Monday, October 8, 2012

facilitate curiosity




Ira Socol (@irasocol)
10/8/12 6:35 AM
Creating Dependence on Authority - via @trescolumnae - joyfullatinlearning.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/pat…and not just in Special Education

our dependence on dependence..


on to creativity... no?
to facilitating curiosity....



via this from diane: http://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/08/creativity-declines-as-testing-increases/

We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity.

Kim, who is a professor of education at the College of William and Mary, analyzed scores on a battery of measures of creativity—called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)—collected from normative samples of schoolchildren in kindergarten through twelfth grade over several decades.  According to Kim’s analyses, the scores on these tests at all grade levels began to decline somewhere between 1984 and 1990 and have continued to decline ever since. The drops in scores are highly significant statistically and in some cases very large.  In Kim’s words, the data indicate that “children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”