Reviews for Practical writing techniques

The average rating for Practical writing techniques based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-22 00:00:00 Hildur Jonsson This book is almost too big for me to wrap my mind around, so I'm only going to respond to a couple of threads: the effect of good intentioned but misguided legislation, and what a school SHOULD look like; and even then, I won't do either justice. A former superintendent always said lawmakers feel qualified to propose laws about school on the basis of their experience as students. LDH explains it differently: "policies that legislate practice are necessarily backward thinking: they must rely on the technologies and knowledge available when they are enacted." In fact, they look back farther than that, to when legislators were in school...they are seeing education through their own lens, and it is by definition a narrow one. She goes on to make the analogy that if lawmakers were regulating the medical profession, doctors would still be using leeches. "Professional teachers should be allowed to focus on doing the right things rather than doing things right....genuine accountability is undermined in bureaucracies, where authority for decisions and responsibility for practice are widely separated, usually by many layers of hierarchy...top-down decision making retards change." She explains that all these laws add to the layers of bureaucracies actually by their nature add more layers of administration, while the laws then require less money for administration...bipolar at best. "POlicies do not support teaching for understanding when they require passive learning of reams of facts and bits of skills, require standardized teaching for student who differ in how they learn and how much they have already learned..." She point out that in this time of greater 'accountability' we are actually loosening the certification standards for teachers..."Teaching is the only licensed occupation -- from medicine and law to cosmetology and plumbing -- that routinely waives standards for entry. WE teachers don't, but policymakers do it all the time. " More: "Although government agencies have gained great power over decisions affecting children and local schools, these decisions are often uninformed by professional knowledge. ...frontline educators often have little input into decisions made above them..." She gives us no clear suggestions about how to approach our legislators and share our world with them...but I understand the dilemma so much better. So, what kind of schools does she see as the answer? Schools with policies for: "Active, in-depth learning, emphasis on authentic performance, attention to development, appreciation for diversity, opportunities for collaborative learning, collective perspective across the school, structures for caring, support for democratic learning, connections to family and community." WOW!! Sign me up! It's so sad to read this, nearly 15 years after she wrote it. I remember schools like this. I taught at several. As legislation and policies and testing and regulations have slowly strangled our schools, we cannot do what's right for students...especially when we KNOW it's right...I nearly cried reading her hopeful descriptions of schools who were trying this approach to educating the whole child, and I wonder what's happening now, in this world of NCLB and RttT... She challenges policymakers: " [They] need to understand that their intentions will land in an environment already cluttered by geological layers of prior policies and local conditions that may be hostile to the desired changes...Policymakers must build capacity for and commitment to the work required rather than assuming that edicts alone will produce the new practice they envision. The more policies impose inflexible constraints, the less possible and likely it is for innovation and learning to occur." So...ultimately, what sense did I make of this? I'll probably have to read it again and again. I wish like crazy she was Secretary of Education...I might have hope for my profession if she was.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-05 00:00:00 Chase Carpenter Written sensibly and for the most part without a bunch of jargon. Backed up with statistics and examples. Published in 1997, with data that was VERY recent at the time; I'd like to see what the current statistics are for the schools she cites.