Chess for Educators : How to Organize and Promote a Meaningful Chess Teaching Program by Karel van Delft
PDF Excerpt

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.

In this guide, psychologist and chess teacher Karel van Delft provides access to the underlying scientific research and presents the best didactical methods. 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? 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 and moves, but it points the way to where good technical chess improvement content can be found. Van Delft offers a wealth of practical advice on the most effective didactics in order for kids to build critical life skills through learning chess.

Karel van Delft is a Dutch chess teacher and chess organizer. He holds a Master’s degree in Psychology of the University of Amsterdam and has lectured and published widely on the subject of the benefits of chess in education.

"More than 260 pages of pure motivation and inspiration. While other school chess books focus on concrete lessons, Karel van Delft provides insight into everything else that should be in the chess teacher's school bag (chess and autism, chess and girls, chess as social and therapeutic tool, the role of the parents...). The author strikes a wonderful balance between practical tips and scientific foundation. You can use some pages as a checklist, on the other hand the references to scientific works can make any school headmaster realise that chess really belongs in the classroom. And isn't that exactly what we need to spread chess in schools?" -- Philippe Vukojevic, First Rank Newsletter, ECU Education