The Official Blog of Robert Swartz and Thinking Based Learning
It used to be thought that only some children are born creative -- they will become the great Shakespeares and Picassos of their time. But all others who are not born this way are doomed to just ordinary thinking… no creativity.However recent advances in how our brain works and the development of new educational techniques show us that ...
Part one. What can we do to save the bees?1. Since 2010 various movements to introduce innovations in classroom instruction have broken teaching away from using the school day as a centerpiece of instruction and learning. And in many cases, it has been replaced with learning built around extended units that replace what used ...
I was scheduled to do a featured presentation at the International Conference on Thinking in Melbourne, Australia, the week of July 4th. But that conference has now been postponed and, at the same time, many of you have been asking me when I will be doing more workshops on Thinking-Based Learning. So now I am ...
2.1. What's in the box?“Well” the student explained, “this is for people stranded in the desert. It gives them drink-ing water. All they must do is to urinate in this bottle at the top and in a few minutes out of the spout at the side water will flow. And it is clean fresh water.” ...
1.1. What’s in the Box?This is what I saw when I visited Pablo Carrion’s Grade 6 classroom at Colegio Lope de Vega in Benidorm, Spain, a few years ago. This student was showing the other students an invention of his and explaining what it does. The students looking on were fascinated.1.2. Solving Problems CreativelySo what ...
Based on Robert Swartz’s editorials for ENIAC published in Madrid, Spain, September, 2015 – January, 20164. Can Creativity Be Taught? Inventions.A few years ago I visited a classroom in which the teacher of a group of 5 year olds had brought in a few medium and large empty cardboard boxes that the school had put ...
Garbiñe Larralde, who has a wonderful talent to express ideas visually, in a format that she calls "Visual Thinking", attended the three-part workshop series that we offer to teachers about how to bring TBL into their classrooms. And as she went through the workshops, she, of course, took notes and wrote what she was learning ...
Based on Robert Swartz’s editorials for ENIAC published in Madrid, Spain, September, 2015 – January, 2016PART 11. Why Do We Need to Teach Students to Think?Well, everybody thinks. Maybe there is no need to teach thinking. But wait – while everyone thinks, not everyone thinks as carefully and as well as they could. ...
DisasterIn June of 1995 the roof of a five-storey department store, the Sampoong Department Store, in Seoul, Korea, collapsed, falling through all five floors in less than 20 seconds and killing over 500 shoppers and employees.Within a week the authorities had ascertained what caused the roof to collapse: an air conditioning unit weighing four times ...
I. In 1976, the Direction of My Professional Life Changed ForeverI was a full professor with tenure at the new Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts. I went there in 1972 as Philosophy Department chairman, redesigned the philosophy program to ground it more in important concepts that speak to the lives of our students. ...
