About the Book
This book provides the profession with across-discipline illustrations of classroom assignments that utilize and develop the mind’s innate but informal gift to think critically. By applying the universal gift formally, faculty, for the first time, can lead all students to think, read, listen, write, speak, and observe critically while concurrently comprehending new and revisited subject matter.
This work is for use as a textbook in teacher preparation and professional development programs. Teacher-educators, teacher-candidates, school and college faculty, and professional developers are shown how to explicitly apply mind grammar to the design of classroom assignments. Disadvantaged, English language learners, general, and special education students will all have their innate abilities to reason critically nurtured and developed.
Teach Like the Mind Learns, along with Fixing Instruction and Preparation for Critical Instruction, provides the teaching profession with ownership - as with doctors, engineers, and lawyers – of its language, standards, preparation, and practice. The merging of subject matter instruction with the development of critical language abilities is now a reality for the teaching profession. The consequences are that faculty practice and student achievement will be substantially more tangible, respected, and universally prized.
About the Author :
Victor P. Maiorana earned his doctorate in curriculum and instruction at New York University, for which he won a scholarship and leadership award, and a research award, for his work on critical thinking and subject matter comprehension. Dr. Maiorana is the originator of mind grammar for subject matter, which develops and applies the mind’s innate ability to think critically to reading, writing, and comprehending content critically in all disciplines.
Review :
Maiorana’s larger project is an ambitious one. He takes aim, with broad brushstrokes, at rote-learning styles of instruction, a specter he calls ‘serialism’ and describes as the ‘teaching profession’s weak default instructional strategy.’ He contends that this pervasive style inhibits ‘our innate ability to think critically.’ As an antidote, Maiorana offers his own unique instructional framework…. There are…helpful insights throughout, including the example teaching exercises that make up the second half of the book.
In the year of the human species 2016, after more than 50,000 years developing simple symbolic systems for communicating, the brightest among us cannot agree on a simple coherent general topological diagram that represents core concepts in the form of a 2 dimensional diagrammatic canvas. We now have one more voice in the universe that lights a few more fires in the dark.
Teach Like the Mind Learns, like the two works that precede it, is a very strong text for use in teacher preparation, professional development, and school and college classrooms. The text is structured well and flows from a foundation of conceptual knowledge to declarative knowledge and then to procedural knowledge. The book’s whole to parts to sub parts narrative, order, and chapter sequence make it easy to follow, and it is rich with depth for the new and seasoned teacher. The use of the “instructional set” is excellent and sets the stage for a domain-general framework that is reinforced with domain-specific examples, which is rarely done in pedagogy and/or andragogy.
Instruction today is at best, practiced by well-meaning but highly ill-informed folks not grounded in the science of human learning. With his mind grammar for subject matter, Victor Maiorana creates a bridge between the learnable mind and the teachable mind.
Teach like the Mind Learns builds on the groundwork provided in Fixing Instruction and Preparation for Critical Instruction. This book brings the reader to the epiphany that a good teacher will understand the language of the mind and how it embraces subject matter content. Example classroom assignments for all levels of education on a variety of discipline-wide topics are fabulous. Professor Maiorana pilots the new teacher towards greater understanding of the mind and how it naturally learns. The teaching profession now has a new discipline, one that addresses teaching and learning subject matter in the context of developing critical thinking, reading, and writing abilities.
We are no longer formidable competitors in world-wide education. As Dr. Victor Maiorana clearly explained in his 2016 book, Fixing Instruction, our teaching approaches must drastically change if we want to impart to students the ability to develop a life-long habit of thinking, reading and writing critically in order to accumulate his or her operational core body of knowledge. We are in an educational uncommon era and common methodologies and philosophies are not producing the high level leaders, scientists, and citizens in sufficient quantities.
Teach Like the Mind Learns is awakening, refreshing, and inspiring. It is AWAKENING because it causes the reader to recognize the “innate ability to reason critically.” Dr. Maiorana is asking us to instruct with self-reflection of our pedagogical call as educators, that is, “ducare”, to lead our students to think beyond basic acquisition of facts and beliefs. In short, he is asking that we allow students to further advance and understand efficacious and acceptable cores of knowledge (subject matter) by taking advantage of the natural intellectual ability with which we are all born.
REFRESHING because it is a positive recommendation to eradicate our major educational failure of the past fifty years by showing the reader HOW we can use what we have ignored: all of us are born with the ability to think and learn critically. Refreshing because its “operational basis for critical instruction” allows us to begin to eliminate the numerous labels we now attach to our students. Dr. Maiorana has supplied the reader with a PRAGMATIC OPERATIONAL tools in this book.
Finally, it is INSPIRING because by introducing CRITICAL LEARNING, at all levels of instruction, we can reach all students despite differences in socio-economic, emotional, ethnic, and language backgrounds. Education need not be “unrealistically differentiated.” With Dr. Maiorana’s teachings, each student’s ability to think critically is systematically developed, enriched, and encouraged as he or she also learns to read and write critically. Such learning is the human’s lifelong quest.
Teach Like the Mind Learns is written in a format for teacher-educators, college students in education programs, practicing teachers, professional developers, and administrators. It is clearly structured to guide the reader down a path of transitioning from instruction that induces rote learning to instruction that induces critical learning. The many types of examples provided within this text will assist the reader in developing his/her own creative ideas for critical instruction within the classroom setting to best meet the needs of learners of all modalities.
In creating a learning environment of such magnitude through the use of Mind Grammar, which is based on our innate and informal ability to think critically, students will ultimately have a greater development of critical language abilities, where they will seek the intent of the subject matter all the while considering its consequences. Through these practices, we will be establishing a learning environment conducive for students to become better thinkers, readers, writers, listeners, and speakers that they will ultimately carry over these skills into their adult lives. The question and answer section of this book is insightful and clarifies the use of mind grammar strategies in various types of learning institutions with students of all ability levels. Teach Like the Mind Learns, along with Fixing Instruction and Preparation for Critical Instruction, is another revolutionary text by Victor Maiorana that will change the face of education in America for generations to come.
“Teach Like the Mind Learns” teaches the reader that applying Mind Grammar strategy and associated techniques will naturally open students’ innate ability to comprehend subject matter on a more critical level. Whereas, they will be provided, through instruction, the necessary cognitive “tools” to deepen not only their understanding, but a more thorough comprehension of the material. This text proves that through this deepened comprehension, students will create meaning via development and application of the subject matter in other contexts as well as being able to explain the material and its causes and effects on people, places and events.
With Mind Grammar implementation in class lessons across all disciplinary areas, educators can now engage students with subject matter’s “end-in-mind” and “consequences.” Therefore, students can be guided on how to analyze and process new information to create meaning and understanding on their own; this being the basis for critical understanding, comprehension and explanation of material.
Changing our educational practices by teaching students to learn through the critical thinking, reading, and writing strategies and techniques so eloquently described in this book will raise our profession to new heights, and be a true gift to the future of all students in their life-long journey of learning.
