Young people learn most readily when their imaginations are engaged and teachers teach most successfully when they are able to see their subject matter from their pupils' point of view. It is, however, difficult to define imagination in practice and even more difficult to make full use of its potential. In this original and stimulating book, Kieran Egan, winner of the prestigous Grawemeyer award for education in 1991, discusses what imagination really means for children and young people in the middle years and what its place should be in the midst of the normal demands of classroom teaching and learning. Egan uses a bright and witty style to move from a brief history of the ways in which imagination has been regarded over the years, through a general discussion of the links between learning and imagination. A selection of sample lesson plans show teachers how they can encourage effective learning through stimulating pupils' imaginations in a variety of curriculum areas, including maths, science, social studies and language work.

In this book, award-winning educator Kieran Egan shows how we can transform the experience of K-12 students and help them become more knowledgeable and more creative in their thinking. At the core of this transformative process is imagination which can become the heart of effective learning if it is tied to education's central tasks. An Imaginative Approach to Teaching is a groundbreaking book that offers an understanding of how students' imaginations work in learning and shows how the acquisition of cognitive tools drives students' educational development. This approach is unique in that it engages both the imagination and emotions. The author clearly demonstrates how knowledge comes to life in students' minds if it is introduced in the context of human hopes, fears, and passions. To facilitate this new educational approach, the book includes a wide variety of effective teaching tools - such as story, rhythm, play, opposition, agency, and meta-narrative understanding - that value and build upon the way children understand their experiences. Most important, Egan provides frameworks for lesson planning and more than a dozen sample lessons to show how teachers can use these tools to awaken intelligence and imagination in the classroom.

It is widely believed that a child's imagination ought to be stimulated and developed in education. Yet, few teachers understand what imagination is or how it lends itself to practical methods and techniques that can be used easily in classroom instruction. In this book, Kieran Egan--winner of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for his work on imagination--takes up where his Teaching as Story Telling left off, offering practical help for teachers who want to engage, stimulate, and develop the imaginative and learning processes of children between the ages of eight to fifteen. This book is not about unusually imaginative students and teachers. Rather, it is about the typical student's imaginative life and how it can be stimulated in learning, how the average teacher can plan to achieve this aim, and how the curriculum can be structured to help achieve this aim. Slim and determinedly practical, this book contains a wealth of concrete examples of curriculum design and teaching techniques structured to appeal specifically to children in their middle school years.

Young people learn most readily when their imaginations are engaged and teachers teach most successfully when they are able to see their subject matter from their pupils' point of view. It is, however, difficult to define imagination in practice and even more difficult to make full use of its potential. In this original and stimulating book, Kieran Egan, winner of the prestigous Grawemeyer award for education in 1991, discusses what imagination really means for children and young people in the middle years and what its place should be in the midst of the normal demands of classroom teaching and learning. Egan uses a bright and witty style to move from a brief history of the ways in which imagination has been regarded over the years, through a general discussion of the links between learning and imagination. A selection of sample lesson plans show teachers how they can encourage effective learning through stimulating pupils' imaginations in a variety of curriculum areas, including maths, science, social studies and language work.

This book offers an energizing Christian vision for the art of teaching. The authors — experienced teachers themselves — encourage teacher-readers to reanimate their work by imagining it differently. David Smith and Susan Felch, along with Barbara Carvill, Kurt Schaefer, Timothy Steele, and John Witvliet, creatively use three metaphors — journeys and pilgrimages, gardens and wilderness, buildings and walls — to illuminate a fresh vision of teaching and learning. Stretching beyond familiar clichés, they infuse these metaphors with rich biblical echoes and theological resonances that will inform and inspire Christian teachers everywhere.

In her newest book, teacher researcher and bestselling author Karen Gallas investigates imagination in the classroom to understand its function in literacy learning. Using rich examples from her elementary classroom, she proposes that imagination is a central, but untapped, component of learing accross all subject areas—language arts, science, social studies, and math.

Everyone knows that educational success is much more likely when students’ imaginations and emotions are caught up in learning. While we have a rich educational literature about holding students’ interest, we do not have very much sustained work on what the imagination is, how it works in learning, or how it may be inspired in the classroom. Addressing the whole curriculum, this book provides insights into each of those areas central to educational success. Engaging the imagination is sometimes seen in opposition to preparing students for testing, but scoring well on tests and being imaginatively active in learning are not mutually exclusive. When students’ imaginations are engaged in learning their educational performance will improve by any test or measure. This book offers a new understanding of how knowledge grows in the mind and how our imagination works and changes during our lifetime. Knowledgeable authors describe innovative teaching methods based on these insights, which offer new ways of planning and teaching.