Eleanor Duckworth Quotes

Intelligence tests require that certain things be figured out, but the figuring out doesn’t count. If the figuring out leads to the right answer, then of course the right answer counts. But no tester will ever know and no score will ever reveal whether the right answer was a triumph of imagination and intellectual daring, or whether the child knew the right answer all along. In addition, the more time the child spends on figuring things out on the test, the less time there is for filling in the right answers; that is, the more you actually think to get the right answers on an intelligence test, the less intelligent the score will look.

~ Eleanor Duckworth

Teachers are often, and understandably, impatient for their students to develop clear and adequate ideas. But putting ideas in relation to each other isn't a simple job. It's confusing and this confusion does take time. All of us need time for our confusion if we are to build the breadth and depth that give significance to our knowledge.

~ Eleanor Duckworth

But it's not the pressure of data that gives rise to the understanding. It's, on the contrary, the child's own struggle to make sense of the data

~ Eleanor Duckworth

What I have learned from the teachers with whom I have worked is that, just as there is no simple solution to the arms race, there is no simple answer to how to work with children in the classroom. It is a matter of being present as a whole person, with your own thoughts and feelings, and of accepting children as whole people, with their own thoughts and feelings. It's a matter of working very hard to find out what those thoughts and feelings are, as a starting point for developing a view of a world in which people are as much concerned about other people security as they are about their own

~ Eleanor Duckworth