The Learning Success Blog

Traditionally, a school or a college is where students go to learn. Apart from learning new things, they get the opportunity to interact, build relationships, and become aware of social values and etiquette.

With technology evading every corner of the world, including the education industry, the learners’ amount of time in physical classes is diminishing every passing month.

The rate highly depends on the educational institution, type of class, or the student’s willingness to show up for physical or blended classes. That wasn’t a big deal before, but the rate at which the world is adapting to virtual learning and the commonly known advantages of the traditional learning style that are threatened raise lots of questions.

Students will no longer have a supportive community where they can practice what they learn or understand what coexisting really means.

Every year many children move to a new school.

And as Covid makes working from home more common, prompting parents to relocate away from big cities, even more students may be faced with the challenge of integrating into another school.

Generally, there are three times in a child’s life when they must deal with education-related change: starting pre-school, moving to primary school and moving to secondary school.

When a child is starting school, they are generally with other children who are all new starters too. But if you have relocated to a new area, your child may be the only new student and it can sometimes feel a little overwhelming. Fortunately, there are ways that you can help them.

Here are some tips for settling your child into a new primary school so that they can enjoy the experience and learn successfully. 

Educators and schools around the world are increasingly using the knowledge, techniques, and programs developed from a new understanding of how our brains learn. They are applying neuroscience in their classrooms.

Why?

As an educator, you might be asking yourself why would I do this in my school?

Here are some reasons why. Educational neuroscience can:

There was a Covid outbreak at a school near where I live.

A lot of the teachers at that school had to isolate. Added to that were the staff who hadn’t returned to school because they’re unvaccinated. This created a drain on the pool of casual teachers in the local area.

I work for LearnFast but I like to keep my hand in by doing a little casual teaching work for the department. So when all the casual teachers in my area were covering the Covid affected classes, I got a call from my old school which is also close to where I live.

Only a very small percentage of the worldwide student population attends a boarding school.

I spent the last four years of secondary school as a “boarding student” because my family lived in country Queensland, and there was no high school nearby.  

Living away from family, sleeping in the dormitory with 30 other kids, and eating what I and my fellow students deemed totally unsatisfactory food was, in retrospect, not too bad. Not too good either, especially in my senior year when the school started to feel a little like a detention centre.

I imagine the quality of the accommodation and food has improved in the decades since I was a boarding school student. At least I hope so!

Nowadays some city parents choose to send their son or daughter to board at a school in the same city because they can afford to do so. 

Would you send your child to a boarding school if you could? What do you know about boarding schools?

There is no denying that the Covid-19 global pandemic has disrupted just about every aspect of our lives, including our children’s education. By the end of March 2020, interruptions were experienced at schools in every state. Although the extent and timeline of the closures differed from one region to the next, the Australian education system as a whole was impacted greatly.

Even now, a year later, great uncertainty still remains, with lockdowns being enforced and lifted without much forewarning. Although Australia has managed to avoid much of the large-scale devastation the pandemic caused elsewhere in the world, the country’s education system remains vulnerable.

There are actually a number of ways in which the pandemic is changing education across the world. 

Speaking almost sixty six years ago Professor John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of AI said at the Dartmouth University conference 1956 , “Every aspect of learning... can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” 

Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist, said “Every aspect of our lives will be transformed by AI” and it could be “the biggest event in the history of our civilisation”.

Teaching is a responsible profession, where you act as a candelabrum for your students and guide them on the path of learning. Your sense of responsibility fuels your enthusiasm to teach your students in the best manner. So, every morning you enter your classroom enthusiastically, ready to serve your students.

But, many times, your enthusiasm can wither away within moments as you find your students not showing the desired interest in learning, despite your best efforts to teach them well. You feel disheartened when you watch them engaging in mischief, lacking attention and creating noise even when you are teaching.

Under such circumstances, you often engage in self-doubt and start thinking that you lack appropriate teaching calibre. However, this is not true! In almost every school and every classroom, teachers face similar problems from their students. So, cheer up, you are a great teacher, and deep inside your heart, you know that too!

As an educator who specialised in teaching children to read, I tried lots of different methods. Some worked with some children and some worked with others but there wasn’t one that I could say was super effective.

For 3 years I ran a reading group before school which we called Early Birds for the children who needed more help with literacy. We staffed the program with parents and volunteers and every morning before school we would see up to 15 or 16 children for a twenty-minute lesson, one on one. And when we did that, we started to see the children make progress in their reading. 

Something had to be done!

So, with a vote of 92-3 the Alabama state parliament enacted the Alabama Literacy Act beginning in 2020 to ensure that every child was reading at grade level by Year 3.

They nominated a task force to recommend a comprehensive core reading program and assessments to be used by local schools and that job fell to Tim Solley.

Solley is a kindly, bespectacled, grey-haired man who looks like he could be your kid’s soccer coach. In fact, he is a leading educational advocate and the Assistant Superintendent of the Madison School District which comprises 17 different schools.

Solley takes up the story: