The Learning Success Blog

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!

Are we safe? This is the biggest question the pandemic makes us ask every time we step out of our house. We doubt every person we meet and surface we touch, are they the carrier of the deadly infection- Covid-19 ? This doubt stimulates us to take the best safety precautions for ourselves.

But, if you are a teacher, you’ll have to take care of your own safety as well as your students’ safety as the schools begin to reopen in some parts of the world. Although this is going to be a really challenging task, some effective tips can make it simpler for you.

We know that children are notorious, they are always making plans to break the rules you make. So, making rules for them is not going to be of help in this situation. You’ll have to make some special arrangements so that your students have no choice but to follow every safety precaution. These tips provide you with some arrangements that you can make in your classroom and ensure safe learning for your students. Now, let’s discuss them one by one:

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:

Coroni Village.  That’s what my 5 year old granddaughter calls the world outside her family’s Sydney apartment, where they have been confined since the COVID-19 shutdown started.

I have no idea how she came up with that expression. No doubt it has to do with the number of times she has heard about Coronavirus. Both she and her older sister are doing school-at-home. So are their two cousins. 

“School-at-home” is a better description than “home schooling” for the situation most students are in now, with their schools shut or their parents deciding to keep them at home. That’s because “home schooling” is a deliberate choice by parents who take on the role of teachers. The “school-at-home” parents did not make that choice.

The vast majority of parents managing “school-at-home” are not teachers. They have no teaching expertise and are feeling uncomfortable being thrust into this role, even with the best remote learning support and resources from their kids’ schools. Plus, many parents are doing their regular work at home as well.

That sounds pretty tough – for the parents and the kids.

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:

What's involved in becoming a volunteer scripture teacher at your local primary school?

There are differences depending on which country or state you are in, and which religion you wish to teach.

But many of the challenges will be similar regardless of jurisdiction or religion. Challenges like how to teach a class of students with a wide age range - from 6 to 12 years, how to answer "difficult questions" in a way that satisfies each child, and how much focus to put on the wider cultural aspects of a religion.

Sydney lawyer, Kaushik Murali, spoke to me on The Learning Capacity Podcast about his experience as a volunteer Hindu scripture teacher