This is a review for a novel called A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel which I was sent to review.
This novel is written by A Mirror for Americans:. In this time of turmoil with schooling and Covid-19 parents are sure what to do about there children’s education.
This includes my family and is one of the reasons we decided to Homeschool Charlie full time. In the meantime I would like to ask you a question.
” Have you ever wondered why do schoolchildren in Japan and China learn more, and learn it faster, than their American peers? I’ve thought about this in the past but I didn’t know how to find out the answer to this question.
Until I was sent my copy of A Mirror for Americans which answered the question for me. As well as many other questions my family hadn’t even thought of.
I will tell you this novel will make you sit down and think about the way our children are being taught. There is moment’s in here I hadn’t ever thought of and the novel was a God send to my family.
About:
Academic Mediocrity of American Students Examined in Thought-Provoking Comparison of Educational Approaches
Brooklyn, NY, September 3, 2020 — East Asian students have always gained higher scores on the international comparative tests than American students. How can this be explained?
In A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel, Dr. Cornelius Grove provides the explanation. Distilling 50 years of anthropological research into East Asian primary classrooms, Grove offers insights into East Asian teaching methods and, more significantly, into the societal values that shape East Asian teaching.
But A Mirror for Americans, about teaching, provides only half of the explanation. The other half is about East Asian families and parenting, revealed by Grove in his 2017 book, The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel.
“The purpose of my books,” explains Grove, “is to convey to the general reader the research findings from East Asia, where societal values unlike ours shape child-rearing and primary school teaching. There’s an ‘Aha!’ moment: If only we could think differently about children and their classroom learning, we could raise the level of our own youngsters’ performance.”
A Mirror for Americans concerns itself with preschool through grade 5, comparing the culture of teaching in East Asia and the U.S. Among the research-generated facts revealed are these:
· In preschool and grade 1, East Asian children are taught, and they practice, individual and group behaviors that promote their own learning and their teacher’s efficient lesson delivery.
Teachers design lessons based on the internal logic of the content they are teaching, not on factors such as a need to motivate, have fun learning or draw out pupil creativity. But they do strive to present content so that all their pupils – slower and more advanced – will benefit.
Whether a lesson is student-centered or teacher-centered doesn’t concern East Asians. Grove’s conclusion is that East Asian lessons are knowledge-centered, a key explanation for why East Asian students outperform their American peers on thohttps://amirrorforamericans.info/se international tests.
Explains Grove, “Attitudes toward learning brought from home, plus methods of teaching encountered at school, mold East Asian youngsters into superior students. These research-generated facts can serve as a mirror for Americans, enabling us to examine our approaches to children’s learning – and to the values that drive our approaches – from a fresh perspective.”
Author Cornelius N. Grove holds a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Johns Hopkins and a Doctor of Education from Columbia. An independent scholar, his “day job” since 1990 has been as the managing partner of the global business consultancy, Grovewell LLC.
Grove has had a decades-long fascination with the cultural factors that affect children’s ability to learn in school. At a 2005 conference in Singapore, he delivered a paper on the two instructional styles found around the world. In 2013 he wrote The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today, a historical study of why most Americans believe that inborn ability determines school performance. For two recently published encyclopedias (2015 and 2017), he contributed entries on “pedagogy across cultures.” And now with A Mirror for Americans and The Drive to Learn, he is revealing the complementary roles that home and school potentially play in building young people’s mastery of school learning.
Author:
About Cornelius N. Grove
Cornelius N. Grove is an independent scholar whose day job is as Managing Partner of the global leadership consultancy he founded in 1990, Grovewell LLC.
After attaining a Master of Arts in Teaching degree at Johns Hopkins University, he taught history in White Plains, NY. Then he moved into educational publishing in New York, after which he and his wife traveled for two years in Europe and Africa. Upon returning, he completed a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree at Columbia University. His graduate school interest was in understanding, at the level of values, differences among classroom cultures.
After receiving his doctorate, he became Director of Research for AFS, the student exchange organization. He also held adjunct posts at Columbia and New School Universities, creating and teaching a course on cross-cultural communication in the classroom. In 1986, he taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University, after which he co-authored “Encountering the Chinese” (3rd Ed.: Hachette, 2010), available from Amazon.
In 2005 at a conference in Singapore, Dr. Grove delivered a paper on the two types of instructional styles found around the world. This led to his becoming curious about the origins of a belief held by many Americans, that inborn ability is the main determinant of a child’s school performance. After exploring the history of this belief, he wrote “The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), available from Amazon.
He then was invited to contribute an entry entitled Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy for the new “Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence” (Sage, 2015). Next, he was invited to contribute a much longer entry entitled Pedagogy Across Cultures for the new “International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
To write those encyclopedia entries, Dr. Grove deeply explored anthropological research on school learning, child development, and parenting worldwide. This re-acquainted him with the powerful influence on children of the values and expectations – the culture – in which they are raised. Focusing on the contrasts between U.S. and East Asian family cultures, he shared what he discovered about parenting for school success in “The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), available from Amazon.
“The Drive to Learn” covered half the story about children’s success in school – the parenting half. The other half concerns what teachers do in pre- and primary school classrooms. Focusing on the contrasts between U.S. and East Asian classroom cultures, Dr. Grove has just finished writing “A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel,” to be published by Rowman & Littlefield during spring 2020, but now delayed by the Covid-19 lockdown. It can be preordered from Amazon.Read less
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland)
Release Date: September 2020
Hardback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4460-3
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4461-0
eBook: ISBN 978-1-4758-4462-7
Available from Rowman.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and Amazon.com
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
