What people are saying about Imaginative EducationIt’s great stuff! I was exposed to it through the article in Educational Leadership and I am now reading the book. It makes so much sense! Thank you for your great work! Dave Bell (Texas) When I started to use IE several years ago now, that I tried it out in a few lessons here and there, was amazed at the success and then began to look for other areas and subjects in which I could use the Lesson Planning Frameworks and other aspects of the theory. Pamela Hagen. I am just back home after a great pro-day and still reeling from all that I learned from your workshop. Pamela Walker (Victoria, B.C.) I've been having a great deal of success with IE in the classroom. I taught grade 5 last year using IE-based concepts and had a GREAT year. I'm teaching kindergarten this year and using the concepts again - so far so fabulous! Mary Mulleady, (Teacher, Surrey.) |
Document ActionsCognitive Tools
last modified
2006-11-05 15:36
"Cognitive tools" is another piece of jargon that education has imported from psychology. But we tend to use such pieces of jargon because we can't come up with better or more everyday terms, or sometimes out of ideleness perhaps, or, even worse, to try to give the illusion of cleverness. Some part of our work on imagination in education draws on ideas of the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. In particular we have been interested by his notion of how the "cognitive tools" one picks up play a large part in shaping the sense one can make and consequently in how one can learn. We have been trying to extend his idea by looking at the cognitive tools that come along with language, for example. We have begun to make an inventory of such tools, because they seem to us crucial to understanding both how and what people can learn. In this section we include some thoughts about what cognitive tools are and why they are important to anyone involved in education, and also our attempts to describe the basic tools that come along with learning an oral language, and then those that come along with literacy. We think these cognitive tools are the dominant influences on what and how students can learn. They are also, hardly coincidentally, important indicators of the forms of imagination that one finds in students at different ages. Some thoughts about "cognitive tools." Cognitive tools that come along with oral language. |
