Schooling Abraham

By Jon Coley

What if we could make our schools better?

What if we could do it without affecting budgets or laws?

What if the answer to most educational problems has been right under our nose for decades?

Enjoy reading this short book that has the potential to change your or any child's school into a better place by looking at education through the eyes of the famous psychology researcher, Abraham Maslow. The well known hierarchy of needs may be the key to school improvement when understood and applied properly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Coley
• Release date: May 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223245032

Jon Coley

Jon Coley lives in Georgia with his wife, daughters, an orange cat, an eccentric husky, and an overly affectionate a Great Dane. He has been a school teacher for more than twenty-five years. That's probably what's wrong with him..

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Jon Coley SEd

Or EdS

Whatever floats your boat

Dedicated to all my colleagues through the years. There are so many good things that happen in schools. I see them every day.

Preface

The only research needed for writing this book was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If you’re an educator, you know it well. The problem is that it isn’t applied. We in the teaching profession learn about this relatively famous pyramid in developmental psychology courses. We look at it. It makes sense. We take the test. Then it is pretty much forgotten. From time to time, you may hear about it in some professional development meeting, mentioned in passing. This is merely lip service, though. After all, you have to make your material look scholarly! I’m not being cynical here. Educational professionals are working hard every day, but sometimes there is a cut-and-paste mentality when it comes to delivering professional development.

You can do all the research you want. Some of it may help, but many school districts have been driven into the academic ground based on research. There’s nothing wrong with data or with being data driven, but if you don’t have guidance and application, you’re just whistling past the graveyard. It has been said that there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. Well, the same can and should be said about educational research. I’ve been teaching long enough to know how research works. Most of it is folly. (I’m using nice terms here because I’ve already used a mild curse word.) Don’t get me wrong, there is good research out there, but all research can be, and often is manipulated. I have seen best practices turn around and contradict themselves based on research.

The funny thing is that some good research is often ignored, which brings us back to the hierarchy. It’s foundational, easy to understand, and old. It’s not the new, cutting edge, fancy, mind boggling stuff that gets people going. To this day I don’t know who these people are, but their love of the newest thing has made my job unnecessarily difficult for decades. This book isn’t meant as a critique of, or as a rant against, the academic status quo, though. It’s just a look at some of the most useful psychological research ever produced with a few suggestions on how to apply it from a guy who’s been teaching for a long time. In other words, this should be plain common sense.

As of this writing, I’ve been teaching nearly twenty-five years. It’s been fun. The profession is still a passion for me. That said, I know that I will not be in this profession forever. Before I retire, I want to give something back to it, something that can make it better. In the Bible, Jesus accused a church of losing its first love (I’m not giving you the verse. Crack that old book open and look for it. It’ll do you some good.). He reminded them of what they really needed. I’m not comparing myself to Jesus, here. I’m comparing the American schools to that early church. Our first love should be the raising up and edifying of our next generations, the education of our sons and daughters. Most of the time this is lost in a conspiracy of good intentions. Hopefully this short book will cut through all of that noise, and just give some sound advice on how to make our schools better.

A hard truth here - some schools are better than others. I’m not talking about test