Chess for Educators

How to Organize and Promote a Meaningful Chess Teaching Program

Karel van Delft

• Publisher: New in Chess
• eBook ISBN:
  9789056919436
• Year: 2021

Chess has the rare quality that children love it despite the fact that it is good for them. Playing chess is just like life: you have to make plans, take decisions, be creative, deal with challenges, handle disappointments, interact with others and evaluate your actions.

Psychologist and chess teacher Karel van Delft has spent a large part of his life studying the benefits of chess in education. In this guide he provides access to the underlying scientific research and presents the didactical methods of how to effectively apply these findings in practice.

Van Delft has created a dependable toolkit for teachers and scholastic chess organizers. What can teachers do to improve their instruction? How (un)important is talent? How do you support a special needs group? How do you deal with parents? And with school authorities? What are the best selling points of a chess program? Boys and girls, does it make a difference? How do ‘chess in schools' programs fare in different countries?

This is not a book on chess rules, with lots of moves and diagrams, but it points the way to where good technical chess improvement content can be found. Van Delft offers a wealth of practical advice on how to launch and present a chess program and how to apply the most effective didactics in order for kids to build critical life skills through learning chess.

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Explanation of symbols
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: School chess worldwide
• Chapter 2: Didactics in school chess
• Chapter 3: Pre-school chess
• Chapter 4: Organization of a school chess club
• Chapter 5: Organization of a youth tournament
• Chapter 6: The role of parents
• Chapter 7: Chess as a metaphor for life according to Moreno
• Chapter 8: Chess, intelligence, and teaching highly gifted children
• Chapter 9: Chess for the blind and partially sighted
• Chapter 10: Chess for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Chapter 11: Chess and autism
• Chapter 12: Chess and dyslexia
• Chapter 13: Girls’ and women’s chess
• Chapter 14: Social and therapeutic chess
• Chapter 15: Class management
• Chapter 16: A.D. de Groot on Polgar
• Chapter 17: Memorandum ‘Chess Instruction in School?’
• Chapter 18: Chess as a subject in primary school
• Chapter 19: Methods of research on the benefits of chess instruction
• Chapter 20: Research into the benefits of chess instruction
• Chapter 21: Alphabet of methods and teaching tips for chess education
• Index of names
• Bibliography