IELTS

CAN YOUR CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT EFFECT LEARNING AND BEHAVIOUR?

Creating a quality supportive classroom environment can support learning, promote engagement and interactions for children. Classrooms that support children’s appropriate behaviours through effective arrangements will make it less likely children will need to engage in challenging behaviour.   

Think about your classroom:

·         What do you see first when you walk in?

·         Are there different areas for different activities? 

·         Are there distractions?

·         Does the arrangement of desks or tables match with the learning strategies you use? 

·         Where are the materials you use daily? Where are your storage areas?

·         Is everything in your classroom accessible to you and all the children?

·         When/where are the children most engaged? When/where do the children struggle to be engaged?

·         If you have a child or children with challenging behaviour, how do you address their individual learning styles and movement needs?

Does your classroom promote child interactions and a sense of community?

How Do Children Learn?

Our next few postings shall be on this topic.

Every child is unique: each has their individual personality, strengths, interests and learning style. One enjoys drawing and writing while another has a three-dimensional approach. One is quiet, content to dream, while another ‘thinks aloud’ and is on the go.

There are developmental differences, character differences and gender differences. Adding further complexity, two in ten children arrive with additional challenges – dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, FASD, ASD, CLDD, etc. (Carpenter, 2013). Teachers must get to know each child and provide resources to connect with the many learning styles. Teaching is an intricate skill. Aristotle called it “the highest form of understanding”.

·         Movement:

Children need to move. Margaret Donaldson describes movement as “thought in action”. (1978) Body and brain develop together, and physical development occurs through using the body, moving it in space and gravity. (White, 2012) Movement gives youngsters the muscle control needed for sitting still. An expert on reading difficulties explains, “Those children who are unable to stay still are showing their balance and motor systems are not yet sufficiently mature...” (Goddard Blythe, 2005) At some schools each day begins with active physical play as many children have been seated in vehicles for some time before arrival. Children transitioning from Foundation Stage to KS1, particularly boys, will ‘turn off’ school unless their physicality is acknowledged. They need generous outdoor time each day for large-motor action. Within the classroom too, children need to move about and change position. Some prefer to work lying on the floor or kneeling or standing.

·         Curiosity:

Albert Einstein stated, “I am neither very clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious!” Children are naturally eager to learn about the world and everything in it. When their interest is engaged, they push the boundaries of their knowledge, hungry for more. One child may be intrigued by plants and animals, another by engines and gadgets. Teachers must tune in to each child’s curiosity and nurture it through the years of school. Universities today seem more interested in “creative thinking, experimentation and improvisation” than in students’ marks. (Beardsworth, 2013) Society needs people with enquiring minds.

EFFECTIVENESS OF TEN LEARNING TECHNIQUES

A recent and comprehensive summary of the impact, strength of evidence and generality of conditions under which a number of learning techniques have been shown to be effective is presented by Dunlosky et al (2013).

High utility:

Practice testing- Self-testing or taking practice tests on material to be learned

Distributed (‘spaced’) practice- implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time

Moderate utility:

Elaborative interrogation - Generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true

Self-explanation – Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving

Interleaved practice- Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session

Low utility:

Summarization- Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts

Highlighting- Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading

Keyword mnemonic- Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials

Imagery use for text learning- Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening

Rereading- Restudying text material again after an initial reading

©Enchanted Learning Ltd 2015

Teaching Our Youngest

Everyone who interacts with a young child is a teacher. As preschool teachers and child-care and after school providers, you have both the wonderful opportunity and the important responsibility to teach and nurture our youngest children.

The years from birth through age five are a time of extraordinary growth and change. It is in these years that children develop the basic knowledge, understandings, and interests they need to reach the goal of being successful learners, readers, and writers.

All young children deserve experiences that will help them to achieve this goal. You play an important role in ensuring that “no child is left behind.” You spend many hours with children, and the right kind of activities can help them tremendously.  You can be especially helpful to those children who have limited learning experiences at home.

The series of our postings recently draws from scientifically based research about what you can do to help children to develop their language abilities, increase their knowledge, become familiar with books and other printed materials, learn letters and sounds, recognize numbers, and learn to count.

Many examples of strategies you can use for teaching these skills have been discussed here.  Also discussed were examples of ways to create an environment in your preschool classrooms that will nurture children’s natural curiosity and their zest for learning.  Throughout our many postings you will find sections titled Teacher Talk.  These are examples of conversations teachers have with children to enhance their learning during everyday activities.

Remember, you hold the key to the future academic success of the young children in your care.

Have a pleasant holiday and don’t forget to keep checking back for more tips, discoveries, and solutions to much of nagging educational challenges in our subsequent posts.

©Enchanted Learning Ltd 2015

QUIZ QUESTIONS FOR WOULD-BE TEACHERS

• Do you love children (and/ or brooding teenagers)?
• Do you have infinite patience?
• Are you passionate about learning?
• Is work more about personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment than a paycheck?
• Can you handle dealing with bodily functions on a daily basis?
• Do you have school spirit?
• Do you like the hearing your last name being yelled at you all day?
• Can you write legibly on a chalkboard/ whiteboard?
• Do you have excellent time management skills and the ability to be flexible?
• Will it annoy you if everyone assumes that you leave work at 3:00 and bask in the sun all summer?

(First realization of teaching: this is not all true!)

© Enchanted Learning Ltd. 2015

THE DYNAMIC MODEL OF EDUCATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2006)

(1) Orientation    

·         Providing the objectives for which a specific task/lesson/series of lessons take(s) place

·         Challenging students to identify the reason why an activity is taking place in the lesson.

(2) Structuring 

·         Beginning with overviews and/or review of objectives

·         Outlining the content to be covered and signalling transitions between lesson parts

·         Drawing attention to and reviewing main ideas

(3) Questioning  

·         Raising different types of questions (i.e., process and product) at appropriate difficulty level

·         Giving time for students to respond

·         Dealing with student responses

(4) Teaching Modelling

·         Encouraging students to use problem-solving strategies presented by the teacher or other classmates

·         Inviting students to develop strategies

·         Promoting the idea of modelling

(5) Application  

·         Using seatwork or small-group tasks in order to provide needed practice and application opportunities

·         Using application tasks as starting points for the next step of teaching and learning.

(6) The Classroom as a Learning Environment 

·         Establishing on-task behaviour through the interactions they promote (i.e., teacher–student and student–student interactions)

·         Dealing with classroom disorder and student competition through establishing rules, persuading students to respect them and using the rules.

(7) Management of Time

·         Organizing the classroom environment

·         Maximizing engagement rates

(8) Assessment  

·         Using appropriate techniques to collect data on student knowledge and skills

·         Analysing data in order to identify student needs and report the results to students and parents.

·         Teachers evaluating their own practices.

©Enchanted Learning Ltd 2015