Thursday, April 28, 2011

Road Trip With Alfie Kohn « The Core Knowledge Blog

Road Trip With Alfie Kohn « The Core Knowledge Blog

Road Trip With Alfie Kohn

by Robert Pondiscio
April 28th, 2011

OK, teachers. Raise your hand if Alfie Kohn has ever set foot in your classroom and witnessed you drilling your students with rote memorization or handing out worksheets all day.

Anyone?

One of the very first pieces I wrote for this blog concerned Alfie Kohn and his insistence that Core Knowledge is rote memorization and a “bunch o’ facts” while never to my knowledge having actually darkened the doorway of a single Core Knowledge school. He’s at it again in Education Week, wringing his hands over the “pedagogy of poverty” and how urban children endure a curriculum that “consists of a series of separate skills, with more worksheets than real books, more rote practice than exploration of ideas, more