6 Comments

  1. teachwell
    February 14, 2016 @ 11:29 am

    Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.

    Reply

  2. Brian
    February 14, 2016 @ 1:01 pm

    A fascinating post on a fascinating topic.

    My perception is that you are coming across as a victim yourself, with all of these nasty people making you potentially suffer bad behaviour in the classroom in order to accomodate the whims of children.

    You spend 2 paragraphs developing a completely ficticious context in which Maslow’s hierarchy has in some way something to do with this issue and for me this is fascinating. I have studied human motivation in great depth and Maslow’s hierarchy in particular. As a manager i did some masters research on the topic which illustrated clearly to me how the theory might and might not be applied in an educational context.

    I am very much looking forward to part 2.

    Your aray of diagrams was wonderous, the blockbusters thing is probably my favourite. I do tend to think that although Maslow didn’t use it, the common diagram is a good one to describe the theories.

    To get hung up on the diagram is for me not good, but we find the same with Bloom’s taxononomy. People start to complain that knowledge is at the bottom as if that is a bad thing. I feel we are going the same way here.

    Awaiting part 2

    Reply

    • teachwell
      February 14, 2016 @ 1:50 pm

      ‘Fictitious’ is just a slightly less rude way of accusing someone of lying. Respond to the points if you disagree. There is nothing intelligent about sneaky, underhand negative comments.

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35431782 – this is just the latest of hundreds of surveys over the past few decades highlighting the increasing levels of verbal and physical abuse against teachers. It’s happening in classrooms and behaviour such as this is cited frequently by teachers who are unhappy in their roles as well as a reason for leaving teaching. The person being abused is the ‘victim’ of that situation. I think the people who believe excuses need to be made do care about the children involved and feel bad about their home lives. That has unfortunately led to accepting some ideas and theories uncritically, as well as the solutions that are based on those ideas.

      As for your take on Maslow – a load of conjecture based on supposed readings. Ditto your understanding of human motivation.

      No one knows me better than I know myself and the idea that you can based on a blog post is nonsense of the highest order. If you want to respond to the points made in the post – feel free to do so but I won’t be approving comments in future that are just sneaky attacks on my character based on the fact that we disagree. Same goes for paragraphs full of nothing except conjecture – e.g. Maslow’s diagram, application to the field of education.

      The only thing I have learnt from your comment is that you value your own opinion very highly, which you are welcome to do so, but I don’t need to know about thanks.

      Reply

  3. olivercaviglioli
    February 16, 2016 @ 12:10 am

    Maslow was keen to stress that self-transcendence and not self-actualisation was his later preferred apex. It’s also interesting to note how close his affiliation was with Esalen, the Mecca of the 1960s human potential movement where LSD was a common ‘sacrament’. I’m not so sure followers of Maslow in education would be so keen if their background knowledge was deeper than that damned triangle.

    Reply

  4. Maslow’s Hierarchy – Critique Part Two – Teachwell
    February 18, 2016 @ 2:19 pm

    […] the first part of this post, I reviewed the link between Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and behaviour management systems in […]

    Reply

  5. Moving on from Maslow – Teachwell
    February 22, 2016 @ 10:32 am

    […] first and second parts of this series of blogs explored the pyramid diagram and the critiquing the use of […]

    Reply

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