deconstructing school choice

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deconstructing school choice

The principle of school choice is not as simple as upholding the rights of autonomy of families to make decisions about the education of their children. There are important considerations related to social justice, social cohesion, and so on. Private schools which are permitted to charge tuition are often able to generate large operating budgets, which can enable them to create better educational opportunities for the students there. This effectively allows wealthy parents to give their children an advantage over children from poor families, which undermines the principles of social justice. Charter schools with voucher systems, which allow families to effectively transfer their child's portion of public education funding from one school to the next, attempt to circumvent this issue by providing full public funding without any allowance for additional tuition fees. However, even in these cases, although financial inputs may be equal, there is still a social justice issue, because only the most active and engaged families (often those with the most educated parents) will do the research and leg work to make the best choices for their child's education

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deconstructing classroom management

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deconstructing classroom management

Classroom management refers to the way in which the classroom is structured, managed, and maintained by or with the teacher. It is often understood more narrowly in terms of the management and regulation of student behaviour, but optimally goes beyond this to include other aspects of classroom life, such as the organization and maintenance of the physical environment. Operationally, classroom management is usually carried out through a combination of the following elements: social norms; rules, and consequences for breaking rules; positive expectations; role modelling; good pedagogical relationships; positive peer pressure; routines and procedures for doing things; well designed learning activities that interest and engage students, and so on.

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deconstructing bloom

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deconstructing bloom

 

The Basic Idea 

In colloquial usage, Bloom's taxonomy refers to a classification scheme for educational objectives. While its original formulation was somewhat more comprehensive, it is characteristically represented as a hierarchy of six cognitive capacities: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Although seldom

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deconstructing play

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deconstructing play

The Basic Idea

When we say play, we're actually talking about a whole variety of different things. The term encompasses activities which range from manual to mental, from tangible to imaginary, from closed to open, from individual to group, from competitive to cooperative, and from silent all the way to rowdy. Basically, play refers to the enjoyable and purposeful activities of babies, old folks, and everyone in between. Play is often centred around some kind of game, or toy, or scenario—but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a pretty open category. 

Functional Importance

Play is one of the most natural human behaviours. It is among the precious few innate human functions which are not immediately necessary for survival. Children are born

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deconstructing curriculum

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deconstructing curriculum

The Basic Concept 

Curriculum design, at its essence, is social engineering. The concept of curriculum is used in a variety of different ways, but is generally understood to refer to the scope of what is taught and learned in an educational setting. Because this meaning is so broad, distinctions have been drawn, for instance, between the taught curriculum and the learned curriculum, or between the formal curriculum and the informal curriculum. Formal curricula provide the authorized encoding of what the educational institution deems to be important.

In most institutionalized educational settings, the curriculum is defined operationally by some kind of formal body of material, a course syllabus, a set of required readings, a document outlining standards and outcomes of the learning experience etc. Whatever

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deconstructing school architecture

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deconstructing school architecture

The Basic Concept

At the fundamental level, school architecture is as simple as it sounds. The basic assumption, of course, is that we need some kind of building to house students. We should not take that for granted because there are plenty of examples around the world where that is not the case, either out of choice or necessity. In addition, online learning is becoming more common, which has the potential to transform the way we understand the concept of school just as it has done with our concept of community. But for the time being, we can acknowledge that most formal education takes place in a building of some sort.

Functional Importance

School architecture has a strong functionalist element. First and foremost, we expect that

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deconstructing assessment

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deconstructing assessment

The Basic Concept

Student assessment is prominent in most education systems, and its prominence is only increasing in the age of market-based education development, comparative rankings under the guise of accountability, and "scientific" reform. But assessment is implemented in a huge variety of ways.

One fundamental distinction in assessment is that of intent. We can differentiate between assessment for learning, which is formative and ongoing, and assessment of learning, which is usually just summative. Generally, summative assessment will tend towards the formal, whereas formative assessment can include formal testing or be as informal as teacher observation. While most assessment is carried out by some kind of adult authority figure, we should also give consideration to students' involvement as co-assessors, through

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deconstructing pedagogy

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deconstructing pedagogy

The Basic Concept

Pedagogy refers to the method or practice of teaching. In education circles the term is used in reference to things like instructional strategies and classroom management, essentially, the performance that the teacher puts on each day. But the idea need not be limited to these kind of direct behaviours. Many things which teachers do that don't involve direct interaction with students also have immense pedagogic potential. Montessori, for one, saw the pedagogic role of the students' learning environment, and devised an educational method which leveraged that potential through careful preparation of the environment to allow students freedom of choice while ensuring that those choices would result in meaningful experiential learning.

Functional Importance

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