Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning (Corwin Mathematics Series)

by Peter Liljedahl

Another group on whom this navigation instrument was having very little impact were the students who didn’t appear to care about either their learning or their grade. Some of these students were performing at the lower end of their respective classes. For these students, information about where they are and where they are going wasn’t helping them to move forward. They already knew where they were, and they didn’t really have ambitions to go anywhere else. This is not to say that they couldn’t be helped. Just not in this way. This is also not to say that all students performing at the lower end of their class didn’t care. We saw big improvements in many students who were previously performing poorly—many moving from failing to passing a unit test.

! If only the will was governed by clear-eyed approaches to Cognitive achievement. “As is the case in many school systems, achievement has taken priority over personhood.” — Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity: The Keys to Successful Equity Implementation by Floyd Cobb, John Krownapple https://a.co/eDvDuoY ““The biggest problem with tracking by a million miles is the equity issue,” says John Hattie (Corwin, 2015), lead researcher of the largest-ever study of educational research. “For instance . . . there is a high probability of African Americans and [Latinx students] being in the lower tracked groups. How can you possibly defend that apartheid in our schools?”” — Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity: The Keys to Successful Equity Implementation by Floyd Cobb, John Krownapple https://a.co/8cCOJ6a “The fact is that Maslow’s insight about belonging is an inconvenient truth when it comes to how schools currently function. School policies, practices, and behaviors all assume that achievement is all-important and is the determiner and entrance to belonging to that culture. The obsession with achievement has damaged relationships and the health and well-being of our students.” — Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity: The Keys to Successful Equity Implementation by Floyd Cobb, John Krownapple https://a.co/7rkk8X3 “This is the area illuminated by the streetlight. In addition, people often fear or ignore whatever is outside the radius of light, that is, whatever is beyond their experience and comfort zone. We believe we need to look beyond what is already known and practiced. The key to equity is still in the shadows. It’s time to bring it into the light.” — Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity: The Keys to Successful Equity Implementation by Floyd Cobb, John Krownapple https://a.co/1RDAiLi “They were persuaded, that, by some ridiculous arts of divination, they could discover the will of the superior beings, and that human sacrifices were the most precious and acceptable offering to their altars.” — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon https://a.co/eojcdOW “If we contemplate a savage nation in any part of the globe, a supine indolence and a carelessness of futurity will be found to constitute their general character. In a civilized state every faculty of man is expanded and exercised; and the great chain of mutual dependence connects and embraces the several members of society. The most numerous portion of it is employed in constant and useful labor. The select few, placed by fortune above that necessity, can, however, fill up their time by the pursuits of interest or glory, by the improvement of their estate or of their understanding, by the duties, the pleasures, and even the follies of social life. The Germans were not possessed of these varied resources. The care of the house and family, the management of the land and cattle, were delegated to the old and the infirm, to women and slaves. The lazy warrior, destitute of every art that might employ his leisure hours, consumed his days and nights in the animal gratifications of sleep and food.” — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon https://a.co/0OFRq2p Carelessness of futurity being characterized by the slaveowning, complicit, colonial hegemon “If polarization is not the natural condition of most of the country, then defining our national life by the views of those who are political obsessives is a misrepresentation of American national life and also affects that life, creating a profound weariness that cripples the will to participate in public affairs. Those of us in the press have an obligation to be clear that America is not defined by its most partisan citizens.” — The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency by John Dickerson https://a.co/dKlbXGk