charter-school

The First Step Is Failure

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Joanne Jacobs, edu­ca­tor, blog­ger and author of Our School: The Inspir­ing Sto­ry of Two Teach­ers, One Big Idea and the Char­ter School That Beat the Odds, par­tic­i­pates today in our Author Speaks Series with an excel­lent arti­cle on how “Schools won’t improve until admin­is­tra­tors and teach­ers can admit the prob­lems, ana­lyze what’s going wrong and try new strate­gies. Stu­dents won’t improve if they think they’re “special” just the way they are.” Enjoy, and feel free to add your com­ment to engage in a stim­u­lat­ing conversation.Our School: Joanne Jacobs

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The First Step Is Failure
By Joanne Jacobs

When self-esteem became an edu­ca­tion watch­word in 1986, I thought it was a harm­less fad. I was wrong: It wasn’t harm­less. Many teach­ers were per­suad­ed that stu­dents should be pumped up with praise, regard­less of their per­for­mance. Schools low­ered expec­ta­tions so stu­dents couldn’t fail. Every­one got an “I Am Special” stick­er. Till the stan­dards and account­abil­i­ty move­ment kicked in, stu­dents often were judged by how they felt about learn­ing not by whether they’d actu­al­ly learned something.

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2 more Contributors on Brain, Education issues

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We are pleased to announce that we’ll have 2 addi­tion­al excel­lent con­tri­bu­tions dur­ing February:

- Adri­an Pre­da, M.D., will write about a brain plas­tic­i­ty topic.

Adri­an Pre­da, M.D. is an Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try and Human Behav­ior in the UC Irvine School of Med­i­cine. His exper­tise in human behav­ior, psy­chol­o­gy and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty is based on years of expe­ri­ence work­ing as a psy­chi­a­trist, psy­chother­a­pist, teacher and researcher in a vari­ety of aca­d­e­m­ic clin­i­cal and non-clin­i­cal set­tings, includ­ing Yale Psy­chi­atric Insti­tute, Yale New Haven Hos­pi­tal, Yale Health Plan, UT South­west­ern and UC Irvine Neu­ro-Psy­chi­atric Research. 

- Joanne Jacobs, edu­ca­tion expert and great blog­ger, will par­tic­i­pate in our Author Speaks Series. 

Once a Knight Rid­der columnist, Joanne is now a free­lance writer and author of a book about a char­ter school that pre­pares His­pan­ic stu­dents for college. Her most recent book is Our School: The Inspir­ing Sto­ry of Two Teach­ers, One Big Idea and the Char­ter School That Beat the Odds. ÂÂ