Examine your knowledge base – My Mentors

A few days after having received an award from the Miller Brewing Company for my teaching of reading, a neighboring  private school director called and asked if I would come and talk to his teachers about teaching reading and my reading program. 

Talking to other teachers about my program was new to me. The first thing that came to mind was concepts I was taught. I have carried three of those concepts with me all my learning years. One thought brought a smile to my face.  It was  the day I was taken out of my highchair and welcomed to the big brown dining table and heard my father say, “If the student hasn’t learned; the teacher hasn’t taught.”

After the happy smiles,  my thoughts went on to the days I was in graduate school and I could hear Dr. Lane say, “If you have knowledge of the symbols of the language you can write and read  reams and reams of papers.” Finally I thought of my first grade teacher’s  response when I told her I wanted to open a school of my own, she said, “ That’s fine, but you have to have methodology.”

Sitting down to prepare my presentation, I remembered that I am not really an education researcher. I  know that I have been taught everything done in a classroom must be researched base. I realized I had to check and see what researchers have said. I wondered if I was thinking straight? Straight?  I went straight to "World Book."  As I picked  “World Book” up; all I could hear was one 
of my grandchildren say, "No Granny, everyone uses the computer now." Opening the World Book, I said,  "The computer uses the "World Book."  I felt good!

Researchers Guidance:

Examine your knowledge base – My Mentors

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Who so ever would be a man, must be a non-conformist. 
To maketh a full man, he must study nature, read literature and make things with his hands. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
Dewey came to regard intelligence as a power that man uses when he faces a conflict or challenge. He believed that man lives by custom and habit. In most situations, it is sufficient to think and act as we have done in the past, but some physical and social situations present problems calling for new responses. According to Dewey, man cannot solve such problems by habitual action and thought. He must use intelligence as an instrument for overcoming any obstacles. Dewey’s philosophy is thus called instrumentalism.

Dewey believed that knowledge is a means of controlling the environment, hopefully they improve the quality of human life. He wrote widely on  Art, Democracy, Education, Philosophy and Science.  In his writings, Dewey always focused on the same problems – how to close the gap between thought and action. Dewey’s  interpretation of science shows that thought and action are united.  He considered science as a method for inquiring into the behavior of things. The results of such inquiries are joint products of thought and activity. Conducting experiments under controlled situations and thought as those theories guide our experiments. 

In every area of life, Dewey called for experimenting and trying out new methods. As an educator, he opposed the traditional method of learning by memorizing under the authority of teachers. He believed that education should not be concerned only with the mind.  Students should develop manual skills.  Dewey declared that education must include a student’s physical and moral well-being as well as his intellectual development. 

Dewey connected works of art with the experience of every day life. He wrote the daily experience can be glorious, joyous,  sad, tedious, terrifying and tragic. These he said are the qualities that architects, composers,  painter and writers seek to capture and express. He regarded education as incomplete if it ignored these experiences.

John Dewey,  American philosopher,  educator, and author of “Art as Experience.” He led  a philosophical movement called Pragmatism. “You learn by doing.”

Maria Montessori,  an Italian educator developed a special method of teaching young children that became known as the Montessori Method.  She believed that children should be free to find out things for themselves and to develop through individual activity. Her teaching materials and learning tasks are used for developing awareness and confidence. These materials make use of a child’s desire to manipulate and discover insights on his own. 

Maria Montessori “Children learn through the five senses.”

Jeanne Piaget, a Swiss psychologist believed that children passed with three periods of mental development: 
Birth to two years Sensory Motor
Children obtain a basic knowledge of objects through their senses. 
2 to 7 Concrete Operation. (Part one) 
Children learn their language and how to draw.  
7 to 11 years Concrete Operation. (Part two) 
Children begin to think logically.
11 to 15 years Formal Operation. 
Children began to reason realistically about the future and deal with abstractions.

Gestalt Psychology is concerned with the organization of mental processes. Gestalt means pattern or form. Gestalt psychologist believe that human beings and animals tend to perceive organized patterns,  not individual parts.  Not merrily parts that are added together.  According to them,  the relationship between different parts of a stimulus which we perceive as a whole or a pattern,  gives us our meaning.
                            Swiss Psychology 

Learning any language involves the four different skills of listening, speaking, writing and reading. 

Every language has four component parts.  These components are words, sound patterns, syntax (a system of word arrangement), and grammatical structure (part of speech). 
Language Learning 

If you have sufficient knowledge of the symbols of a language, you can write and read reams and reams of paper.
                           Dr. Leonora Carrington Lane

Whenever I think about the researchers, I think about Dr. Lane and Jeanne Piaget. They each told us the same thing, “Reading is the product of knowing the language.” They also told us that between the ages of two and seven, a child should learn to draw.  When I first heard that, I paid little attention.  I could not draw. I understood the language part, so I worked on teaching the language. 

One day I was in my classroom.  School has just started and I was in a new school system.  The supervisor from the central office came into my room.  He wanted to see what plans I had for teaching art to the children.

I explained that I myself cannot draw and I was never good in art.  Mr. Goutenhauser said, “Well Miss Frazier, an art lesson is just like any other lesson.  All are given to children to make them think.” The very next day,  I told the children we were going to learn to draw trees.  Some children said, “I can’t draw.”  As we sat on the lawn, I told the children, “Just put down something for everything you see where ever you think you see it.” 

It was Autumn and each day that we went out  our autumn trees became better. Winter came and from our classroom windows, we looked out and drew winter trees.  Then came our first snowfall.