I know we cannot provide everyone with a stable/knowledge rich environment, but can we begin providing tools to help all students understand how individual environments affect thinking, learning, motivation, and health?

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mayfieldga , Teacher asks:

This also greatly affects mental/emotional health: drug/alcohol abuse, and suicide, something I feel schools create by teaching permanence in ability and not providing tools to improve thinking, learning, motivation, and mental/emotional health. By showing students how their individual environments greatly affect their ability to think, learn, long-term motivation to learn, and grow mentally and emotionally, students will have much more respect and esteem for themselves and for others. By providing students with tools to approach their lives more delicately and differently to continually change and improve their lives, students will then have a continuous hope of developing in time, many if not all of the qualities they admire in others over time. Students will then have a continuous hope of changing and becoming newer and better persons with each passing day. This will reduce much hopelessness, many harmful escapes and other problems created by the terrible teachings of fixed intelligences in school such as dropouts, drug/alcohol abuse, catharsis of violence, and suicide. Theory to all htt://learningtheory.homestead.com/Theory.htm

Question asked after reading: http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_...

Member Added on Aug 3, 2010

The reason it was a more of a comment is I was reading another article and the only way to reply to that article that I could see at the time was to use the question box. I am hoping to get more persons looking at environmental variables as tools to improve thinking and learning. I know that "providing stable/knowledge rich environments is not feasible". The idea though is to use a very new definition of mental stress as layers of mental frictions that impede more so or take up mental energy that hinders thinking, learning, and motivation to learn. Also as those layers accumulate they create psychological suffering and shorter reflection time that leads to many escapes. By using this new definition of stress we now have a tool to help improve many things for students.

In Topics: School and Academics, Learning issues and special needs, My child's growth and development

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greenprof2 writes:

Hello - I think your post is more of a comment than a question. I would agree with you that schools ought to seek to provide every student with a stable and knowledge rich environment and also provide tools to help students understand how their environments affect their thinking, learning, motivation, and health. As a retired teacher educator, I always considered this part of the content of my courses for prospective teachers. Many teachers see this as an important aim of their classroom curriculum but many others are distracted from this aim by pressures from above to make AYP (that is, pass state high-stakes tests). I believe we need different priorities for schools if we are to achieve the aim you advocate here. Unfortunately, the current "Race to the Top" program still puts tests above all other indicators of student performance so I don't think "change you can believe in" has yet arrived. Michael Bentley, Expert Panel Member

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