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Formal-Operational vs. Post-Formal Thinking: Brains Grow Up
Formal-operational thinking is absolute, and involves making decisions based on personal experience and logic. Post-formal thinking is more complex, and involves making decisions based on situational constraints and circumstances, and integrating emotion with logic to form context-dependent principles. The distinction is a useful thing to understand when dealing with emerging adults. For example, adolescents have… Continue reading
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Primary and Secondary Intellectual Abilities in Adolescence
Primary intellectual abilities include number skills, word fluency, verbal understanding, inductive reasoning, and spatial orientation. These abilities improve until early middle age, and then begin to decline. There are cohort patterns where strength of primary abilities are concerned – for example, our grandparents were better at math than we are because they had less access… Continue reading
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further thoughts on my thoughts on others’ thoughts
Open Education has written a very thoughtful post about two of my posts: “characteristics of adolescent thinking” and “mean ’til Hallowe’en.” If either of these posts interested you, you might want to go check out what Open Education has to say about them. Continue reading
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teacher nightmares
Please do yourself a favour and go check out A Shrewdness of Apes’ post on teacher nightmares. I guarantee you will recognize your own nightmares in one, if not many, of the accounts. I had no idea that so many people were having the same dreams as I was in the weeks before school began. Continue reading
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Games in the College Classroom
This semester, there will be more games. When I taught ESL immersion, I taught the same class for five hours a day, five days a week, for five weeks. Every morning we started with a game, and we usually ended every afternoon with a game as well. In such a circumstance, the content of the… Continue reading
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Ethnic Identity Formation in Adolescents
According to one theory, there are three important phases of ethnic identity formation: a phase where ethnic identity is not explored or considered important; a phase where individuals begin to explore their ethnic roots; and a phase where ethnicity takes an important place in the individual’s self-concept. The theory argues that a strong sense of… Continue reading
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more on discipline
To continue the conversation that began with the post “mean ’til Hallowe’en,”, I wanted to point out Jose Vilson’s helpful tips on classroom management in an urban school. Regardless of the specificity of his situation, I think his ten points are great reminders for all of us. And for more thoughts on how to maintain… Continue reading
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Characteristics of Adolescent Thinking
There are four important characteristics that distinguish adolescent thinking from more mature thinking: adolescent egocentrism (intense preoccupation with one’s own feelings and lack of connection to feelings of others), imaginary audience (the belief that one is the focus of others’ thinking and attention), personal fable (the belief that no one else can possibly understand one’s… Continue reading
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Identity Achievement and Emerging Adulthood
Emerging adults need to be recognized for who and where they are. They also need to be encouraged to recognize themselves for who and where they are, and not be too hard on themselves. Many CEGEP students seem to feel that they need to be more focused and committed than would be adaptive at this… Continue reading
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Moral Reasoning and Empathic Orientation in Adolescents
Nancy Eisenberg’s model of moral development is based on the assertion that most children’s and adolescents’ moral dilemmas involve a choice between serving one’s own interests and those of others. She divides moral reasoning into four stages: hedonistic orientation (concern with one’s own pleasure), needs-oriented orientation (concern with others’ need for help), stereotyped approval-focused orientation… Continue reading
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.
Classroom as Microcosm 