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Saturday, March 2, 2013

Daily Kos: The need for reflection and downtime in education

Daily Kos: The need for reflection and downtime in education:


The need for reflection and downtime in education

I was provoked to offer my thoughts on this topic by reading Puttering, Responsibility, and Beauty, a blog post by Diana Seneschal that I highly recommend.
I add to this my friendship with Vicki Abeles who produced the important film Race to Nowhere, about how we overschedule and overburden many of our school students, sometimes with tragic consequences.
I will also note that my own teacher training in the Master of Arts in Teaching program at Johns Hopkins emphasized the need for reflective practice by teachers.
As a National Board Certified Teacher I was required as part of my application for that status to offer a great deal of reflection on the work I did and the artifacts I presented in support of my candidacy.  The fourth of the five core propositions upon which the National Board process is based is Teachers Think Systematically about Their