Inside Today's Elementary Schools: A Psychologist's Perspective

by James J. Dillon

Overview

This book takes readers on a tour of a day in the life of a public elementary school in an effort to give parents and other stakeholders a sense of the realities of the classroom. The tour reveals ten worrisome things about today’s schools and considers what to do about them. Dillon emphasizes the need for future schools to be places filled with adventure and high purpose, with classrooms small enough to waste only a minimum of time. They should be free from stifling levels of bureaucracy, supervised by rotating teacher administrators rather than career managers. The book asserts that schools should be staffed by scholarly and engaged teaching professionals dedicated to helping students live a healthy adult life in a democracy rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all, furiously assessed college prep curriculum on everyone. In all, Dillon argues, schools should be places with classrooms of narrow ability ranges dedicated to teaching a coherent curriculum, all in a context of full buy-in and support from students’ families. Let’s go inside today’s elementary schools.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030233464
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/09/2019
Edition description:	1st ed. 2019
Pages:	261
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

James J. Dillon, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia, USA. He is a graduate of Clark University, a certified public elementary school teacher, and author of Partnerships in Research, Clinical, and Educational Settings (2000) and Teaching Psychology and the Socratic Method (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016).

Table of Contents

Part I: Shortsighted Vision & Lopsided Staffing
Chapter 1: The House on Sleepy Hollow Road
Bridges and Potholes
How the Book Is Organized
Chapter 2: So Many Girls...So Few Princes
Some Negative Effects of the Gender Staffing Imbalance
What You Can Do
Chapter 3: When Am I Ever Going to Use Any of This?
Adventure and High Purpose
The Romantic Child
Lessons from Harry Potter
Industry vs. Inferiority
The Zombie Apocalypse
What You Can Do
Chapter 4: And Then God Made School Boards
The Administration
Total Management Mentality
Adversarial Posture
Who Becomes an Administrator?
Toxic Culture
The Good Ones
What You Can Do
Chapter 5: the Bottom of the Barrel?
Women's Work: The Mother
Drill and Kill: The Sergeant
Just Tell Me What to Do: the Sheep
The Easiest Major: The Underachiever
Teacher Training, Where It All Begins
Why Should We Teach Anyway?
What You Can Do
Chapter 6: What to Do about These Four Things
Our Vision of Teachers and Schools
Personnel Reform
Part II: The Wall of Separation, Administrative Bloat, and Boundless Accommodation
Chapter 7: Platonic Curriculum; Epicurean Society
Who Formulates the Standards?
What Are Standards Designed to Do?
What Is the Nature of the Standards?
Five Basic Problems with Current Elementary Standards
Three Possible Solutions
What You Can Do
Chapter 8: Just Wastin' Time
The Different Kinds of Wasted Time
Where Does the Time Go?
Time-Off-Task
Why Is So Much Time Lost?
How Lost Time Negatively Impacts Teacher and Student
What You Can Do
Chapter 9: No Child Left Behind?
A Brief History of Standardized Tests
Common Critiques
The Real Reason Why NCLB Caused So Much Trouble
Life after NCLB
What You Can Do
Chapter 10: I'm Five Teachers at Once!
What is Differentiated Instruction?
A Sympathetic Critique of DI
Less Noble reasons for Using DI
What You Can Do
Chapter 11: The Incredible Bending School
Reasonable Special Education and Non-Academic Services
Unreasonable Special Education and Non-Academic Services
Pedagogical stress
What You Can Do
Chapter 12: Look Not to the Stars
A Picture of Contemporary Parental Engagement
Barriers to Parental Engagement
Why Parental Engagement Matters
What You Can Do
Chapter 13: What to Do about These Six Things
Wall of Separation
Multiplying Diversions
Part III: What to Do about All 10 Things
Chapter 14: A New Day?
Dealing with Fear
Seeing Through Ideology
Letting Go of the Need to Control
Conclusion