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Thursday, March 28, 2013

“Five ways to get kids to want to read and write” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

“Five ways to get kids to want to read and write” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…:


“Five ways to get kids to want to read and write”

Five ways to get kids to want to read and write is an excerpt from my book, Self-Driven Learning, that was published by the Washington Post this morning.
There wasn’t room for the short introduction to the excerpt that I wrote, so I’ll publish it here instead:
Sir Ken Robinson has said:
“Farmers and gardeners know you cannot make a plant grow….The plant grows itself. What you do is provide the conditions for growth. And great farmers know what the conditions are and bad ones don’t. Great teachers know what the conditions for growth are…”
Unfortunately, we teachers might often feel pressured to believe that the best “conditions for growth” include treating students as “vessels to be filled,” giving and taking away “points,”  or using other types of punishments and rewards (eerily similar to how some “school reformers” want to treat educators themselves).