Introduction
When children do not succeed in school, educators and others disagree about who or what is to blame. Because learning is a process that takes place both inside and outside school, an ecological approach offers a working description for the youth. In this view, inadequacies in any arena of life–the school, the home, or the community–can contribute to academic failure when not compensated for in another arena. The personal, economic, and social costs of academic underachievement are high and growing. Each year, increasing numbers of students enter school with circumstances in their lives that schools are ill prepared to accommodate. Yet from this academically and culturally diverse population must come the next generation of scientists, engineers, and other skilled professionals. Today, schools are encouraging the development of thinking skills in remedial programs. They also are embracing school wide restructuring programs and heterogeneous grouping as alternatives to pull-out programs. Many of these new programs and practices have proven themselves in the classroom. Schools also are exploring new ways to involve parents and families in their children’s education. Research indicates that parent involvement makes an enormous impact on students’ attitudes, attendance, and academic achievement.
Cooperative Learning
Cooperative Learning is a relationship in a group of students that requires positive interdependence (a sense of sink or swim together), individual accountability (each of us has to contribute and learn), interpersonal skills (communication, trust, leadership, decision making, and conflict resolution), face-to-face promotive interaction, and processing (reflecting on how well the team is functioning and how to function even better). Cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement.
The Cooperative Learning Center is a Research and Training Center focusing on how students should interact with each other as they learn and the skills needed to interact effectively. We have reviewed more than 800 studies dating back to the late 1800′s and have contributed more than 80 research studies of our own to clarify the issue of student to student interaction and learning. Our training includes instructors from pre-school through college in all subject areas. The training has concentrated on North America, but interest is growing around the world.
Cooperative learning has been around for a very long time—long before John Dewey and progressive education extolled its virtues in the early 20th century. Documented more than 3000 years ago, students of the Talmud paired up to engage in lively debates. Later, in the United States, the practice of group learning was a natural extension of the one-room schoolhouse. It was a prominent component of John Dewey’s experiential classroom and was present in most American classrooms until the early 1940s, at which point it fell out of favor for about 30 years. Cooperative learning is often at odds with the messages that most students get about collaboration in the classroom. Students are instructed from first grade on to “do your own work” and “keep your eyes on your own paper.” Most “collaboration” is treated as a form of cheating (GLENCOE Online).
Community Service Learning
Service-learning is a teaching method that enriches learning by engaging students in meaningful service to their schools and communities. Young people apply academic skills to solving real-world issues, linking established learning objectives with genuine needs. They lead the process, with adults as partners, applying critical thinking and problem-solving skills to concerns such as hunger, pollution, and diversity.
“Service-learning is education in action.” — Sen. John Glenn
“Developing a social consciousness in the young means engaging them in meaningful activity”.
Without a sense of community and family, many young people lose the connectedness that fosters these sensitivities, motivations and skills. The result for these youths is incivility and apathy as well as a lack of confidence that they can make a difference to others and to the world as a whole. Young people’s disengagement with the social and political world has become more serious over the past 30 years. In January 1998, the Higher Education Research Institute reported that the nation’s college freshmen were less connected to politics than any entering class in the 32-year history of the study. According to the study, this year’s college freshmen are less likely to believe that “keeping up to date with political affairs,” “becoming involved in programs to clean up the environment” and “helping to promote racial understanding” are important life goals. They have less desire than previous freshmen classes to influence the political structure, participate in a community action program, influence social values or even discuss politics. These findings are alarming because our democratic culture and social wellbeing depend on the renewing energy of young people who have the sensitivities and vision to help create a better world. Indeed, the very fabric of our national community depends on the degree to which we care about and treat each other with respect and civility.
Parent Involvement
The term “parent involvement” includes several different forms of participation in education and with the schools. Parents can support their children’s schooling by attending school functions and responding to school obligations (parent-teacher conferences, for example). They can become more involved in helping their children improve their schoolwork–providing encouragement, arranging for appropriate study time and space, modeling desired behavior (such as reading for pleasure), monitoring homework, and actively tutoring their children at home. Outside the home, parents can serve as advocates for the school. They can volunteer to help out with school activities or work in the classroom. Or they can take an active role in the governance and decision making necessary for planning, developing, and providing an education for the community’s children.
The research overwhelmingly demonstrates that parent involvement in children’s learning is positively related to achievement. Further, the research shows that the more intensively parents are involved in their children’s learning; the more beneficial are the achievement effects. This holds true for all types of parent involvement in children’s learning and for all types and ages of students. There is a much higher incidence of parent involvement at the preschool level and in the primary grades than at the middle school or secondary level, and, consequently, the majority of research on parent involvement has been conducted with young children and their families. Indeed, just a few years ago, research on parent involvement in the education of older students was too limited to permit drawing any conclusions about its effectiveness. In recent years, however, more research has been conducted with middle school and secondary students and their families. This research shows that parent involvement remains very beneficial in promoting positive achievement and affective outcomes with these older students
Team Teaching
Team teaching is open to several interpretations. Two or more instructors are involved in the same course. Team members may come from closely allied disciplines, or they may derive from fields as disparate as art history and theoretical physics. Thus, while team teaching is frequently connected with an interdisciplinary approach to learning, the mere presence of a teaching team in a classroom does not by itself indicate a crossing of disciplines. Team teaching is a strategy that has been around for years, but creating teams, whether in response to district expectations or as a way of dealing with changes in teaching practice, needs careful thought in order to succeed. While teaming means the partners must reconfigure much of their teaching lives, it can be done successfully. Team teaching, in the most general sense, encompasses a wide variety of arrangements. One specific form, which has become quite prevalent in recent years, is having two teachers in the classroom teaching simultaneously. This is becoming more and more common throughout Japan and in other Asian countries. Team teaching can be an extremely beneficial and professionally rewarding experience if all goes well. In order to accomplish this however, both teachers need to maintain respect for each other both inside and outside the classroom.
Conclusion
There are a lot of ways on how to better improve the quality of education for the young learners. Specifically declared in the above statements, the four reform strategies have aimed at promoting enhanced value of education for the delicate minds of the youth. From the involvement of parents and community, there has been a continuing reformation of the system of education. Why is this so? Why is there a search for the betterment of the youth education? This would be simply for the reason that these growing young learners got the future at their hands. That would be a great reason for these educational reforms.
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