Any teacher will tell you that the biggest difficulty they face as educators is helping parents to understand the complex nature of the interactions that take place in a classroom to achieve learning for any individual student. Test scores give us the impression that education is an assembly line of facts being fed into a voraciously hungry machine (and we all know how hungry those teenagers can be at times). In fact, the process of educating includes thousands of nuances that revolve around complex human psychology, emotion, interests, cultural predispositions, and countless other factors.
The following video emerged the other day from a colleague I first met at the Learning 2.0 technology and learning conferences in Shanghai, China. Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. It is a great way to look at the subtleties of learning. In particular, it hit me that parents might find this helpful in how they work with their kids at home. The steps here are simple:
- Examine
- Expose
- Emotion
- Expect
- Endear
So what do you think, parents? Can we do this at home in equal measure to what we do in schools to encourage learning and, what I would suggest is the final “E” – Empowerment?
Share your thoughts…