An often engaging guide, but parents may wish it were less pedagogical and more practical.
An educational consultant enthusiastically discusses the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) method in an example-driven resource for parents and teachers.
In a world that’s seen leaps and bounds in technology, what progress has been made in how kids are taught in school? Novak (UDL Now!, 2016), who’s also a parent herself, is convinced that today’s children need an updated mode of learning that meets their individual needs. To make this change, she says that one may use the well-known UDL educational framework. The method, she says, breaks down the learning process into three parts: the affective network, which “has to be motivated”; the recognition network, which “has to be resourceful”; and the strategic network, which “has to be self-directed.” The author uses an abundance of metaphors to help explain this method, encouraging readers to “think of the brain as a heating system” with the three aforementioned networks acting as the “thermostat,” the “burner”, and the “blower,” working together to heat a home. This metaphor is expanded with examples of UDL lessons in action in classroom settings and in Novak’s own life, showing how paying attention to these three parts of the learning process can better engage students and children at home. Subsequent chapters discuss the value of variability, the hardships that teachers face, and the power of high expectations. The intriguing metaphors help to make some of the jargon more palatable, each chapter ends with helpful “key takeaways,” and snappy line drawings illustrate Novak’s points through the book. Although she has written the book as a resource for parents, the majority of its ideas are meant to be implemented in the classroom. Readers may want more examples of how a parent can engage their child’s teacher with these tools. There’s some discussion of specific challenges (the chapter “What Teachers Are Up Against” is a welcome addition), but some other factors that may influence kids (poverty, trauma, stress) aren’t addressed. That said, the book’s bright metaphors, sample lessons, and anecdotes will make the UDL method appealing, even to readers with no teaching experience.
An often engaging guide, but parents may wish it were less pedagogical and more practical.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-930583-16-0
Page Count: 170
Publisher: CAST Professional Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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