In The Learning Paradox, neuroscientist, educator, and Harvard professor, Felipe Fregni discusses how our brain architecture, combined with our current educational system, may result in superficial and short-term learning. This book is relevant for students, teachers, education systems, and individuals who seek to improve their cognitive prowess while becoming better learners.
Learning from Singapore tells the inside story of the country’s journey in transforming its education system from a struggling one to one that is hailed internationally as effective and successful. It is a story not of the glory of international test results, but of the hard work and tenacity of a few generations of policy makers, practitioners and teacher trainers. Despite its success, Singapore continues to reform its education system, and is willing to deal with difficult issues and challenges of change. Citing Singapore's transformation, author Pak Tee Ng highlights how context and culture affect education policy formulation and implementation. Showing how difficult education reform can be when a system needs to negotiate between competing philosophies, significant trade-offs, or paradoxical positions, this book explores the successes and struggles of the Singapore system and examines its future direction and areas of tension. The book also explores how national education systems can be strengthened by embracing the creative tensions generated by paradoxes such as the co-existence of timely change and timeless constants, centralisation and decentralisation, meritocracy and compassion, and teaching less and learning more. Learning from Singapore brings to the world the learning from Singapore—what Singapore has learned from half a century of educational change—and encourages every education system to bring hope to and secure a future for the next generation.
As more is discovered about the powerful impact of lifelong learning on adults, educators are changing their views about how, when and where we learn. Learning is no longer defined only in the context of formal educational settings but in social context as well – including families, the workplace, and religious and political groups. This book explores how learning is our lifetime quest to understand personal identity, purpose and meaning while conforming and adapting to the perceived and real confines of our paradoxical society. The author examines the complex social experience of learning, revealing how culture, gender, race and other societal factors shape an individual’s identity and ability to function in relationships – the basis of all learning. He also discusses the difficult paradox of cultivating creative thinking and reflective action in a society that values the acquisition of degrees, certificates and titles over actual learning and growth.
An introduction to paradoxes showing that they are more than mere puzzles but can prompt new ways of thinking. Thinkers have been fascinated by paradox since long before Aristotle grappled with Zeno's. In this volume in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Margaret Cuonzo explores paradoxes and the strategies used to solve them. She finds that paradoxes are more than mere puzzles but can prompt new ways of thinking. A paradox can be defined as a set of mutually inconsistent claims, each of which seems true. Paradoxes emerge not just in salons and ivory towers but in everyday life. (An Internet search for “paradox” brings forth a picture of an ashtray with a “no smoking” symbol inscribed on it.) Proposing solutions, Cuonzo writes, is a natural response to paradoxes. She invites us to rethink paradoxes by focusing on strategies for solving them, arguing that there is much to be learned from this, regardless of whether any of the more powerful paradoxes is even capable of solution. Cuonzo offers a catalog of paradox-solving strategies—including the Preemptive-Strike (questioning the paradox itself), the Odd-Guy-Out (calling one of the assumptions into question), and the You-Can't-Get-There-from-Here (denying the validity of the reasoning). She argues that certain types of solutions work better in some contexts than others, and that as paradoxicality increases, the success of certain strategies grows more unlikely. Cuonzo shows that the processes of paradox generation and solution proposal are interesting and important ones. Discovering a paradox leads to advances in knowledge: new science often stems from attempts to solve paradoxes, and the concepts used in the new sciences lead to new paradoxes. As Niels Bohr wrote, “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
The most potent catalyst in a firm's success: change In this insightful book, Jim Harris details the philosophy and specifics of creating companies that respond successfully to change. With practical advice from companies who've made resilience a corporate motto, The Learning Paradox offers insights on how to adapt to the chaotic new world of business, including how to: create, motivate, and continuously improve; create learning organizations; design systems and structures for growth; maximize shareholder value, employee security, and customer loyalty; and attract and retain the best employees. He also addresses such critical managerial issues as maintaining control, while allowing people freedom and building a positive vision of the future, even during a reorganization.
This self-helf book begins with an entirely different premise compared to the pervasive practices of psychology. Traditionally, therapeutic psychology asks the question: "What is it about my bad brain chemistry, my bad biology, and my bad upbringing that creates the misery in which I am mired?" In contrast, "Changing Your Stripes" begins with an entirely different question, a more productive premise: "What is happening in my relationships with others, and what is my responsibility to be true to those relationships?" Because "Changing Your Stripes" is written from a Social Psychological perspective, it provides an alternative view on the issues of 1) Cause & Effect: The differences between how cause occurs in the physcial versus the behavioral realm); 2) Understanding Who You Are: You are more than the characteristic of your body, the most important aspect of Self is "how you are be-ing" with others; 3) Mental Illness/Disorder: Do you actually "have" a disorder, or are you really just "doing" dis-order; 4) Emotional Scars: How they really manifest, and how one can make them disappear.
The main conclusion drawn in this text is that Piaget's accounts of the construction of necessary knowledge continue to have an intelligible and respectable bases.
For fifty years Bärbel Inhelder (1913-1997) was the research companion of Jean Piaget. In this unique volume, published in her honour, leading international researchers examine the various aspects of her work and ideas and her contribution to developmental psychology. Following an initial chapter establishing Inhelder's stature as an independent researcher in her own right, the various research topics that she explored are reviewed and discussed with specific reference to her own perspective and in the chronological order in which she approached them. While the book explores Inhelder's work with her more famous colleague, it also highlights areas of research in which her ideas were at variance with those of Piaget, such as mental imagery, and areas in which her innovations have not been fully recognised, such as her discovery of the formal operations stage - an event usually attributed to Piaget - and her introduction of longitudinal studies in the field of cognitive development. Her research, viewpoint and contribution in other fields such as mental retardation, learning, and cross-cultural issues in development are also discussed. The final chapter, written by Inhelder herself, deals with experimental reasoning in children and adolescents and provides a glimpse of her creativity.
This book is the outcome of a long and passionate debate among world experts about two of the most pivotal figures of psychology: Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotksy. The occasion was a week-long advanced course held at the Jean Piaget Archives in Geneva. The most interesting outcome of the meeting is that, in spite of differences in aims and scopes (epistemogenesis versus psychogenesis), in units of analysis (events versus action) and in social contents (Swiss capitalism versus Soviet communism) both Piaget and Vygotsky reached a similar conclusion: knowledge is constructed within a specific material and social context. Moreover, their views complement each other perfectly: where Vygotsky insists on varieties of psychological experiences, Piaget shows how, out of diversity, grows universality, so much so that the most communist of the two is not necessarily the one who was so labelled. This book is not only of interest to developmental, social and learning psychologists, but also deals with issues pertinent to education, epistemology, language, thought and cognition, anthropology and philosophy. It is likely to shed some light on the state of affairs in psychology for the general reader too, because it is clear and precise, straightforward and uses virtually no jargon.
