This is the title of a book by Howard Sharron and Martha Coulter which I’ve recently been re-reading.  It describes the inspiring work of Reuven Feuerstein, the Israeli teacher and psychologist.

It is a lesson to everyone engaged in education to treat with caution the claims of “science” in pre-scientific subjects like psychology. Feuerstein was one of the survivors of the Holocaust who made his home in Israel after the Second World War. As a psychologist, he was confronted with helping children who had survived the camps to lead a useful life in their new country. However, he was shocked to discover that the conventional psychologists of the time diagnosed a wholly disproportionate number of them as educationally sub-normal. Luckily, Feuerstein was more of a teacher than a psychologist and he refused to accept that these remnants of European Jewry, however horrific their experiences, were ineducable. Continue reading →

There are two ways of making abstract words from concrete words: one is nominalisation and the other is metaphor.

When I was working on the structure of abstract  language, I found it hard to flush into consciousness the metaphors embedded in everyday language. For example, we have no way of conceptualising time except by using a metaphor from space. (For instance, the chemist’s is between the grocery and the optician. The meeting is between 2.00 and 4.00.) For me as an adult, the processing of these metaphors had become automatic.

I’ve been reading a recent book on metaphor: I is an Other  by James Geary. He desribes research which indicates that children develop an understanding of different kinds of metaphor at different ages. Continue reading →

This week’s blog continues Bob Farmer’s contribution. He applies his ideas on interactive peer group learning to teaching The Language of Ideas:

Low academic language skills have been shown to be associated with low academic performance in a variety of educational settings. Mary Mason’s computer package The Language of Ideas is a based on the principle that one of the differences between successful and unsuccessful students is that students who succeed have learned the abstract language of ideas. In order to get qualifications in any subject, therefore, students need more than good exam technique, they also need to learn about and raise their level of academic language skills. Continue reading →