article on need for holistic learning in school
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Answer:
Holistic education is concerned with the development of a person’s intellectual, emotional, social, physical, artistic, creative and spiritual potentials. School Around Us aims to create “whole” individuals who are well balanced in their outlook on life and their personal understanding of themselves in relation to the world.
School Around Us emphasizes self-knowing and honoring who you are, learning to set realistic and achievable goals, and in retrospect, regularly examining the path you have taken to achieve your goals. Holistic learning honors life experience, both achievements and road blocks, with a focus on both what went well and what didn’t go as planned. School Around Us believes that learning is in everything we do and self-reflection is the key to understanding yourself and becoming a happy and strong adult.
““Holistic education is a philosophy of education based on the premise that each person find identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to humanitarian values such as compassion and peace. Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning.””
— Ron Miller- Pioneer in Holistic Education
Since we are part of the Progressive Education Movement, we hold the following common values with other progressive methodologies such as Waldorf, Montessori, Sudbury Valley and other free schools, and Reggio Emilia Education, among others.
At School Around Us we:
Emphasize learning by doing and provide hands-on projects and opportunities
Design integrated curriculum focused on thematic units
Help our students learn to develop problem-solving and critical-thinking skills
Provide regular opportunities for group work and the development of social skills
Facilitate understanding and action as the goals of learning as opposed to rote knowledge
Emphasize collaboration and cooperation rather than competition
Educate for social responsibility and democracy
Integrate community service and service learning projects in the daily curriculum
De-emphasize the use of text books in favor of varied learning resources
Create life-long learners
Assess by evaluation of children’s projects, goals and learning experiences
Help students understand and respect their learning styles
Hey dear..
Professor David Perkins likes to tell this story: Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was getting on a train. One of his sandals slipped off and fell to the ground. The train was moving, and there was no time to go back. Without hesitation, Gandhi took off his second sandal and threw it toward the first. Asked by his colleague why he did that, he said one sandal wouldn’t do him any good, but two would certainly help someone else.
As Perkins writes in his new book, Future Wise, “People cherish the story as a marvelous example of a charitable act. And so it is, on a small scale, seizing a singular moment.”
But as he also points out, and as he told an audience at the Future of Learning institute held this past summer at the Ed School, it was more than that: It was also a knowledgeable act. By throwing that sandal, Gandhi had two important insights: He knew what people in the world needed, and he knew what to let go of.
Educators, Perkins says, need to embrace these same insights. They need to start asking themselves what he considers to be one of the most important questions in education: What's worth learning in school?
What’s worth learning in school? It’s a question that students have been lobbing at teachers for years, in a slightly different form.
“In the back of the class, there’s that idly waving hand,” Perkins writes. “You’ve been teaching long enough to be pretty sure that hand is going to go up as soon as you got started on this topic, and so it does, with an annoying indolence. All right. You gesture toward the hand, Let’s hear it.
“The student: ‘Why do we need to know this?’”
As a teacher, Perkins says he hates that question. Teachers work hard at what they do, and the question is disrespectful. Yet, he admits, the question is actually a good one — an “uppity version” of what’s worth learning in school. (It’s also one he admits having asked once or twice himself.)
“When that ballistic missile comes from the back of the room, it’s a good reminder that the question doesn’t just belong to state school boards, authors of textbooks, writers of curriculum standards, and other elite,” he says. “It’s on the minds of our students.”
That’s why Perkins decided to devote an entire book, and many lectures and discussions, to how that question gets answered.
These days, he says we teach a lot that isn’t going to matter, in a significant way, in students’ lives. There’s also much we aren’t teaching that would be a better return on investment. As a result, as educators, “we have a somewhat quiet crisis of content,” Perkins writes, “quiet not for utter lack of voices but because other concerns in education tend to muffle them.” These other concerns are what he calls rival learning agendas: information, achievement, and expertise.