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Anna Stokke's avatar

I watched most of it. That's 45 minutes of my life I'll never get back. It's an old argument and I'm amazed people buy it. It goes something like this: If you want kids to do well on exams then teach them stuff, but all you'll get is kids who do well on exams. (So, cut down any teacher whose students do well on exams, because that doesn't mean anything anyways. It's nasty, really.) If you want to build great collaboration, creativitivity, imagination, curiosity, you must teach this way [insert whatever the speaker is selling]. But why should we take it as truth that said teaching method is going to foster those nice-sounding things? Things like curiosity and imagination can't be measured, nor can you every say for sure what caused them.

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Kevin Butler's avatar

Scott Newstok mentions in his book "How to Think Like Shakespeare" that, in Shakespeare's time, the school day was around twelve hours, six days a week, and involved extensive memorization, recitation, and translating Latin. I'm not saying we should go back to that, but seriously...for Guy Claxton to talk about Shakespeare being a "slow learner" and to criticize the building of explicit knowledge as a result is pure madness.

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Liz's avatar

Thanks for brightening my day. "...this would be huge, if true, because brain growth is commonly assumed to be constrained by the inner dimensions of the skull..." gave me the big smile I needed to get through.

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Prof. Gavin Brown's avatar

Given the previous summary I read of Claxton's speech I don't know how he qualifies as a cognitive Psychologist.

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Martin Robinson's avatar

He qualifies by calling himself one. His actual qualifications are listed as: “Guy has a “double first” in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and a doctorate in psycholinguistics from Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and an Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences”

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Prof. Gavin Brown's avatar

Doesn't seem sufficient credentials. Greg Ashman is more of a cognitivist than Claxton is.

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Martin Robinson's avatar

Claxton the chameleon, will change his credentials depending on what branch of the tree he visits

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Cameron Christiansen's avatar

Compare the pair, one from Claxton’s book ‘The Future of Teaching’, one from the transcript between Bennett and Willingham.

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Nate Byrd 13's avatar

I saw as well that Joe Biden has come down with the stage 4.

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