Theory of Education Blog Pablo

Partially following last week's ntopic, the importance of space in education, in this week's post i'll be talking about how the space is used and designed in Waldorf schools. The Waldorf pedagogy is a method created by Rudolf Steiner in 1919 and that is now implemented in more than 1.000 schools around the world.  The 7th of september of 1919, the first Waldorf school opened with 12 teachers and 256 students. It was the beginning of a pedagogy that is still widely used nowadays and that is based on anthroposophic philosophy. It states that the formation of human beings should be holistic. Students feelings, imagination, spirit and intellect form a unique composition. Anthroposophic philosophy, and therefore Waldorf education, divides human development in septenniums: from 0 to 7 years, from 7 to 14 years and from 14 to 21 years. Individuals in each of these stages have different characteristics and, because of this, the architectural characteristics of the classrooms will v...

Usually, when we think about teaching and learning, the first things that come to our mind are teachers, books, exams… But the truth is that there are lots of factors that affect education that aren’t just teachers. The environment, the place where you study or learn has a great influence in the process of education. Because of this, I’m going to talk about one of the aspects of the classroom that has a big impact on how we learn: the colors of the classroom. Even if we don’t realise it, the colors of the spaces in which we study and learn affect us. Depending on the predominant colors found in the walls, furniture, decoration, etc. certain parts of our brain are activated. For example, when colors are on the warm side of the scale (reds, oranges and yellows), the response to them tends to be more stimulating. By using specific colours, we are able to draw the student’s attention to specific pieces of information. If, on the other hand, we use colours that belong to the cool side of th...

For this week's blog post, I'm going to be talking about differnt teaching styles: Authoritarian, Democratic and Laissez Faire.  Teaching can be done in multiple ways. Every teacher has its own ways of giving class to its students. Most of them usually follow educative methods, try to use their experience to teach as they think its best for students or use different teaching styles. It's about three of them that i'm going to talk about. - Authoritarian style : In this teaching style the teacher acts as a leader. He explains the tasks and how to perform them. The students become passive students as the only thing they can do is listen to the teacher. This usually creates concentration problems as lessons done with this style tend to be boring for kids as they can't interact with what they are learning, leading to distraction. It can have benefits for the teacher, like facilities to teach, as kids are more quiet, but students are the most important part of a class as ...

This week, I’ve been able to see a really interesting documentary called “A Class Divided”. The film follows an “experiment” carried out by Jane Elliott in one of her 3rd degree classes in order to address racism that consisted of dividing the class by their eye colour. It is surprising how the experiment was carried out in the 70’s but it feels like it could have been made just some years ago. It is sad how racism is still as present in today’s society as it was 50 years ago. It shows how important it’s to talk about this topic, especially at schools. At that age, kids are learning and developing and they are usually more open-minded. We tend to become more closed-minded as we grow up as we think we know everything and we aren't willing to learn as much as when we were younger. Starting from a really important problem and kids of an age in which you can’t just do a masterclass about it so they can understand it, she was able to create an effective method to teach kids about it: se...

 In one of this week's lessons we have talked about differnt theories of education. The acquisitionist, the deconstructivist and the integrationist. In this week's blog post I'm going to be talking about them.  First of all, i'm going to start talking about the acqusitionist theory. This theory has an objectivist view and the kids learning with this method learn what is true. They passively acquire knowledge. I don't share the ideas of this theory, as i think it's of great importance that kids actively participate in classes. From my own experience as an student, this kind of learning ends up boring students and doesn't let them connect with the lesson and what is being taught. Kids learn everything, or almost everything, that is taught but end up forgetting it in a short time using this theory while if we, on the other hand and in my opinion, use the constructivist theory, they will learn the same but will retain the information for a much longer period of ...