- HOME
- Table of Contents
- Resume
- Philosophy Statement
- 1. History of Jewish/General Education
- 2. Assessment
- 3. Curriculum
- 4. Language Development/Hebrew
- 5. Personal Development of Teachers
- 6. Collaboration/Community
- 7. Technology
- 8. Learning and Cognition
- 9. Evidence-Based Practice
- 10. Child Development
- 11. Content Knowledge
- 12. Ethics and Values
- 13. Instructional Methods
- Inspiration/Chizuk
- Post-Observation Reflections
Foundations of Jewish Education
Dr. Sokolow
Fall 2009
Foundations of Education: Pioneers
Numerous figures in history have come to be considered pioneers of modern teaching, yet their approaches are still encouraged or critiqued for various reasons. Below we will analyze the positive and negative aspects of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s approach to education. Living in the era of the Industrial Revolution, Pestalozzi reacted to the dissolution of family life by encouraging schools to provide nurturing home-like environments, while children learn from interacting with objects in their natural environments.
PRO
1) Direct sensory learning from within a child’s environment promotes realistic and useful knowledge that a child develops in school and utilizes outside of school, as well.
2) The methods are applicable to both general and special-needs students.
3) Schools are envisioned as emotionally-healthy and nurturing environments, with teachers who are good instructors as well as emotionally-healthy and sensitive people capable of developing caring relationships with all their students, ensuring teachers of both academic and personal quality.
4) The whole child is addressed, both intellectual and emotional wellbeing and development. Many school-related issues develop, essentially, as manifestations of unmet emotional needs, or negative emotional experiences, so an educational approach that addresses this as well, is likely to be more effective, especially if a child’s family/home life is not nurturing,
then at least his school environment will be.
CON
1) “Emotional health” is not a quantifiable criterion for hiring teachers.
2) How is this method, in its preschool stages, more than simply supplementing parenting, or active babysitting, if the children are already exposed to what is being taught?
3) Children cannot be expected to “thoroughly understand what they are studying (page 101)” until older ages. They can grasp certain concrete aspects of plants or rocks, for example, but will never fully understand what they are simply via sensory experiences.
4) While emphasizing personal sensory experience with nature, and gradually building skills upon those subjective observations, there is a lack of imparting objective information. Will children be limited to learning only about what they experience in their immediate environment, and not learning, for example, about far-away countries?
Dr. Sokolow
Fall 2009
Foundations of Education: Pioneers
Numerous figures in history have come to be considered pioneers of modern teaching, yet their approaches are still encouraged or critiqued for various reasons. Below we will analyze the positive and negative aspects of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s approach to education. Living in the era of the Industrial Revolution, Pestalozzi reacted to the dissolution of family life by encouraging schools to provide nurturing home-like environments, while children learn from interacting with objects in their natural environments.
PRO
1) Direct sensory learning from within a child’s environment promotes realistic and useful knowledge that a child develops in school and utilizes outside of school, as well.
2) The methods are applicable to both general and special-needs students.
3) Schools are envisioned as emotionally-healthy and nurturing environments, with teachers who are good instructors as well as emotionally-healthy and sensitive people capable of developing caring relationships with all their students, ensuring teachers of both academic and personal quality.
4) The whole child is addressed, both intellectual and emotional wellbeing and development. Many school-related issues develop, essentially, as manifestations of unmet emotional needs, or negative emotional experiences, so an educational approach that addresses this as well, is likely to be more effective, especially if a child’s family/home life is not nurturing,
then at least his school environment will be.
CON
1) “Emotional health” is not a quantifiable criterion for hiring teachers.
2) How is this method, in its preschool stages, more than simply supplementing parenting, or active babysitting, if the children are already exposed to what is being taught?
3) Children cannot be expected to “thoroughly understand what they are studying (page 101)” until older ages. They can grasp certain concrete aspects of plants or rocks, for example, but will never fully understand what they are simply via sensory experiences.
4) While emphasizing personal sensory experience with nature, and gradually building skills upon those subjective observations, there is a lack of imparting objective information. Will children be limited to learning only about what they experience in their immediate environment, and not learning, for example, about far-away countries?