Bennett’s blog – #2 Tricks of the teaching trade – easy things you can do at home that cost nothing
Author
Carole Bennett, Trust Leader
Right now, when you are suddenly called to be a teacher to your child, it can feel like you need to learn things fast – content, skills, techniques that you might not have thought about for years. Whilst you can do that, it is hard work and very stressful for everyone. Which is counterproductive, as happy, relaxed children learn the best. And if we are honest with you, most of teacher training and school research is not about learning facts, but learning HOW to teach/talk to children. Changing this is much more powerful than topping up your French verbs.
There are some really simple things that teachers do, at work and with their own children, that could help yours out – not just now, but for the long term. So what are some easy things to try? Here are my top four…
1) Showing that we are really interested in education and think it is good to try to learn.
This sounds easy and you we all think we do it, but kids are not great with subtleties. Unless you make a point of saying it, they might not know how much you want them to learn and do well. There are two really good studies on this. The first is that kids with a lot of books at home do better at school. Not because they have books, but because they see that their parents like to read and learn, and this seeps into their minds as an important thing to do. There was also a really interesting study by Sigata Mitra in India where he asked children to learn on their own from laptops. The kids whose parents were just asked to ask how they got on, what they were doing and looked interested in what they learnt made much more progress than those who didn’t. The parents of the highest achieving kids didn’t tutor, they didn’t test – they just made it clear that the kids learning was interesting to them, and that it made them happy. So although schools do most teaching normally, it is really, really important just to ask your children what they are doing and listen as they tell you. Which takes me to point 2….
2) Asking children questions without a fixed answer, and being happy waiting
A lot of teacher training talks about the importance of asking the right kind of questions. Asking questions with a ‘fixed’ answer, like yes/no or a number means that the conversation with a child is over quickly. They knew the answer or they didn’t. If they did, they learnt nothing. If they didn’t, they are corrected and move on. Teachers are taught to ask ‘open questions’, where you have to have a longer, personalised answer – and crucially, kids have to think more. Questions like ‘how do you know that??’ or ‘what do you think about?’ or ‘how would you work this out?’ make a child really have to think and explain, which leads to more detailed answers and longer term learning. One easy way to practice is to take a closed question like ‘Did you have a good day at school?’ and shift it to ‘what was the best thing that happened at school today?’.
The second part of that is making sure that you are comfortable to wait. Human nature can mean that when a child thinks we leap into the silence and ‘rescue’ them with an answer. Thinking is good. Silence is good. If they get stuck, just asking ‘do you need help with that?’ or ‘what are you thinking’ can be enough to help kids work towards an answer.
3) Being comfortable about not knowing everything, but being seen to learn with your child.
No teacher knows everything. It is impossible. The most important thing is to be OK with that, and be happy to say when you don’t. The critical thing here is that you show that this is the start – you don’t know it, but you are going to find out. And try to learn WITH your child. Children can then learn two things, both the answer and that learning happens all the time, it is a good thing that even adults do. I lost count of the number of parents who were sneakily learning at night so they didn’t have to tell their child they didn’t know algebra, or the parents who worried that they could not help their child. In truth, learning together is far more powerful for children than if you DID know something. Learning becomes something they see in action, which makes it less something that you do as a kid, and then can move on.
4) Noticing and praising not just answers, but the way children got to them
So finally, this is a really important thing to try to do. It is very tempting to praise children when they get something right. But again, when children do get something ‘right’ they already know it. So this isn’t really moving them on. All kids thrive on praise, however much they say they don’t care what we think, children really love pleasing their parents and adults. The evidence for that is clear. When we praise them for spelling something properly, or getting a maths question right, they know they got one thing right. But praising them for the way that they got the right answer can help more than just the outcome. So, noting when they didn’t give up when it got hard, really thought about the answer, listened to your advice, used a pattern they noticed before and applied it to a new problem, worked hard – all of these things are worth saying so that children choose to do those things again. It isn’t about faking praise – kids can spot that a mile off – it is about catching a behaviour that helped them learn, and noting that too so they do it again.
Of course, no-one can do all of these things all the time. We humans are not perfect, and sometimes we just do what we do. But picking one of the four things and trying to do it once a day can make a massive difference – and costs nothing. Before you reach for a tutor to get your child ahead, or buy into an online learning programme, it is worth remembering that all of the evidence shows that children care most about what the adults in their lives think. And subtle changes to the way you talk about learning do make a massive difference to progress in all subjects. Tutoring just helps you move ahead in one. But that is a blog for another day…………..