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Guidelines for Egan paper
EDD 610 – guidelines for Kieran Egan paper
How could the types of thinking Egan discusses enrich teaching in your discipline? Focus on a few related ideas (more than one, but don’t spread yourself too thin trying to cover all the bases) from the Egan book. The paper should emphasize types of thinking rather than curriculum, but you can also discuss a particular classroom activity (or example from Egan) to help make your point clearly.
For social workers especially, but also anyone in the class who is not experienced in a classroom or with teaching in their discipline, here are some variants on the assignment:
Imagine you are working with a family and a teenager has trouble connecting with school. Of course there are many possible reasons for this, but, for sake of this paper, consider a cognitive analysis. Which of Egan’s tools of mind (which may be “habits of mind” for the individual) could be explored to help draw the student into Math or English or History (a class in which they are doing poorly)? (You are creating a hypothetical teenager; make up a strength the student has outside of school and examine how you might try to use it to improve their school performance.)
How can you utilize (leverage?) a particular “tool of the mind” for yourself? For example (imagine a pre- or post-COVID world), say you would like to read more but walk through a library or bookstore and wind up not checking out or buying a single book? OR Discuss how you could use some particular aspect(s) of Egan’s approach to improve your chess playing or anything else you’d like to get better at – say, understanding the stars in the night sky. (Those are just examples. Examine something of interest to you that you would like to do more or better.)
