The Official Blog of Robert Swartz and Thinking Based Learning
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...