Every child wants to succeed, and every teacher wants their students to succeed, but it’s important to recognize that even when the intentions are there, teaching and learning methods don’t always work great. Sometimes teaching and learning doesn’t work.
Signs that a child’s education and learning is not going well include:
- Students are late to class
- Children will take more breaks during class
- Children typically only copy the actions or procedures discussed, without intuitively understanding the concept and being curious enough to try to apply it.
- The child is not very responsive or interactive.
- Not doing homework or advance learning regularly
- I don’t often laugh heartily in class.
- Seems confused in class
- Student withdrawal behavior
Learning well is more important than knowing all the terms – Young children often want to quickly memorize all the fun terms, but don’t necessarily understand the details. As a teacher or parent, it’s important to make sure your child is learning the basic concepts well and not just “knowing all the keywords and terms”. There’s nothing wrong with knowing terms, but it’s important to let your child know that real learning is not about knowing terms and keywords. Real learning goes deeper than that, and learning the real-world application and usage of a topic requires commitment and perseverance to learn deeply. No one can become an astronaut in a year!
Have fun learning – It is very important in life to have some fun in whatever you do. If you don’t, you will genuinely question yourself. Similarly, we think it is very important for children to have fun while learning and for teachers to have fun while teaching and doing difficult things. If they don’t, they should question themselves about their teaching methods. Most teachers can make their students laugh and teach well at the same time. This is a sign that the class is really going well.
Parents are the first heroes, and teachers meet many students – Parents are the first heroes as they spend more time with their children and understand them better. But teachers have a broader perspective on teaching the same subjects to a large number of peers. So one has in-depth knowledge of the child and the other has extensive knowledge of peers and their learning styles and interests. Both inputs need to be considered with equal weightage in order to understand and inculcate the best development of the child. Often times, one data input is biased over the other or there is pressure to give one more importance than the other. It is very important to recognize that parents and teachers see very different sides of the same coin and therefore both views should be integrated and not ignored.
If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t understand the subject very well. There is no doubt that if you understand a subject well, you can translate it into simple terms and explain it to a child. Having personally taught many children, I can say that even very young children can often understand difficult concepts, provided the teacher has the ability to formulate the concept in simple terms for the child.
Set small, achievable goals – The best things in life happen when you do a little better every day. James Clear is one of our favorite thinkers on this aspect. It’s so true that everything in life adds up if you act every day with discipline. Taking things slowly isn’t what we like, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s better to take things slowly and do them well than to do a lot of things at a shallow level.
Use your child’s interests – Sometimes, a child may not show much interest in the topic you are teaching them. Connect the dots on how the topic relates to his/her own interests. Talk a bit about your child’s interests, involve him/her and care about his/her well-being. This will make your child happy and in response, your child will be a bit more proactive in their approach to the topic.
Connections in everyday life – Link learning material to situations and examples from everyday life, making it relevant and helping children retain and apply the subject matter.
Provide incentives and gamify the learning process – Reinforce learning by providing incentives such as a points system, reinforcing specific desired behaviors such as recalling past lesson learning or completing homework with points, rewards and peer competition. Try gamifying your child’s learning and application in ways that interest them.
Lessons usually go well when students are curious about new things, exploring on their own, and having fun while they learn.
Like any change in life, learning and teaching can sometimes be less fun. It is important for parents and teachers to accept that. However, every child is unique, and what motivates one child may not work for another. We should try different strategies, observe what works, and try to be flexible in our approach to accommodate different learning styles and intelligences. It is important not to make quick decisions or judgments, but to patiently stick to a particular approach for a little longer. In modern society, one important thing we all lack is patience. This is why we always encourage people to spend time with nature. Nature tends to slow things down for us. Nature always works patiently and slowly, and yet everything is accomplished with awe and beauty.
I hope this helps. Thank you.
You might also like to read these articles: How to stimulate your child’s curiosity?, The development of children’s leisure reading, How do children learn through play?
