time we talked on the phone.
I'm thankful that I had the chance to know you and that you followed my invitation to Luxembourg for a presentation of your work on 19th of June 2008.
With your death, the world of education has lost a charismatic figure. You had the sensibility and the intelligence to give room to children's voices like only few people I have met could do it.
Thank you for the marvelous work you've done and which will continue to inspire me.

I'm planning an evening dedicated to Jacques Duez on Thursday 15th of April in the Cultural Center in Bivange, for all those who had the pleasure to meet him in Dudelange (L) 2008 and for those who don't know his work yet. Help me spread the word and send me an email if you plan to come: In Memory of Jacques Duez

My post on Jacques:
http://www.pinofiermonte.com/2008/06/jacques-duez-on-listening-to-children.html

Read the authentic words of Jacques Duez
by Massart on http://www.desimages.be/spip.php?article404

• le chemin pour devenir professeur de morale
• l’invention d’une pratique vidéo avec les enfants
• ne pas garder de savoir en réserve
• la caméra introduit de la distance
• rencontrer l’humanité à travers un écran
• la correspondance comme effet de montage
• une égale capacité à dire ce que l'on ressent (nouveau)
  
• le savoir et le vivant (nouveau)
  

Also available as Feed:
feed://www.desimages.be/spip.php?page=backend&id_rubrique=112

Biographical article written by Jacques and published 5th July 2007:
http://philohorsclasse.free.fr/article.php3?id_article=10

Some interesting extracts of Jacques' interviews can be found on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jacques+duez&search_type=&aq=f

To me one of the most impressing video sequences by Jacques Duez is the following one, in which Jacques interviews one of his former students who has become a young man and who reflects on himself when he was a child and on his experience in Jacques Duez lessons.



Announcement of Jacques Duez's death on Arte TV-channel:
http://www.arte-belgique.be/mensuel/EM_300810

http://www.telemb.be/content/view/5827/166/

Thinking with Charles Darwin

On February 12th we are going to celebrate (some would probably prefer to say "deplore") Charles Darwin's 200s birthday and on November 24th 2009 the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" - in short called The Origin of Species. Another milestone of his work is the book "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" which he published in 1871.

Although many other scientists have worked on evolutionary theories, Darwin is the one who built his on the principles of mutation, variation and natural selection and the common descent of living organisms. The convergence of Charles Darwin's theory, with Mendel's findings on heredity, with the discovery of the DNA and it's role in heredity, but also with Wegener's theory of the continental drift and with many other theories have conducted to our modern view on the origine and the development of the living organisms, the face of the Earth and the Universe.

Ok, this is all stuff that you can read up in most science books and on the Internet. But there are two reasons why I think that it is important to bring this up on my blog on educational matters.
First, teachers are those who have to deal with the conflict between scientific findings and beliefs. Second, teachers have to encourage the development of critical thinking and scientific thinking - at least that's my point of view.

Regarding the first issue, there is a serious risk that science is not taught as it should because,"Teachers hesitate to offend to religious beliefs of their pupils even when these directly contradict scientific fact." as Richard Dawkins puts its. (For more information see: "The Genius of Charles Darwin" Richard Dawkins; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfAS2kBJDBw ; in 10 episodes.)

To get a feeling of how serious this problem is taken you should read the report "The dangers of creationism in education" by the Parliamentary Assembly Committee on Culture, Science and Education of the Council of Europe published June 8th 2007 (Doc. 11297). http://assembly.coe.int/main.asp?Link=/documents/workingdocs/doc07/edoc11297.htm

But there's the other issue. There is a risk that science is not taught as it should be, because schools continue to rely on a concept of transmission of knowledge which has much more in common with indoctrination and brainwashing than with teaching or with scientific thinking. I would even go so far as to say that this is not a risk but a fact in most classrooms.

To open a science book, to paraphrase the content of a chapter on evolution for example and to impose on the students that they memorize and recite the theories that have been presented has nothing - nothing at all - to do with anything that comes close to scientific thinking. Such a practice fosters belief, not very different from religious belief, but not thinking.

I see the same risk when students are asked to choose a "science" subject, to gather information on the Internet and to translate them "into their own words", during a few so called "project work" lessons. Even if this maybe more motivating and even challenging than to follow chalk-and-talk lessons, this isn't sufficient to produce thinking young people either. In my view this approach mainly produces superficial and fragmented knowledge and seldom helps students develop a transferable critical attitude, particularly if gathering and assembling of information is a substitute for discussion, negotiation of concepts, formulation of questions and hypothesis, reconstruction of scientific interpretations, justification of choices, evaluation of different viewpoints and analysis of their dependency on the sociocultural context in a specific period in history etc. (see also http://www.criticalthinking.org)

What's the use of such teaching if in the end, most of what is left of it are some simplistic beliefs (why should I call them concepts?) of how things work, were it mathematics, language, learning, intelligence or evolution.

Am I asking to much from school? I don't think so. I am asking less but more in depth work, much more time spent on one project and a lot of socratic dialogue. If you are of those who persist on thinking that past teaching methods were useful to develop scientific and critical thinking, I suggest that you design a test like the ones that have been developed for the PISA survey, but for adults - parents, teachers, whoever you want. You will see right away what I mean - as sure as death and taxes - and you will acknowledge that a lot of teaching has been, continues to be and will be for long nothing but a big waste of time.

But, we started with Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory.
How does it work again? ……………………………………………………? Who cares?
If it's important, and if I need it, I'll find it easily on wikipedia.org or in some other bible.
And if you give me some time, I'll put it in my own words if you prefer.
But there's this question that I can't get out of my mind:
Do I believe what I read or do I understand what I read?
Let's see if I can find the answer to this where I found the other one.
If not, maybe it's not a good question after all.

image sources:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Darwin_ape.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Darwin_tree.png

200th birthday of Louis Braille, January 4, 2009

Louis Braille's celebration day reminds me of the fact that it is not the child's disability that prevents her/his inclusion into mainstream schools but the school's disability to include children that do not fit into the norm. (Besides, being in the same building is not a sufficient condition for talking about integration or inclusion.)

Reading about Braille I also remembered how impressed I was as a child by the movie about Helen Keller and her tutor Anne Sullivan who taught her to communicate using a manual alphabet.

One thing that came to my mind, when I searched the net to find information about Louis Braille and his invention of the tactile reading system called braille, is that - as I can't read braille, not even identify one single word with my fingertips - I sure must have disability because I don't have this ability.

"The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing people towards them."
"The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but has no vision."
Helen Keller

2009

To all the children in this world I wish at least one caring elder, enough food, a meaningful education, the intelligence to know which role model to follow, and a safe place to stay in this world of adult madness and perversion of power.

For all my friends, relatives and page visitors : May the beauty of life be with you!

Original images found on Wikimedia Commons.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Children_in_Middle_Vietnam.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palestinian_children_in_Jenin.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Children_in_Namibia(1_cropped).jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Babasteve-three_boys.jpg

If only teachers could all be Pygmalions

40 Years ago, in 1968, the psychologist Robert Rosenthal and the principal of an elementary school Lenore F. Jacobson conducted their famous study to test the hypothesis if children would become brighter when expected to by their teachers. The study was conducted in 18 primary school classes from which 20% of the students were randomly chosen to be the "brighter" kids after they all had taken a non-verbal intelligence test which in fact was not taken into account to choose the children.
After 8 month the study apparently showed that a strong "interpersonal expectancy effect", also called "Pygmalion effect" or "Rosenthal effect" had influenced the attitudes of the teachers in a way that as a matter of fact, the randomly chosen kids showed intellectual gains than their non-chosen classmates.

Funnily enough, on this 40th birthday of the Pygmalion-in-the-classroom-study, Luxembourg has introduce standardized testing for third graders for the known reasons which there are, raise the standards after the disastrous PISA study results, accountability and better student's orientation (!). Funny also, that when years ago standardized testing was introduced at the end of the primary school, I said that this would only be the beginning and that it was just a matter of time until standardized testing would be introduced in lower grades. Now here we are. But as it took quite a few years, I can affirm that I was not at the origin of a self-fulfilling prophecy I made - at least I hope so.

For those who would like to get a short overview of the study by R. Rosenthal, here are his own words which I took the liberty to transcribe from the video below. This is a must read for all the teachers especially those in third grades in Luxembourg.

R. Rosenthal: "What we wanted to show was the extend to which teachers expectations could actually effect pupils intellectual performance, for example their IQ scores.
So what we did was, we tested everybody in the school with a test that pretended to be a test that would predict academic blooming - the so called Harvard test of inflected acquisition - and allegedly on the basis of that test but not really we gave each of the teachers in the school the names of a handful of children in her classroom that would get smart in the academic year ahead.

These kids names were taken out of a hat. We chose them by means of a table of random numbers. The children themselves did not know in any direct way that teachers were holding certain expectations for them. Teachers were told not to tell the kids and of course we didn't tell the children either. So the children never knew.

And then when we tested the children a year later we found that those kids who'd be alledgedly to their teachers be showing or going to show intellectual gains, in fact showed greater intellectual gains than did the children of whom we'd said nothing in particular. So the kids actually got smarter when they were expected to get smarter by their teachers.

We've come to feel that there are really four factors that operate in the mediation or communication of these self-fulfilling prophecies, especially in a classroom but not only in a classroom.

So what are these four things that teachers tend to do differently to kids for whom they have more favorable expectations?

The first factor is the climate factor. Teachers tend to create a warmer climate for those children for whom they have more favorable expectations. They are nicer to them. Both in terms of the things they say and also in the non-verbal channels of communication.

The other very important factor is the so called input factor. That one probably won't surprise anyone. Teachers teach more material to those kids for whom they have more favorable expectations. After all, if you think a kid is dumb and can't learn you are not going to put yourself out to try to teach him very much.

Two other factor though make a difference. One is the response opportunity factor, that is
kids get more of a chance to respond if the teachers expect more of them. They call on them more often and when they do call on them they let them talk longer and they help and shape with them the answers that the kids speak out - kind of working together to put the response out.

The last is feedback. The feedback factor works in this way: As you might expect if more is expected of the kid, the kid is praised more, positively reinforced more for getting a good answer out, but interestingly enough is given more differentiated feedback when they get the wrong answer.
One of the ways in which you can sometimes tell a little bit that the teacher does not have very high expectations for a kid is that the teacher is willing to accept a low quality response or won't really clarify what would have been a good quality response. Maybe because he or she feels well what's the use, the kid is not smart enough to profit from this additional clarification.

So those are the four factors climate, input, response opportunity and feedback."

Source:



Additional resources:

Covert Communication in Classrooms, Clinics, and Courtrooms
by Robert Rosenthal - Harvard University
http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_121.asp

T&C TOWER - Rediscovering the Pygmalion myth in today's education
Expectation stimulates the mind
http://maincc.hufs.ac.kr/~theargus/378/theory_01.htm
(His conclusion lead to the title of this blog post. Thank you Lee Hyae-myung.)

Rosenthal, Robert & Jacobson, Lenore Pygmalion in the classroom (1992). Expanded edition. New York: Irvington

For details on the Pygmalion myth or the play by George B. Shaw, go to wikipedia.org.

Croatian Thoughts

My recent family holidays took me to Croatia, a beautiful country which I already wanted to visit years ago, before Yugoslavia split apart. We drove through Germany and Austria before arriving in Slovenia and finally in Croatia more exactly to the Plitvice Lakes. When the Third Balkan War broke out back in 1991, the maps which were displayed during the head news on TV always made me aware of how close to the country I lived an armed conflict was taking place in Europe.

Now, driving my way through Slovenia and Croatia, I couldn't help but thinking about this tragic event and I scrutinized the landscape to detect some scars that could have been left by this war. But I noticed that in the area we drove through most oft the streets and houses were quite new. Only a few house fronts were covered with bullet holes.

While I was in Plitvice I read in one of my travel guides that it was exactly in this area of these beautiful lakes, that some of the first people had been killed in late March 1991. This "Plitvice Lakes incident" is also known in Croatian as "Plitvice Bloody Easter". This incident "contributed significantly to the worsening ethnic tensions that were to be at the heart of the subsequent Croatian War of Independence." as explained on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plitvice_Lakes_incident). Now I was there with my family to spend some enjoyable days and to contemplate the striking beauty of the landscape.

I read also that Slovenia, the first province of former Yugoslavia to declare it's independence and the first one to be accepted as a full member in the European Union, had been (maybe still is) opposed to the admission of Croatia in the EU because of territorial conflicts between both countries and I thought: Crazy! Political problems are being exported from one structure - Yugoslavia, and imported into an other one - the European Union. Inveterately human!

Reading "The Goddess and the Bull" by Michael Balter about the excavation of the neolithic site in Catalhüyük - I came across interesting fact that it was not agriculture that made people choose a sedentary life and that settlements hat been created long before agriculture was invented. This leads to a important question which archaeologists try to address through their exploration of the past: What made people want to live together in the first place? I liked very much how Balter linked this issue to our present and future by writing: "if we could understand a little better why we all wanted to live together, maybe we would bet better at doing it."

The language differences between the former Yugoslavian provinces and regions has also been a major issue during the conflict and remains an important element in the endeavors to gain or to construct a national identity. When years ago people were said to speak Serbo-Crotatian now they speak Serbian or Croatian which in itself is a mix of the dialects Chakavian, Kakavian and Shtokavian. In a language forum I found an interesting post with questions concerning the similarities or differences between the languages Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian and a very interesting answer which gives an indication of the complexity of the matter http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=36982.

Reading about the language conflicts I could recall a situation in one of the schools I work with, where a few girls tried to teach me the differences between Croatien and Bosnian or Bosniak. The words they chose as examples were very close and sometimes differed only by their intonation. The process of bringing up language differences to construct ethnic or national barriers seemed to have been triggered already. Language is never a neutral or non-political subject. Some may say that it's not the role of the school to address political issues and many teachers will avoid this kind of subject or will simply not be aware of their implications. Especially in Europe we should take this very seriously and teach young people how and why language conventions are constructed, that language barriers are as artificial as territorial barriers and that language is not only a tool to think with but also a tool to construct realities and an instrument that is used to include or exclude others.

The recent conflicts in Belgium between the French-speaking region of Wallonia and the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders is a current example which shows the deep political implications of language differences. If teachers in schools don't want to tackle such problems, who else will? Should we wait until children are grown up to discuss their histories, differences and similarities and how much the construction of their identities is linked to language?

26 out of 47

26 Years ago I finished my teacher training and I started my career as a teacher in the same year in September. Who was I at that time, who am I now, twenty five years later? I remember being an angry young man, bored and frustrated by school, bored by most of my teachers, impressed by a few, opposed to authorities, especially those without intellectual and ethical strength or empathy, not very gifted and talented but well armed with low self confidence. In my beginning teaching years I wanted to to be a better teacher to my pupils - because of , or despite the ones I had and the schools I visited. I wanted to make a difference in children's life and protect them against the arbitrariness of the schooling system, the brutal social injustice and the predetermination because of their social and cultural background. But while trying desperately to succeed I sometimes unfair and threatening to those that I wanted to protect. I think because it took me to much time to make a difference in someone else's life, because of my impatience and the feeling of powerlessness. It took me years and some charismatic mentors to be able to really listen and talk to children and to be a partner in their own quest. Thank you Christian, Gérard, Roger, Brigitte, Vivian, Françoise, for showing me the way out. After 20 years of civil service, I created EducDesign with Frank and Jos, and I'm still trying to make a difference to the life of others, teachers and children. (Not an easy job, seldom profitable but often rewarding ;-)
I never cared too much about birthdays, especially my own ones, but I'm deeply touched by the greetings I got today, especially those from my former students.
After all the intellectual posts I wrote recently - and considering my age - I think it was time to be pathetic for a moment. Cheers!

"It is honesty, not rightness, that moves children." Herbert Kohl

During my three days trip to the French Atlantic coast I reread 36 children and Growing Minds, on Becoming a Teacher by Herbert Kohl.

H. Kohl is a great example of a reflecting teacher who is also a gifted writer. He is often qualified as "provocative" educator with "revolutionary" teaching ideas and methods. Considering that his beginning teaching experiences happened back in 1962, in a primary school class in Harlem, with 36 black children, they are indeed revolutionary.

But what stroke me most, is his honesty regarding his first steps in teaching, where he still stuck to the curriculum and tried to establish order and gain authority in his classroom while simultaneously trying to do innovative projects and bringing in his enthousiasm for teaching.

In my view, what he did is the same as most young teachers do (me included, when I started teaching), trying to merge or serve system expectations and a self-image of an innovative, skilled and respected educator.

What makes H. Kohl exceptional to me - as a teacher, not as a writer - is his self-criticisme, the conclusion he drew out of his daily experiences and his statements on the role of the teacher.

It's definitively a must read for every educator regardless if he/she is in his/her beginning or final years of teaching.

I don't want to spoil your pleasure of discovering the books by yourself so I won't quote to much from them, except for the title and the following :

"I've been involved with what has been called open or progressive education for over twenty years and found these concepts frequently misunderstood. One can teach Shakespeare, microbiology, computer math, as well as simple reading , writing and arithmetic, in open ways that leat do understanding, mastery, and occasionally love of the subject itself. To teach in an open way does not mean the loss of content, the indulgence of the whims of students, or the avoidance of complexity. On the contrary, it implies control of content, and the ability to deal with new and difficult ideas and concepts - in other words, the development of sophisticated thinking."

"In a boring classroom where learning is not much more than filling out forms and taking tests, ther's little reason to want to join back in once you've been separated from the group. (...)

Decent nonviolent discipline will only be effective in a learning environment where interesting things are happening. There is an essential relationship between the quality of content an the use of nonpunitive discipline strategies in any learning situation. Effective discipline is dependent upon building an attractive and comfortable world that children don't want to be excluded from, and not upon how you respond in any particular instance."

"Because they saw my researching they learned to do research. They wouldn't have learned had I merely told them to do it."

Why do arrows never hit their target when used in combination with a teaching machine?

Evaluation by competences has become the new credo of schools and educational reform in many countries in Western Europe.
We all know that giving global marks to students in a subject like mathematics or reading is vague, subjective, and depending on only a few test situations and thus unfair. We also know that this evaluation practice doesn't take into account complex learning processes that students have gone through. This leads to the conviction that evaluation by competences will me more objective and more precise. And, according to a common belief, the more items are taken into account the more precise the picture will be.

But will splitting up complex knowledge into multiple items really improve evaluation? How many items do we need to be able to attest a student that he/she has good reading skills?
Will learning be more effective when we can assume that "teaching to the test" will be transformed into "teaching to the competence item list"? Has there been considered, what difference it makes if the teachers themselves are in charge of defining the items or if the competence lists are centrally defined and distributed to the teachers as normative targets?
What will be the effect on students once they have gone through a schooling system where "myriads" of items have to be taken into account, especially when school has not been able, up until know, to get rid of subtle reward and punishment practices? Are people aware of the possible contradictions between competence items and their contradictory theoretical roots?

An interesting article by Véronique Marchand illustrates how the "evaluation of competences proceeds through reductionism" and states that "the complex action which constitutes every act of thought is reduced to a succession of procedures that become an end in themselves".
http://www.manifestoclub.com/education-competences (English translation)
http://www.sauv.net/competences.php (French version)

When reflecting on this subject, I can't help but thinking that, even if Burrhus Frederic Skinner is not necessarily the direct and only mentor of the approach, it could well be that in in the end he will.
Why? Because the main arguments that are use to "sell" the approach to 'evaluate by competences' like 'reduce or even eliminate failure', 'set reachable targets for everyone', 'increase students motivation to learn' etc. have all been used in a similar way by B. F. Skinner when he argued in favor of his operant conditioning instrument, the Teaching Machine. And we all know that any given school system tends to assimilate (make it similar to what is already in place) new concepts.

It is often said that, if you don't know the history, you are condemned to repeat it. This applies to teaching as well. If you don't know in which theories your teaching practices are rooted, you may be condemned to do what you tried to overcome or to do differently and better.

So you teachers out there, I invite you to analyse what is hiding behind the competence item before checking the box. The item is not necessarily what it pretends to be. And please don't forget to have a look back to the roots of your teaching.
Take the videos below as a start and listen carefully to what Skinner says about the "free will".

Oh yes, what about the title?
Read to Véronique Marchand's article to the end and you will get the explanation.

The Tower of Babel

I got a lot of comments and questions recently. Thanks to all of you who took the time to comment my posts. Regarding the questions it will take some time to answer them, if I can. But maybe somebody else does have answers. Use the comment to react to peoples questions if you have some hint to a specific subject.

One suggestion I would like to make is that you should try to write your comments in English.
I think that most readers will understand English and expect English, as the whole blog is in English.
If I accept every language, the blog will be something like the Tower of Babel. Unfortunately I know only a few languages and most of the people around the world don't understand Luxembourgish. This makes it difficult to moderate comments. So let's all make an effort and avoid confounding of tongues to keep confusion low.

Besides, I don't give marks here and I don't care about your spelling - I care about the message. And if you are a teacher or a future teacher, try to do what you expect students to do, take your time but don't avoid the difficulty ;-)

I don't know what I think until I see what I say

This title is a declaration by the novelist Edward Morgan Forster (maybe known through some films based on his novels like A Passage to India, A Room with a View or Howards End).
I found the quote in the book "You Won't Remember Me - The Schoolboys of Barbiana Speak to Today" written by Marvin Hoffman in which he comments on "Letter to a Teacher" and reports how he was influenced in the beginning of his teaching career by the writing of the schoolboys of Barbiana.
When coaching teachers I regularly experience their resistance to writing when I suggest that they should try to write down their thoughts or to make short transcripts of classroom dialogue. Most of the teachers I meet have no confidence in their writing skills or feel that they have nothing valuable to write about. I can easily understand these feelings as I used to react in the same way and because I know what a poor and slow writer I am - which doesn't stop me from writing as you can see.
I think that you don't have to be a gifted writer if you have something to say and to share. We all know gifted writers and speakers who most of the time use their talent to demonstrate their superiority or to manipulate and to intimidate their audience or their readers.
Unfortunately most of us - teachers included - have not acquired writing and reading skills as means of self-expression and reflexion. In school we have been trained to think carefully before opening our mouth or before using a pen.
Nobody told us that writing is a way of thinking and that thoughts take shape during the act of speaking (cf. Heinrich Kleist famous essay he wrote in 1805 "On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking". ("Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden").

Teachers in the same way as their students need to take "courage to do without knowing yet how to do it" (P. Meirieu). Only then will they be prepared to be conscientious objectors to textbooks and to a rigidification of a curriculum which both are meant to enable a better transmission of reading and writing skills but too often leave students and teachers voiceless.

Célestin Freinet : Too progressive to be remembered ?

80 years ago the French pedagogue and educational reformer Célestin Freinet moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence with his wife Elise where they both worked as teachers.

At that time C. Freinet had already developed most of his major teaching principles which he called techniques (in opposition to methods which he associated with a top down approach). Each of his techniques were meant to connect learning in school to real life outside school and to encourage students to be productive, explorative, critical and collaborative while learning.

Freinet's students regularly left the school building to join their teacher in exploratory walks during which they gathered impressions and interesting information about their natural and social environment. Back to their classroom the students composed their own "free texts" which they discussed with their classmates and used a printing press to publish their "authentic" and most of the time collaborative work in newspapers. Gradually these newspapers were used as meaningful and rooted learning material instead of the preestablished curricula schoolbooks and they were exchanged with those of other schools.
These exchanges of "culture packages" between the Freinet's and René Daniel's students marked the beginning of interschool networks which became one of the characteristics of the Modern School Movement.

Besides the printing press Freinet's students used other instruments like photography, slide shows or audio-tape recorders. The instruments and techniques established a different relationship between students and teachers, between students and school as an institution, and most important between students and knowledge.

Freinet's efforts to establish collaborative teaching through interschool network was also motivated by the strong conviction that collaborative reflective teaching is essential to any serious school development and a necessary ground for reaching beyond rigid top down curricula and the latest teaching tricks, methods or ceremonials in fashion.

LEGO 50th Anniversary

Playing with Lego promotes creativity, spacial knowledge and imagination and as other tools Lego helps developing emotional values and social intelligence through collective play, (socio)dramatic play and narrative play.
In general, playing contributes to the development of emotional values and a positive self-esteem through the mastery over the tools and the imaginary worlds the player creates.

All experiences during play educate the player by providing enjoyable and sometimes not so enjoyable experiences (frustration if the construction is not working as intended).

5.000.000.000.000 Lego elements have been produced until today.
15.000.000.000 Lego figurines populate the globe.
And - LEGO is the world leading tire manufacturer.

Wilhelm Busch (not Bush !)

Wilhelm Busch, the father of violent comics and satirical picture stories, died on the 9th January, 100 years ago. His Max and Moritz stories were published in 1865 and are well known all ower the world. And we all remember Teacher Lämpel's exploding pipe, don't we ?

(image from commons)