Higher education

Tips for Parents - School and Teacher Relationships

Research shows that one of the most important factors that affects a child's performance in school is parental involvement. All too often, parents assume that just sending their children to school and looking at their report cards is enough. Not true! If you want to be involved, if you want to actively participate in the relationship betw

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Methods for Parents to Get to Know Their Child's School Better

First of all, don't just show up at the school; make an appointment to visit.
After you've made an appointment, go to the school; look around, talk to people.
As appropriate, call or write to your child's teachers.
Talk to other parents about their experiences.
Be sure to read the minutes of the school board, which are usually printed in the local newspaper.
Take time to read the school newsletter.
It may not always be convenient, but try to attend school functions such as open houses and PTA meetings.

How Parents can Help with their Children's Homework

There are things you can do that will help your child do assigned homework and that result in learning, which, after all, is the reason for being in school.

Communicate with your child about school. This includes talking to him about his friends, activities, teachers, and assignments.
Show enthusiasm about school and homework.
Set realistic goals for your child, and then focus on one at a time.
Help your child get organized. Break down assignments into smaller, more manageable parts. Set out needed items (clothes, homework, permission slips, etc.) the night before to avoid last-minute rushing around in the morning.
Provide a quiet study corner in your home complete with paper, markers, a ruler, pencils and a dictionary.
Never do your child's homework!
Check with your child's teacher about correcting homework.
Expect, and praise genuine progress and effort. An opinion: don't praise or otherwise reward your child for doing what you and he know is expected. This practice leads you down a slippery slope, often with really bad consequences for you and your child.
Be specific when you do praise something.
Focus on your child's strengths in school.
Build associations between what is taught and what your child already knows and understands.
Incorporate concrete materials and examples whenever possible, especially with younger children. Try to help your child learn about the subject in more than one way, using as many senses as possible.
Separate your child's school weaknesses from your child. If your child fails a test, that is all the child fails. He or she is not a failure.
One more thing: Never do your child's homework! (deliberately repeated)

Questions to Ask at a School Conference

Is my child performing at grade level in basic skills? Above/Below? Math/Reading?

What are the objectives my child is supposed to attain? How do these objectives lead to the overall goal for the course/grade?

What achievement, intelligence, or vocational aptitude tests have been given to my child in the past year? What do the scores mean? (Be very specific and be sure you understand completely what the reported scores mean).

What are my child's strengths and weaknesses in major subject areas?

What subjects do my child enjoy most?

Can we together go over some examples of my child's class work?

Does my child need special help in any academic subject?

Who are my child's friends and how does he or she interact with other children?

Has my child regularly completed assigned homework?

Has my child attended class regularly?

Have you observed any changes in learning progress during the year? Has learning improved or declined during the year?

A Purpose for Social Studies
(or what is social studies for anyhow?)

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Although I am officially retired from teaching education courses at a fairly large public university, I have some ideas that might have resonance with people studying to be teachers. In my career, I taught

Believe me when I say that I have read many, many of the statements by such organizations as the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) that describe why social studies is important. If those statements meant anything at all in the REAL world, our students, after more than four decades of NCSS guidance in social studies curriculum, would surely have a better grasp of the content and would also engage in concomitant civic behavior such as voting. But they don't. Go to the NCSS web site and see what you think. There is a vast gulf between professed goals and actual results.

I have come to some conclusions about this. As I have expressed elsewhere on the ADPRIMA site, social studies is about understanding things, and not very much about learning skills. I have come to believe that any idea or concept that takes more than three pages or so of explanation should be broken down into two or more co

The countless textbooks that appeared in my mailbox, and that were described in an endless stream of brochures that touted yet other, new approaches for learning how to teach social studies marginalized themselves by their sheer numbers and bulk. In many ways, they remind me of the near weekly torrent of book

Let me put it directly to you then.

I believe social studies should be part of the curriculum for the purpose of helping students understand human interactions that occurred in the past, are occurring now, and that are likely to occur in the future. The reason for these understandings is they may help students develop and nurture values that will make it more likely that they will be able to determine for any situation what the right thing is and do it, especially when doing the right thing is hard to do. It is about decency, respect, courage and honor. This is not a difficult idea to understand, but it can take a lifetime to appreciate.

If learning that Seoul is the capital of South Korea, that the Congo River crosses the Equator twice, that the Battle of Antietam in 1862 was the bloodiest single day in American history, or being able to describe the culture of China during the reign of Qin Shi Huangdi contributes to this, great. Understandings are not, and cannot "practiced" in the same way as skills, but they can be developed, strengthened and made meaningful by students connecting new information to what they already know. I am also of the belief that such understandings need not be described in such obscure and complex ways as to diminish their value to the learner. The countless mind-numbing hierarchies of social studies standards, strands, goals and objectives that are promulgated by both public and private entities, while often developed with the best of intentions, really haven't contributed much to the civic and social literacy of our nation. In fact, some would argue that measures of this literacy show a marked decline over the past forty years or so. Perhaps many have forgotten that understanding social studies concepts and ideas is an intensely personal thing.

So I really didn't "teach" my students how to teach social studies. That is impossible. What I did was to motivate them to want to learn about social studies and different ways of teaching it. They come to believe that they don't understand anything unless they understand it in more than one way. I believe I was successful at doing this, and it is a good feeling.

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