School board members are receiving death threats. School board meetings have become shouting matches. The national news is regularly reporting about the most local of politics—school board elections in tiny districts. The two primary topics causing all this conflict are COVID-based mandates for masking and/or vaccination and teaching about racism in social studies classes. This post is about…
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We are excited to offer you a free, digital Solutionary Guidebook to help your students and children build solutionary practices. Our guidebook offers a rationale and step-by-step process for educating people to be solutionaries. It also offers case studies covering elementary through higher education along with many resources. The guidebook will help you guide young people to:…
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I recently read Steve Pearlman’s excellent new book, America’s Critical Thinking Crisis: the Failure and Promise of Education, and I immediately reached out to him. At the Institute for Humane Education, we share Steve’s conviction that critical thinking is critically important, and we’re thrilled that he offers pedagogical approaches for creating critical thinkers. Steve is…
Read more » We are excited to offer you a free, digital Solutionary Guidebook to help your students and children build solutionary practices. The guidebook details the multi-step Solutionary Framework and outlines how to use it to educate people to be solutionaries. It also offers case studies covering elementary through higher education along with many supporting resources. The Solutionary Guidebook…
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Zoe Weil is a blogger for Psychology Today, and we share her blog posts here. When I teach, I often begin my classes by telling students not to believe me. They’re usually surprised by this. It’s uncommon for teachers to discourage their students from believing what they say. What would be the point of schools…
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Zoe Weil is a blogger for Psychology Today (PT), and twice a month we share her blog posts here. Enjoy! As a 98 lb. white woman with small bones, I am a poster child for osteoporosis. Plus, I have a family history of the condition. My mother had a spontaneous sacral fracture at age 83…
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by Abby Power Can we have an open dialogue with our children and students about what is happening in the world today? I say yes! Children have an extraordinary capacity for critical thinking when given the opportunity to practice it. I have found that there are three main areas that help in creating a space…
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by IHE Peruse a piece of information, and it may seem objective. Look again with a more critical eye, and you can begin to see the hidden messages, the framing, and the context (or lack thereof) attached to that piece of information. Much of the information we impart to our students, whether through textbooks or…
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by Marsha Rakestraw In mid-January, two boys, ages 12 and 13, killed more than 500,000 bees and destroyed tens of thousands of dollars of property. Allegedly just for kicks. In December 2017, a young Muslim woman was attacked on a transit train in Vancouver, Canada. Most people watched; only one young man intervened. Incidences of…
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by Marsha Rakestraw Technology is not neutral. And while we’re increasingly learning about the pervasive influence of fake news and misinformation, we rarely consider that the algorithms and filters our tech uses contain bias. Those algorithms limit and shape what we see, how we spend our time, and what we think about. Those algorithms can…
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