Importance Of Best Practices In Education


In these troubling times, people start to pay more and more attention to financial aspects. It is a major concern, especially since it is a worldwide economic crisis, but somebody should constantly keep thinking about the importance of best practices in education. Why? Because our future depends on it, it is as simple as that. The children born today will become our future engineers, our future doctors, our future architects, our future teachers, our future scientists and our future leaders. Whatever fantastic and unimaginable developments might occur, these jobs will never disappear and in two generations time we will all be replaced by our direct followers. So what do we do to keep them healthy and help them find and develop their true inner potential? We do our best to educate them the best we can, using the most modern tools and materials, the most open methods and hiring the most qualified professors. The following notions and methods have proved revolutionary in recent years.

 

1.      The Montessori Method. Named after Italian researcher Maria Montessori, this experimental method of teaching was first developed on very young children (0-6 years) with special needs. It implies providing the child with learning utensils and letting him or her discover through his or her own experiences facts and piece them together. The teacher has the main role of observing the child and its’ development and guiding it through the stages if it is misbehaving. Even though this method has been scarcely criticized, it has the incredible advantage of letting the child follow his or her potential and thus finding his or her normal state. It can be practiced from a very early age until the end of high school and offers a freedom of speech and expression throughout; that is why it is one of the best practices in education.

2.      Critical pedagogy. This is one of the most recent items in our list of best practices in education. It is more than a trend in education, it is a whole philosophy based on the writings of critical educator Paulo Freire. It basically says that the child is entitled to know the relationship between the problem he or she faces in the teaching environment and the social context which produced them; it underlines the inclination towards consciousness.

3.      The gradual moving away from the traditional teaching. The importance of the best practices in education can be easily underlined in this powerful, but unsurprising shift. It took a long time, but the change is here: studies have proven that teachers and pupils alike have found it limiting to keep the traditional form of the classroom. A classroom where the teacher sits in front of the class and recites the lesson in a monotone voice is not going to work anymore. The children need to interact and explore, they need to see experiments happen in front of them so that they can understand physics or chemistry. That is precisely why the teacher will no longer hold an authority position in grade school and middle school, but organize a class in which friendly interaction will be the golden letter.

4.      Inclusion. It is truly one of the best practices in education today. It states that normal schools will try to assimilate and accommodate pupils with special needs to provide them with a proper education in a normal environment. Whether it’s Down syndrome or paraplegia (children with mental or physical disabilities) they should all be integrated into a regular classroom as long as their illness enables them to be and as long as they and their parents want to. This will enable children with special needs to lead an almost entirely normal life and become adults perfectly integrated in society. The employment rate for children with special needs who go to regular schools is also much higher and that is a definite plus.

5.      Humanitarian education. It is one of the best practices in education and furthermore, it emphasizes the global importance of these practices. It basically introduces the notion of empathy for children from a really early age by teaching several subjects from a humanitarian perspective, a perspective which will implement a desire to stop suffering, save human lives and maintain that precious human dignity.

6.      Supplying kids from poor countries with competitive learning equipment. A positive effect of globalization is this: children in third world countries will be able to receive a special laptop (charges directly from the sunlight, but has low disk space) to use as a learning device and access information from all around the world.

7.      Student-centered learning. It is a method which puts the needs of the child first as opposed to placing the needs of the teacher of administrator first. This kind of learning will follow each student’s particular needs and potentials.

 

This was a mere selection of the best practices in education available out there today. It is amazing what a bit of forward thinking can do and where it can take you so keep in mind these revolutionary ways for their effects and their importance will be easy to observe in the future.



Incoming search terms:

No related posts.

Share |

Leave a Reply