A-ha!

Working through a topic or question, a shaft of sudden inspiration hits. The cloud of fragmented ideas and thoughts clear as a whole picture begins to form coherently in your mind. What you have now worked out – in an unexpected, exciting eureka moment – will stay with you forever.

All teachers seek this experience for their students. Liz Attwell explores theories of education to argue that traditional teaching, ‘filling buckets’, must be replaced by dynamic, progressive teaching that promotes active learning – not just ‘lighting a fire’, but knowing how to lay the sticks and finding the matches too. This progressive approach seeks to create a basis for inner awakening and original insight, in order for students ultimately to come to their own a-ha moments.

In A Drop of Light, Liz Attwell presents her original research into the phenomenon of a-ha moments, offering a theoretical background as well as practical advice to give teachers the tools, lesson plans, anecdotes and inspiration to bring living thinking to their own classrooms. Goethe’s approach and Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogical ideas make an important contribution, but Attwell advises that teachers following Steiner’s philosophy should enter into dialogue with educators from other backgrounds. Working together, enlightened teachers around the world can help schools and colleges to become true learning communities.