Teaching for Intellectual and Emotional Learning (TIEL): A Model for Creating Powerful Curriculum

Responsibility, compassion, and self-direction are the kind of balanced, common sense characteristics that both teachers and students should develop. Yet, in an environment of high stakes testing, common sense and educational balance are often lost amidst constant test preparation. Teaching for Intellectual and Emotional Learning (TIEL): A Model for Creating Powerful Curriculum will help teachers and teacher educators meet their goals of mastery in basic skills and content knowledge as well as intellectual and social emotional development. Sharing the experiences of real teachers who changed their teaching and helped their students understand their learning and develop skills of self-direction and collaboration, Folsom introduces a powerful visual model that helps teachers develop standards-based curriculum that includes social-emotional learning. New ways of planning lessons and developing project-based units that focus on developing thinking skills and social emotional learning are presented. The TIEL model makes the fundamental intellectual and social emotional processes that underlie effective teaching and learning accessible to teacher educators, teachers, and students in gifted, special, and general education.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Introduction Part 2 Codification Chapter 3 Codification of Thinking and Social-Emotional Processes Chapter 4 What is TIEL? Part 5 Consciousness Chapter 6 Consciousness of Thinking and Social-Emotional Processes Chapter 7 Teacher and Student Understanding Part 8 Communication Chapter 9 Communication of Thinking and Social-Emotional Processes Chapter 10 Challenges of Classroom Context Chapter 11 Teaching Self-Organization Skills Chapter 12 Students Becoming Teachers Part 13 Curriculum Chapter 14 Courage to Teach Self-Organization Skills Chapter 15 Freedom from the Fear Factor Chapter 16 Creating Complex Projects Chapter 17 Transformations in Thinking Part 18 Connections Chapter 19 Theory and Thinking Chapter 20 Connections and Application Part 21 Conclusion

About the Author :
Christy Folsom is associate professor of Childhood Education at Lehman College, City University of New York teaching courses that prepare teachers to design curriculum that integrates thinking and social emotional learning within classroom subjects. She also consults with schools on curriculum development.

Review :
This marvelous and practical book will help teachers create the kind of rigorous and successful project-based learning that is so essential for teaching 21st century skills and so difficult to do well. Teachers have found a new way to analyze their curriculum through the use of the TIEL wheel. They see it providing the framework to think about teaching and learning. It has been a powerful tool. It provides an explicit method by which teachers can articulate objectives concerning their teaching. A very practical framework! In lucid prose and easy-to-follow graphics, Folsom explains her innovative model of thinking about thinking and how attending to students' emotional needs such as empathy, ethical reasoning, and self-management enhance academic/intellectual performance and unleash powerful reservoirs of creativity and genuine ownership of learning. With over twenty years of experience in urban public education as a teacher, curriculum writer, professional developer, and program administrator, I have seldom come across abook as cogent and on-point as this. In an era of relentless attention on the wall chart of test scores, the author's emphasis on rich, meaningful projects in an authentic context is a welcome and badly-needed antidote to worksheets and test prep. Like John Dewey, her vision of measurement in education is more about possibilities than a static snapshot of immutable norm-referenced aptitudes. In a three-year professional development program led by Professor Folsom, I have been privileged to see the TIELmodel clearly improve the classroom practice of dozens of public school educators. By using TIEL, I teach students to recognize which thinking operations they are performing, which operations they might be overlooking, and which could strengthen their learning. The influence of the TIEL Wheel has encouraged me to incorporate more self-assessment assignments, critical thinking and improved small-group discussion. Christy Folsom addresses some of the most urgent questions educators are asking today about how to teach thinking skills, and perhaps more importantly, how to integrate intellectual and emotional learning in ways that lead to engagement in lifelong learning. Built on a foundation of project-based learning, Folsom's Thinking for Intellectual and Emotional Learning (TIEL) is a practical teacher-friendly model that connects gifted education with general education. I believe that Christy Folsom is onto something important here, showing educators how to foster relationships between and among the foundational intellectual and emotional skills essential to creating a vibrant and increasingly diverse democratic community in this rapidly changing global villageof ours.. Christy Folsom addresses some of the most urgent questions educators are asking today about how to teach thinking skills, and perhaps more importantly, how to integrate intellectual and emotional learning in ways that lead to engagement in lifelong learning. Built on a foundation of project-based learning, Folsom's Thinking for Intellectual and Emotional Learning (TIEL) is a practical teacher-friendly model that connects gifted education with general education. I believe that Christy Folsom is onto something important here, showing educators how to foster relationships between and among the foundational intellectual and emotional skills essential to creating a vibrant and increasingly diverse democratic community in this rapidly changing global village of ours. In lucid prose and easy-to-follow graphics, Folsom explains her innovative model of thinking about thinking and how attending to students' emotional needs such as empathy, ethical reasoning, and self-management enhance academic/intellectual performance and unleash powerful reservoirs of creativity and genuine ownership of learning. With over twenty years of experience in urban public education as a teacher, curriculum writer, professional developer, and program administrator, I have seldom come across a book as cogent and on-point as this. In an era of relentless attention on the wall chart of test scores, the author's emphasis on rich, meaningful projects in an authentic context is a welcome and badly-needed antidote to worksheets and test prep. Like John Dewey, her vision of measurement in education is more about possibilities than a static snapshot of immutable norm-referenced aptitudes. In a three-year professional development program led by Professor Folsom, I have been privileged to see the TIEL model clearly improve the classroom practice of dozens of public school educators.