The unconscious sprang to the attention of the West a hundred years ago, and we are still struggling to absorb its full impact. It was one thing to understand the concept, to see it and believe it, but another to live with it, to take in fully its challenge to our deepest cultural assumptions. Today, as we expand our understanding of its reach, we are still coming to grips with what it means. This “new unconscious” is driven by the identities we assume, the groups we belong to, the ideas w...

Merging cognitive science with educational agenda, Gardner makes an eloquent case for restructuring our schools by showing just how ill-suited our minds and natural patterns of learning are to the prevailing modes of education. This reissue includes a new introduction by the author.

Comparing math teaching practices in Japan and Germany with those in the United States, two leading researchers offer a surprising new view of teaching and a bold action plan for improving education inside the American classroom.For years our schools and children have lagged behind international standards in reading, arithmetic, and most other areas of academic achievement. It is no secret that American schools are in dire need of improvement, and that education has...

This popular text provides a clear, succinct explanation of how reflection is integral to teachers’ understandings of themselves, their practice, and their context, and elaborates how various conceptions of reflective teaching differ from one another. The emphasis on the importance of both self and context is embedded within distinct and varied educational traditions (conservative, progressive, radical, and spiritual). Throughout the text the reader is encouraged to examine his/her assumpt...

With four simple truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America’s educational establishment.Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its best to ignore it.Half of the childr...

Few writers ask us to question our fundamental assumptions about education as provocatively as Alfie Kohn. Time magazine has called him'perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores.' And the Washington Post says he is 'the most energetic and charismatic figure standing in the way of a major federal effort to make standardized curriculums and tests a fact of life in every U.S. school.'In this new collection of essa...

How much of our identity or 'self' is truly representative of our own wants, needs, and goals in life and how much does it reflect the desires and priorities of someone else? Are we following our own destiny or are we unconsciously repeating the lives of our parents, living according to their values, ideals, and beliefs? In this thought-provoking book, noted clinical psychologist Robert Firestone and his co-authors explore the struggle that all of us face in striving to retain a sense of o...

This book builds on two current developments in psychology scholarship and practice. The first centers on broad discontent with the individualist tradition in which the rational agent, or autonomous self, is considered the fundamental atom of social life. Critique of individualism spring not only from psychologists working in the academy, but also from communities of therapy and counseling. The second, and related development from which this work builds, is the search for alternatives to i...

Final thoughts from the now-deceased leader of narrative therapy.Michael White’s untimely death deprived therapists of a leading light. Here, available for the first time in book form, is a collection of the work he left behind—writings on topics dear to the psychotherapeutic world: turning points in therapy, conversations, resistance and therapist responsibility, couples therapy, and narrative responses to trauma.

Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of the landmark book Discussion as a Way of Teaching shows how to plan, conduct, and assess classroom discussions. Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill suggest exercises for starting discussions, strategies for maintaining their momentum, and ways to elicit diverse views and voices. The book also includes new exercises and material on the intersections between discussion and the encouragement of democracy in the classroom. T...

A powerful and unassailable argument for reforming America's schooling methods and ideas—by one of America's most important educators, the bestselling author of Cultural Literacy."A penetrating and compelling analysis of how, despite the good intentions of educators, bad ideas and failed theories now characterize American education." —The Indianapolis StarFor over fifty years, American schools have operated under the assum...

Perkins reveals the common misguided strategies students use and offers teachers and parents advice on how they can help their children.Although there has been a great deal of impassioned debate over the sad state of American education today, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how children actually learn to think. But, as David Perkins demonstrates, we cannot solve our problems in this area simply by redistributing power or by asking children to regurgi...