Why Do Our Children Go to School?
“Students don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” -De porter
Voices rise at the beginning of the school year, wondering about the point of children going to school in an age when information and knowledge is available to everyone. By pressing a button, anyone can access a sea of sites that provide a variety of educational content, for all businesses and in all fields, at prices that are almost available to everyone, not to mention the free platforms, so why are we still sending our kids to school?
Need for knowledge vs. evaluation of knowledge:
Their world is small, and their experiences are few and limited. These are our children and they need us to realize what they like and do not like, know their qualities and their diverse needs, and accept them as they are, and at all times. This is what makes them feel safe, and makes an essential contribution to building their self-confidence and developing a healthy image of themselves.
Children’s first experiences with the external environment are the cornerstone of their physical, psychological, and behavioral development. These experiences then determine their quality of life, their personalities, and their emotional, social, and physical well-being.
What leads to the building of this heathy personality is how healthy the environment in which children grow up is, and the curiosity of caregivers (whether parents or those who represent them, such as teachers in advanced stages of their lives) to observe and understand the children’s behavior according to the different stages of development that children go through. It is an important factor in choosing, designing, and providing activities, and the experiences that children prefer to engage in, in a way that allows them to understand life problems and challenges, through contexts in which children are immersed in learning and practicing facts, and finding solutions that fit their reality.
7 Expert tips for teachers to build a healthy learning environment for children:
Being a teacher means that you participate in building the inner world of the child. The healthy educational environment designed by the teacher in the classroom is a suitable climate for the growth of children’s personalities, most importantly meeting their psychological needs, such as promoting a positive self image, building a healthy respect for self and others in a more balanced structure, growing communication and empathy skills, and building a strong foundation for acquiring good morals, such as honesty and compassion.
Here are seven expert tips that will help you build a healthy environment for children’s education, providing them with the opportunity to build a brighter future and stronger relationships:
1. Observe:
Teachers can observe children’s behavior in the classroom and during breaks and play with other children. Also, they can observe their interaction with other children and adults in different situations, which helps them track qualities, such as flexibility to try new things, a preference for sharing learning and playing with others, their ability to control their reactions, and empathy with others when their moods change.
2. Participate and have fun with them:
Building an enjoyable learning environment is fundamental to the accelerated learning model. It is the environment that allows the teacher and learners to have a good time, during which children are open to talk about their personal experiences and share them with others, which contributes to strengthening the peer learning strategy in the classroom. At the same time, it gives the teacher the opportunity to get to know the children concerning what gets them excited, what discourages them, and what they learned during their various experiences in and out of class.
This environment contributes to strengthening the social and emotional bonds between learners, as well as between learners and their teachers, and this is extremely important for the learner who will not care to listen to what the teacher has to say until they know that their teacher cares about them. This was confirmed by several experiments about the impact of positive emotion in strengthening the learning of the learners.
This environment also contributes to presenting the rules of communication in different contexts, and helps build a positive self-image for learners; thus, it helps build self-confidence, and it teaches them how to show interest and respect for others by listening to them, and communicating with them in a variety of contexts.
3. Listen carefully:
One of the challenges adults face in communicating with children is the inability of children to express themselves clearly. Therefore, it is important for the teacher to pay attention to non-verbal cues, such as gestures, physical expressions, the tone of their voices, and the phrases they use frequently. Listening attentively teaches them that you care, encourages them to talk to you, strengthens the bond between you, and ultimately leads to the learner leading the conversation without any direction of their thoughts from the teacher.
4. Allow them to express their feelings freely:
The activity of expressing by drawing is one of the favorite activities of children, and the most effective activity in encouraging children to express their experiences and feelings freely and openly. Therefore, experts encourage teachers to use rhythmic and artistic activities to help children express themselves, their experiences, and their emotions freely and openly during the educational process.
Some children at older ages may choose to express themselves in writing by writing diaries or arranging verses of poetry or prose, and writing fictional stories. You can encourage them to keep diaries, and focus on monitoring their behavior, thoughts, and feelings in certain situations during their day, or even provide them with notebooks to write down their literary creations. The written notation process contributes to assessing life situations with a more objective and logical view (some students may need external support from a specialist to master this skill).
5. Ask questions that encourage them to communicate:
The child’s inner world is a world rich in imagination and creativity. Open-ended questions help give children the opportunity to express what is going on on their minds and share their deep feelings. The real challenge lies in the teacher’s ability to build rapport with the child through thinking like children while talking to them, or participating in a particular activity with them during the school day, without limiting the teacher’s thinking. After all, children have a different way of seeing the outside and the inside world, unlike how adults do.
6. Show sympathy:
Children’s moods may suddenly change from total happiness and complete immersion to annoyance, and perhaps crying for reasons that some adults may consider trivial. The teacher should take the children’s feelings seriously, which shows that you respect their point of view. Sharing the child’s grief over the paint spill on the painting that they put so much time and effort into is definitely supportive to them, and sharing your sympathy will create a strong bond assuring them that their own experience is valuable and that you respect it.
7. Understand children’s temperament:
When the teacher sees each child as a unique personality, with their own characteristics, strengths, temperament, and way of dealing with the world, they will understand why some students are flexible to try new things, and others are more inclined to repeat the usual experiences and things. This will give the teacher a different perspective when preparing activities accompanying the educational materials.