A Place Called School Summary

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5. What did Dr. Goodlad mean by “humanizing knowledge?” In the book A Place Called School, John Goodlad proposes the concept of “humanizing knowledge” in the classroom. A key factor of this method calls for education being accessible to all students. Goodlad expresses two components to achieving this accessibility. “The first is made up of a teacher’s personal attention- interest in both the learner and the subject” (Goodlad, 2004). In my opinion, it is this component that is crucial to the success a teachers finds in the classroom. If students know that you care about their well-being and that you are passionate about the content you teach, they will more likely increase their own effort in your classroom. The second component is “made up of pedagogical traits- all those techniques designed to keep the student overtly and covertly engaged in the learning”(Goodlad, 2004). The second one can be achieved through pre-service educational experiences as well as in-service experiences. Teacher educator programs would be responsible for …show more content…

In other words, his argument deems that all teachers should be able to implement these components in their own classroom. He goes on to state that data shows “both this nurturing behavior and these technical skills are recognized as important teacher attributes by both parents and students” (Goodlad, 2004). With that being said, Goodlad also states how evidence shows that the use of these two aspects drastically decreases from elementary grades to secondary grades. More specifically, “there was increasingly less use of teacher praise and support for learning, less corrective guidance, a narrowing range and variety of pedagogical teaching and declining student participation”(Goodlad, 2004). With this evidence present, secondary teachers must work on adapting their pedagogy in order to reach more

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