For the past twenty-five years educational reform has focused on testing as the way to improve student achievement. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been the culminating legislation of this movement in the United States. In her bookTested, Linda Perlstein (2007) provides a dispassionate account of how one school in Maryland has coped with the demands of NCLB. Her account describes a school day that is almost entirely devoted to preparing for the Maryland School Assessment Test (MSA), which is administered in March. Here is a typical day:

8:45–10 Mock MSA

10–11:40 Identify tone in a poem....

To teach the whole child we need to use a broad range of teaching strategies. If we use a limited number of approaches, we will surely not connect with the head, hands, and heart of the child.

In this chapter three basic approaches, which were briefly discussed in the last chapter, are presented in more detail. It should be noted here that I use the wordsapproach, orientation, andpositioninterchangeably. These terms refer to abasic stance in teaching that is rooted in a world view. The first part of each section briefly describes this paradigm (a more complete...

How can we use the three teaching positions to teach the whole child? Since each approach reaches a different part of the child, they need to be used together in a way that nurtures wholeness. Ideally, they should be used to create a flow or rhythm in the classroom. It becomes problematic if we get stuck in one approach, as the energy can dissipate with just one method.

In this chapter I discuss the steps the teacher can use to bring the three approaches together in a holistic and rhythmic manner. Also included are descriptions of how six teachers working...

The whole curriculum is theconnectedcurriculum. The whole curriculum focuses on relationships so that students can make connections. One of the fundamental realities of nature is interdependence, yet our curriculum is fragmented as we break knowledge into courses, units, lessons, and unconnected information. Whole child education focuses instead on the connected curriculum.

In this chapter we examine six types of connections. The whole curriculum does not isolate information and concepts but showsrelationships among subjects. It supports an integrated approach to learning. The whole curriculum also connects the student tocommunity. This includes the classroom community, the school, the...

The whole school fosters community both in the classroom and in the school. For me, the most powerful vision of community is Martin Luther King Jr.’s Beloved Community: a community of love and justice. In his earliest writing he referred to it; for example, during the Montgomery bus boycott he wrote that the goal is ‘the creation of the beloved community’ (1957, p. 30). The beloved community is a ‘reformed and regenerated human society’ (Smith & Zepp, 1998, p. 130). It is also a community based on interrelatedness. King (1963) believed that ‘we are tied together in the single garment of...

We need whole teachers to teach the whole child. Whole teachers practise patience, presence, caring, love, and humility. The whole teacher is also a lifelong learner who is humble enough to realize that the journey to being a whole teacher never ends. This chapter begins by discussing the qualities of the whole teacher and then suggests ways of nurturing these qualities through various practices including meditation and mindfulness.

We live in an impatient society. Consider the roadways that are filled with impatient drivers or the exasperated individuals we see waiting in lineups in the grocery store. We see impatience in...

In June 2007 I was approached by a group of teachers and parents who were applying to the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) to start up an alternative school called the Whole Child School (WCS). They were working on a proposal to begin an elementary school with a holistic approach to education. They asked me to help set up an advisory committee that would provide support and guidance to their project. The school opened in the fall of 2009 as a K–5 school with an enrolment of 150 students and plans to expand to grade 8.

The Whole Child...