Finding Creative Ways to Help Students Advance at their own pace
While a lot of newer methodologies help you understand why they need to be injected in the current education system, they don't necessarily come with an instruction manual. Taking the example of implementing a personalized environment in a classroom setting, there are a combination of ways to figure out the best road to take in terms of implementing its core. Part of the journey in realizing change and actually taking steps towards achieving that change is learning how to implement them. And the education sphere is no different.
Massive improvements in the form of gadgets, technology, and thinking has sprung up ample opportunity for a brighter future in the education sector. Usage of purely tech devices and algorithms in estimating a student's career choices, understanding associated learning patterns and scoring methods and creating an environment in which they can grow has increased slowly but surely. This hasn't stopped with technology. Methods to help improve and gear up a student to face and solve various industry related problems have also seeped into the classroom space, by equipping children with knowledge and good vocal command over these topics. One such teaching methodology is finding the right, and equally engaging ways a student can advance in a skill (or even a subject) at their own pace.
For one, this has a lot of advantages. Letting your student grow at their own pace doesn't help them be better at the subject and dive into its core head first, but it also gives them an added responsibility that helps them become better students. It is important that a student doesn't feel rushed or forced to blindly read and spit out bookish content; when students learn at a pace suitable to them, they learn more and are able to apply what they read in real life.
Prioritizing Innovations
A lot of schools are trying to implement the Competency Based Learning System, which tries to use a system of competencies to enable a child to learn the most out of a specified subject. This resembles mastery learning, but its reaches are far more flexible. The question of student pace, which is the main feature of a competency based system, doesn't necessarily come under any administrators priority list. This could be because the idea of handing the control of the classroom to a group of 30 students, and to trust them with tools and the environment you've created is scary, but the result is always something that blows away a person.
These innovative teaching practices, if exhibited, coupled with good test scores and high achieving students' academic needs, have helped raise some doubts. The schools management team should be allotting time to teachers during the course of the week to analyze data and understand each student's academic needs. In the early stages of implementing competency based learning, teachers should try to pick lessons that would most likely meet many students' needs as possible. As the academic year progresses, teachers can begin to shift to project-based learning, and let students collaborate in groups based on their common strengths and weaknesses, and provide one-on-one support to those who need extra motivation.
The visible change
Overtime, students reported being motivated by one another, with earlier uncertainty giving way to a motivation to not feel left out. As schools decide to implement these methodologies in their classroom settings, the way that learning has occurred over the past 100 years will gradually begin to shift. Teachers will be encouraged to spend more one-on-one time with advanced students, instead of focusing only on students who are behind. School administrators and leaders also understand a students' own abilities to adapt to a changing system, with some students having the chance to finish their standards early to achieve higher results. In due course of this change, the initial skepticism of competency-based learning will subside.
By the end of an academic year, teachers will be able to look at their students and think that they've figured it out.
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