Experience 4:
A year 8 student has been asking for extra help with her English work. She is motivated and wants to learn but just is not understanding the work set out. It has been modified and explained to her as well but she still is not understanding. The teacher tries explaining another way to do the work, she nods as if she is understanding but the teacher can tell she needs help.
I bring this experience up because students have a tendency to always ask for help but when it is explained to them again they just nod and pretend they know what they are doing when really they don’t. I think it is extremely important to let students know that being in your classroom they can come to you for anything and ask for all sorts of help. This is where the trust and good communication between a teacher and student is needed to be well and proper so that they are comfortable enough to come up to you and tell you that they don’t get it even if it has been explained differently. It’s the job of a teacher to cater for a student and understand their needs. In 1.1 of the Australian Professional Standards for Teaching, it outlines “Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of physical, social and intellectual development and characteristics of students and how these may affect learning.” (Australian Professional Teaching Standards, 2017) In this case, I would try to understand where the student is coming from, put yourself in the student’s shoes and see where it is that she is not understanding or grappling, once this is done, effective changes can be made. Social learning theory comes into play here, the work of Albert Bandura is important to this matter as he believes “…that the traditional behavioural views were accurate – but incomplete – because they gave only a partial explanation of learning and overlooked important elements.” (Margetts, Woolfolk, 2016) For this student I would be focusing on the most important bits of the activity and just focusing on that, trying to get her to understand the one thing the teacher wants her to take out from the activity. Then progressively branch out to the other parts of the activity, in other words break it down bit by bit.
References:
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. “Australian Professional Standards for Teachers” 2017. https://www.aitsl.edu.au/
Woolfolk, Anita, & Margetts, Kay. “Educational Psychology” 4th Edition, Australia: Melbourne, 2016.
julenaoliva 