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The notion of Coherent Direction allows us to see where the conscious and unconscious choices that underlie the activities and mutually shaping interactions of individuals, groups and institutions move and regulate a system as a whole—and where they pull against one another. Coherent Direction is an LCA term that
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Edusystemic — a tag used on this site to describe thinking that keeps in view at all times the scales at which an educational situation can usefully be understood: an exchange between people, a lesson, a course, an institution, the larger system in which all of this is happening. Mutually transforming
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Discipline is understanding a consequence in relation to a goal one has made one's own, and acting from that understanding. In the existing paradigm of education, discipline is something imposed from without. A student who accepts it is rewarded with approval. But what is being managed is fear
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Critical thinking is a set of skills applied to specific situations or material. Criticality is broader. Criticality is readiness to notice and question the frame one has been thinking and living inside. Criticality begins in a sensitivity to something not feeling quite right. It means standing on the edge of
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Some things are not built into the system. They are what the system rests on: Humanity, Dignity, Kindness, Generosity. These are not components. They are conditions. The Russell–Einstein Manifesto was released in London on 9 July 1955, signed by Bertrand Russell and ten other scientists, among them Einstein, Max
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Trust — the condition in which an individual does not need to feel guarded or defensive: attention can go to what is happening rather than to how it might be judged. A system expresses trust when the people doing the work count for more in judging its quality than the paperwork
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Quality of individual experience — what it is actually like to be the person inside an educational process — and what it is in that process that makes it so. At the heart of the LCA is "Individual Experience." Quality of experience is a term that invites questions about this
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Underlying the work here is this minimalist definition of intelligence. INTELLIGENCE is the capacity to keep growing in the direction of : ࿇ appreciating and enjoying life in the present ࿇ not being stunted by difficulties, mistakes and disappointments ࿇ being ever more conscious of what is going on within and around oneself ࿇ recognising
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Breaking, But Not Broken by Ghazally Ismail, Ahmad Ibrahim and Hisham Badrul Hashim was launched on 8 August, but had not yet reached the bookshops when it came into my hands. It is a beautifully produced and illustrated book. Its foreword is written by Sultan Nazrin Shah of Perak, who
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📗This is a review I wrote for The Language Teacher in December 1988, when I had been working in Japan for only three and a half years. It surfaced while I was tidying my office, and I was struck by how much it reflects my current interests, even though it
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📕Brumfit, C. (1984). Communicative methodology in language teaching: The roles of fluency and accuracy. Cambridge University Press. I am writing a book this summer, and this morning I intuitively reached along the row of books I set up on my desk months ago — twenty or thirty I expected to need
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Infants live before the distinction between work and play has been instilled in them — before comparison with others and before measurement. What they have instead is the urge to try something, to find the edge of it, and to push past that edge. As we get older, that simple urge