I believe that individualized, direct teaching with positive reinforcement are the best methods to helping students reach their full potential.
First, direct teaching. By this I mean a focused approach to helping each individual student in my class feel as though we are in a one-on-one situation. I know that this is not always going to be 100% possible but striving for this type of feeling is important. Some of my students are going to need extra attention and it is only fair that I put forth the effort to make them feel as though they are being paid attention to on more than just a superficial level. Second, positive reinforcement. Time and again direct, positive reinforcement is brought up in the articles I find, videos I watch, and textbooks I have been assigned. It is my responsibility to reinforce the effort portion of learning by letting the student know that it is ok to fail as long as they learn something from it. Positive reinforcement is going to help the student gain confidence and hopefully an understanding that we all make mistakes, but if we put in the effort we can overcome those mistakes. From a more practical approach I continually go back to the “chunking” methods that I learned about from multiple sources. It is one of the few strategies that I found showing up across disciplines. Breaking time and information down into tangible chunks allows the student to focus on less material at once while slowly learning more information overall. Making sure to fully grasp the current material before moving on is important, even if they have to use more time to get a solid grasp on a specific topic it will save time overall because they will not have to revert back to old lessons in the future. If we as teachers commit to continually learning and upholding a strong amount of empathy there is no reason why our students should not only be able to keep up, but actually thrive in the classroom and hopefully in life. |