Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning

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She is mother to two self-directed learners who were unschooled for 6 years, then attended a Sudbury-model school in Paris and now are members of the Self-Managed Learning College in Hove. The excerpt is from her new book, Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of Their Own Learning.

Naomi Fisher draws on her extensive psychological knowledge, as well as her experience as a mother of two children, to show that there is an alternative to the damaging effects of current educational practice.Now that schools have reopened, most seem to have forgotten how ridiculous the material their children are having to learn actually is, and also just how counterintuitive the way it is they are expected to learn it - parents are just relieved it’s no longer on them. Her work has featured in The Psychologist , The Green Parent , Juno , SEN Magazine and she has appeared on many podcasts including Reasons to be Cheerful with Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd.

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). However, this book has clearly demonstrated the extent to which the system conflicts with basic human behaviour and the way we learn. Focuses on self directed learning and towards the end of the book gives lots of useful information about how this could be carried out at home through home education. When they refuse to cooperate with this, they are said to be suffering from school refusal, or perhaps school phobia.

He worked in publishing but I didn’t think there was any chance his company would publish my book because (as I saw it) it was so niche.

It suits people in these jobs for everyone to think this, because that justifies their high salaries. Quite scary to think about taking such an alternative route with your children but makes an awful lot of sense to me. If you remember, SDT is a theory of motivation, which suggests that autonomy, relatedness and competence underpin intrinsic motivation. It’s not uncommon for someone to choose a job where they have few choices and no control, in the belief that this will be less stressful. Many people assume that the most stressful jobs are the ones at the top, the ones where you have the power to determine the future of thousands of employees, or to steer a company away from bankruptcy.As well as a grounding in theory, the book provides a roadmap to help self-directed learning become a reality for families. It is written for the growing number of parents who feel that ‘school’ is doing their children more harm than good. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

Even when people work at the weekend, they tend to do it in their own time and in their own way, and therefore have increased autonomy as compared to during the week. I read the books which claimed that the problem in education today is that we don’t teach children enough facts, and the books which argue that children just need to be kept under control better. Changing Our Minds is densely packed with studies and information from across cognitive psychology, biology and sociology yet woven together in a warm and conversational way. Her work has featured in The Psychologist, The Green Parent, Juno, SEN Magazine and she has appeared on many podcasts including Reasons to be Cheerful with Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. To be honest, I downloaded this one because it was the only one available on Audible and I thought I’d give it a go. We tend to parent and teach the way we were raised and taught, which is why changing our minds about how children learn and grow is so hard to do. It is written for the growing number of parents who feel that 'school' is doing their children more harm than good.