Product Description

Make learning more meaningful by teaching the "whole game"

David Perkins, a noted authority on teaching and learning and codirector of Harvard's Project Zero, introduces a new, practical, and research-based framework for teaching. He describes how teaching any subject at any level can be made more effective if students are introduced to the "whole game," rather than isolated pieces of a discipline. Using real-world examples, Perkins explains how learning academic subjects should be approached like learning baseball—or any game, and he demonstrates this with seven principles for making learning whole: from making the game worth playing (emphasizing the importance of motivation to sustained learning), to working on the hard parts (the importance of thoughtful practice), to learning how to learn (developing self-managed learners).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64852 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470384527
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Inside Flap

Making Learning Whole

"One summer I participated in Little League baseball . . . Baseball for me was a triumph of mediocrity. I wasn't especially good at it but I wasn't awful either . . . In the years since those days I've come to an odd conclusion about those early learning experiences: The results were only so-so but the process was pretty good . . . It was pretty good because from the beginning I built up a feel for the whole game. I knew what hitting the ball or missing the ball got you. I knew about scoring runs and keeping score. I knew what I had to do to do well, even though I only pulled it off part of the time. I saw how it fit together."
—from the IntroductionIn Making Learning Whole, David Perkins—a noted authority on teaching and learning and senior co-director of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education—introduces a new, practical, and research-based framework for teaching. Using learning the game of baseball as a metaphor, Perkins illustrates how teaching any subject at any grade level can be made more effective if students are introduced to the "whole game," rather than isolated pieces of a discipline.

Filled with real-world examples, Making Learning Whole describes how learning can be organized for deep and lasting impact by using these seven principles:

• Play the Whole Game

• Make the Game Worth Playing

• Work on the Hard Parts

• Play Out of Town

• Uncover the Hidden Game

• Learn from the Team

• Learn the Game of Learning

At the end of each chapter, Perkins includes "Wonders of Learning," a summary of the key ideas and "I wonder . . ." questions, which can be answered in real contexts of teaching and learning.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Making Learning Whole

"David Perkins is one of the great teachers of our time.In this insight-filled book, you can learn how he achieves hiseducational goals and how you can achieve yours as well."
—Howard Gardner,Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education,Harvard Graduate School of Education, andauthor, Five Minds for the Future

"A must-read for those serious about transforming education toprepare our youth for success in a rapidly changing world."
—Dr. Jayne H. Mohr,associate superintendent, Traverse City (Michigan) Area Public Schools

"David Perkins goes straight to the heart of the matter.His seven principles of teaching vividly explain how to organizelearning in ways that allow people to do important things withwhat they know—which is, after all, the point. ?Every educator shouldread this book, and so should policymakers whose work influenceswhether and how we can finally make school learning whole."
—Linda Darling-Hammond,Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education,Stanford University

About the Author

David Perkins, Ph.D., is a senior professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and senior co-director (with Howard Gardner) of Project Zero, an educational research group known particularly for its work on learning for understanding, thinking, and multiple intelligences. Perkins is a noted international speaker and author of several books, including Smart Schools and The Eureka Effect.

Customer Reviews

To Transform Education
Every teacher, school, district, and government searches for the best way to educate the children in their care. If there were one magic way to accomplish this daunting task, we would have implemented it long ago. David Perkins' wonderful Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education addresses the problem of how the whole picture of education, from Kindergarten through University, fits together: how it interacts, connects, and becomes meaningful.
Perkins begins with the basic premise that most formal education in our world approaches ideas, concepts, subjects, and disciplines in a piecemeal approach instead of looking at the big picture. We are subject, in school, to what he calls "elementitis" and "aboutitis," or breaking down learning into discrete, unconnected bits that frequently - usually - never do get connected. It's a fractured curriculum, with a narrow focus on standards which are frequently based on disjointed accumulations of facts. We teach what's relevant to what's going to be tested. Perkins says we go through our years of schooling in this lurching, broken way, "with the whole game nowhere in sight."
So what to do about it? Perkins, along with Howard Gardner, is a co-director of Harvard Graduate School's Project Zero, which aims to investigate education and learning in a holistic way. Project Zero has supported the concept of Teaching for Understanding. Its researchers are in the forefront of studying what education can look like for the 21st century. Perkins proposes that we look at education with an eye for bigger goals than just accumulating disconnected pieces of knowledge, without discounting the need for skills and foundational knowledge.
To do this, he sets out seven principles of teaching that can make significant changes in how a teacher plans and implements a curriculum in any subject area, for any grade level. Suggested classroom practices are included, but more than that, the book is about different ways of thinking, for both teachers and students. Written in Perkins' delightful wry voice, Making Learning Whole is motivating, inspiring, and very accessible. Perkins recognizes past and current research into the process of learning, and cites numerous additional resources in which "visions of meaningful education seem to speak to three basic agendas: enlightenment, empowerment, and responsibility" (p.61).
The seven principles to get started on that vision, a wonderful extended metaphor to the game of baseball, are:
1. Play the Whole Game: Get students started on accessible, authentic ways of learning; get into the game instead of being always stuck at "threshold experiences."
2. Make the Game Worth Playing: Get students started with deep disciplinary thinking and investigating processes. Be able to answer the question, "Why are we studying this?"
3. Work on the Hard Parts: Find ways to support and fine-tune areas where individual students are stuck, without getting mired in "elementitis."
4. Play Out of Town: Stretch learning to new situations and applications, for tomorrow and not just for the test.
5. Uncover the Hidden Game: Pay attention to the deeper principles beneath the obvious.
6. Learn from the Team... and the Other Teams: Learning is social and constructed in communities. Put those learning groups and communities to work in "participation structures" to deepen experience and proficiency.
7. Learn the Game of Learning: Students can develop intellectual dispositions and learning habits of mind to become self-managed learners.

Teachers, you will love this book! It will inspire you to remember that the most important goal of learning is understanding, and the criterion of understanding is performance: whether the learner can "think and act flexibly with what they know" (p. 49). It will help you go beyond the ordinary routines of skill lessons to look at how your teaching and your students' learning can be transformed. Perkins provides a guide for the "choreography of learning, an effort to organize learning for greater timeliness, focus, effectiveness, and efficiency" (p. 17). Educators of any stripe or level, school administrators, district board members - you need this book also. If education is going to be meaningful in significant ways in our time, we need to be playing the whole game all through school!

Interesting book for people not tied to established education
I loved this book! It explains why I hated school and yet have had a lifelong love of learning. I resonated with every page as it explains my own frustration with why public schools kill the spirit of learning. Simply read the introductory story about learning to play the game of baseball and you'll see the logic behind why whole learning is so powerful! I highly recommend this book.