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ellenv's picture

Teaching the Brain

We talked about the randomness/unpredictability of the nervous system last time and it made me think about whether or not the same type of system exists in the classroom. In reading through the articles about education reform, it seemed that they talked a lot about the identifying specific problems (inputs) that create unfavorable forms of education (output). Once the problem had been identified, those involved in reform attempted to look for other ways to change the input in order to gain a different output. However, oftentimes the outputs were not the desired output even though other cases had proven that such an output was possible. For example, failing public schools can sometimes be turned into charter schools. At times this change to charter schools creates a success story, but other times it is not the case. Could the problem be that like the nervous system the educational system is not based on input and output alone? If so, I would think that a different approach to reform would be necessary. There would be no room for creating formulas for success and there would have to be a much more individual approach to reform from school to school.

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