Inside Today's Elementary Schools: A Psychologist's Perspective

ISBN-13: 9783030233464 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 261 str.

James J. Dillon

Opis

This book takes readers on a tour of a day in the life of a public elementary school in an effort to give parents and other stakeholders a sense of the realities of the classroom. The tour reveals ten worrisome things about today's schools and considers what to do about them. Dillon emphasizes the need for future schools to be places filled with adventure and high purpose, with classrooms small enough to waste only a minimum of time. They should be free from stifling levels of bureaucracy, supervised by rotating teacher administrators rather than career managers. The book asserts that schools should be staffed by scholarly and engaged teaching professionals dedicated to helping students live a healthy adult life in a democracy rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all, furiously assessed college prep curriculum on everyone. In all, Dillon argues, schools should be places with classrooms of narrow ability ranges dedicated to teaching a coherent curriculum, all in a context of full buy-in and support from students' families. Let's go inside today's elementary schools.

Spis treści

​Part I: Shortsighted Vision & Lopsided Staffing

Chapter 1: The House on Sleepy Hollow Road

Bridges and Potholes

How the Book Is Organized

Chapter 2: So Many Girls...So Few Princes

Some Negative Effects of the Gender Staffing Imbalance

What You Can Do

Chapter 3: When Am I Ever Going to Use Any of This?

Adventure and High Purpose

The Romantic Child

Lessons from Harry Potter

Industry vs. Inferiority

The Zombie Apocalypse

What You Can Do

Chapter 4: And Then God Made School Boards

The Administration

Total Management Mentality

Adversarial Posture

Who Becomes an Administrator?

Toxic Culture

The Good Ones

What You Can Do

Chapter 5: the Bottom of the Barrel?

Women's Work: The Mother

Drill and Kill: The Sergeant

Just Tell Me What to Do: the Sheep

The Easiest Major: The Underachiever

Teacher Training, Where It All Begins

Why Should We Teach Anyway?

What You Can Do

Chapter 6: What to Do about These Four Things

Our Vision of Teachers and Schools

Personnel Reform

Part II: The Wall of Separation, Administrative Bloat, and Boundless Accommodation

Chapter 7: Platonic Curriculum; Epicurean Society

Who Formulates the Standards?

What Are Standards Designed to Do?

What Is the Nature of the Standards?

Five Basic Problems with Current Elementary Standards

Three Possible Solutions

What You Can Do

Chapter 8: Just Wastin' Time

The Different Kinds of Wasted Time

Where Does the Time Go?

Time-Off-Task

Why Is So Much Time Lost?

How Lost Time Negatively Impacts Teacher and Student

What You Can Do

Chapter 9: No Child Left Behind?

A Brief History of Standardized Tests

Common Critiques

The Real Reason Why NCLB Caused So Much Trouble

Life after NCLB

What You Can Do

Chapter 10: I'm Five Teachers at Once!

What is Differentiated Instruction?

A Sympathetic Critique of DI

Less Noble reasons for Using DI

What You Can Do

Chapter 11: The Incredible Bending School

Reasonable Special Education and Non-Academic Services

Unreasonable Special Education and Non-Academic Services

Pedagogical stress

What You Can Do

Chapter 12: Look Not to the Stars

A Picture of Contemporary Parental Engagement

Barriers to Parental Engagement

Why Parental Engagement Matters

What You Can Do

Chapter 13: What to Do about These Six Things

Wall of Separation

Multiplying Diversions

Part III: What to Do about All 10 Things

Chapter 14: A New Day?

Dealing with Fear

Seeing Through Ideology

Letting Go of the Need to Control

Conclusion

O autorze

James J. Dillon, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia, USA. He is a graduate of Clark University, a certified public elementary school teacher, and author of Partnerships in Research, Clinical, and Educational Settings (2000) and Teaching Psychology and the Socratic Method (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016).