Beyond the factor of simply teaching students the needed academics, schools can foster students’ learning growth in their emotional skills, identity, and well-being. Using educational websites and learning games can increase a student’s interest in an academic subject at hand.
Currently, our education system often focuses on a narrow sliver of children’s cognitive development with a very strong emphasis on transmitting content knowledge, often to be memorized and repeated within the same form it had been received. Subject matters on reading, science, and math, as well as testing in those lessons often dominate most of the curriculum.
While academic subjects are very important and fundamental to a child, learning involves various factors more than those things. Such a narrow focus gives short shrift to the ways in which children grow and learn in their relationships, identity, emotional understanding, and overall well-being.
Using Educational Websites to Cultivate Learning
Educational websites don’t need to be boring, nor do they need to be basic math games with animated cartoons thrown in. Most of those websites will reinforce the fundamentals, but never really transcend that. Children need more than that. They have to use significant websites that encourage them to critically think, recognize patterns, and stay creative. so as to make polymath minds that will shape the longer term. Parents should not specialize or focus on a basic game that teaches addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables through rote memorization and repetition.
Recent research about neuroscience, developmental and learning sciences, education, sociology, and other fields confirms that a “whole child” approach isn’t only desirable but necessary to make sure that children learn well. Brain development is formed by consistent, supportive relationships; responsive communications; and modeling of productive behaviors. The brain’s development fully grows with children if they feel engaged, connected, and challenged.
Learning is social, emotional, and academic. Positive relationships, including trust with the teacher, and positive emotions, like interest and excitement, open up the mind to learning. Negative emotions, like fear of failure, anxiety, and self-doubt, reduce the capacity of the brain to process information and learn. Children can build skills and awareness to figure with emotions in themselves and their relationships. Positive, stable relationships when adults have the empathy, and cultural competence to know and hear children.
Foster a learning environment that supports the relationship among students, families, and staff. There are many faculties that support old educational designs, emulating the 1900s factory model, where students cycle through classrooms and teachers see many students each day. These structures depersonalize learning at a time when students need and would enjoy long-term relationships with teachers and peers. Creating a positive school climate that supports strong relationships provides a bedrock for learning. Students must feel a way of safety and belonging so as to thrive in class.
Implement engaging and interesting instructional practices that help the students manage their own learning. Students crave opportunities to find out things that matter and are relevant to their lives. Instruction gives a scaffold to the students and helps them grow with what they understand.
For instance, teachers can connect lessons in mathematics to common tasks students are engaged in using those skills, like in cooking, artwork, sports, and other settings. When skillfully combined with direct instruction, inquiry-based learning that’s driven by students’ interests boosts their motivation and develops real-world skills. In one secondary school class in Oakland, for instance, students decided to review how environmental pollution affects the ocean and then designed a campaign to scale back waste and litter and increase recycling at their school.
Assessments that include feedback and opportunities to revise work help students find out how to find out and encourage an intrinsic desire to know the subject matter and challenge themselves, beyond just making the grade. This sort of “mastery-oriented approach” is related to more meaningful learning. For instance, some schools cultivate student inquiry and revision skills through capstone projects that give students a chance to find out deeply about a problem that matters to them and often work to make changes in their own community. These projects are usually revised to satisfy a high standard of inquiry and presented to panels of educators and other adults from outside the institution with a type of dissertation defense.
