TIEL Institute -- Teaching for Intellectual and Emotional Learning

From the Forward to the Book

"As an antidote to the current climate of teaching and learning in schools as an exercise in test preparation, this book is a refreshing reminder that learning matters more than achievement and that teaching is more than using data to decide on which skills to emphasize in work sheets. Folsom has created an educational vision that has high practical value even as it has strong theoretical roots in our educational history. It offers a concrete way for teachers to help students learn at higher levels but also develop the character traits so necessary to be able to function in 21st Century society.

For gifted educators, it offers a blueprint for making differentiation in classrooms real and palpable. For general EDUCATORS, IT AFFORDS A VISION OF ENHANCING THE LEARNING LEVEL FOR ALL STUDENTS IN AN EVEN-HANDED WAY. The book should be required of all who supervise teachers as it provides a primer to meaningful teacher growth and change over time."

Joyce VanTassel-Baska, Jody and Layton Smith Professor in Education, College of William and Mary

Reviewers

"This marvelous and practical book will help teachers create the kind of rigorous and successful project-based learning that is so essential for teaching twenty-first century skills and is so difficult to do well."

Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University

"Christy Folsom addresses some of the most urgent questions educators are asking today about how to teach thinking skills and, perhaps more importantly, how to integrate intellectual and emotional learning in ways that lead to engagement in lifelong learning. Built on a foundation of project-based learning, Folsom's Teaching for Intellectual and Emotional Learning (TIEL) is a practical teacher-friendly model that connects gifted education with general education.

I believe that Christy Folsom is onto something important here, showing educators how to foster relationships between and among the foundational intellectual and emotional skills essential to creating a vibrant and increasingly diverse democratic community in this rapidly changing global village of ours."

Dona Mathews, visiting professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and adjunct professor at St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto

"In lucid prose and easy-to-follow graphics, Christy Folsom explains her innovative model of thinking about thinking and how attending to students' emotional needs, such as empathy, ethical reasoning, and self-management, enhances academic/intellectual performance and unleashes powerful reservoirs of creativity and genuine ownership of learning.

With over twenty years of experience in urban public education as a teacher, curriculum writer, professional developer, and program administrator, I have seldom come across a book as cogent and on point as this. In an era of relentless attention on the wall chart of test scores, the author's emphasis on rich, meaningful projects in an authentic context is a welcome and badly needed antidote to work sheets and test preparation. Like John Dewey, her vision of measurement in education is more about possibilities than a static snapshot of immutable norm-referenced aptitudes.

In a three-year professional development led by Professor Folsom, I have been privileged to see the TIEL model clearly improve the classroom practices of dozens of public school educators."

Philip Panaritis, New York City Department of Education

"Teachers have found a new way to analyze their curriculum through the use of the TIEL model. They see it prividing the framework to think about teaching and learning. It has been a powerful tool. It provides an explicit method by which teachers can articulate objectives concerning their teaching. A very practical framework."

Jane Schumann, assistant professor of graduate education at the College of Saint Elizabeth

"By using TIEL, I teach students to recognize which thinking operations they are performing, which operations they might be overlooking, and which operations could strengthen their learning. The influence of the TIEL model has encouraged me to incorporate more self-assessment assignments, critical thinking, and improved small-group discussion."

Jane Moreno, Salt Lake Community College

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