Problems students are facing in class
Students often exhibit various learning disabilities. However, teacher intervention corrects these disabilities effectively. Some of these problems persist while other might be obscure, long enough to remain unveiled by the teacher. They surface when the problem is profound and requires intense teacher and school counselor intervention to correct it.
Learning disabilities could be as a result of influence and environment. Ideally, learning institutions are core factors in children/students academic development. The learning environment greatly influences the child’s future well being. Learning environment plays a great role in how children learn and relate with each other. Learning environment inspires influence.
This paper explores how student learning and teacher problems arise and how a teacher can effectively correct such problems when they arise. A comprehensive approach to resolving learning conflicts and conditions that arise in a classroom is projected. This is important for a teacher and his career.
Peer influence and influence of behavior among students
Students in high school are clustered as adolescents. They are in a stage of life where their social-cognitive skills are being advanced to adulthood. High school students influence each other in class leading to formation of peer groups in class. These typical social groupings are forms of rebellion against learning concepts, especially the discipline concepts.
The classroom is filled with children/students from various social set ups. These students influence each other in a way or another. These influences are not always positive influences but serious negative influences that gradually propagate into irresponsibility, exposure to vices and distraction to academia. These negative attributes are playing a role in distracting students in the class from studying, concentrating and spending time in studies. The students seem bored, distracted and rebellious.
Adolescents are greatly influenced by peers hence they are vulnerable to involving in negative behavior such as the rebellion attributes, boredom and distraction. The role of the teacher is to mentor children through their learning environment and train them to become responsible and academically well. This problem is emanating from peer pressure. The problem is that, the students have grouped themselves into a caboodle of vagrant minded teenagers who want to prove their semi maturity. This peer influence is borrowed from media based extracts of school settings and behaviors of young students in similar institutions.
As a teacher, understanding the root cause of this influence, diluting the rebellion through positive approaches and training the students to embrace learning as their future’s bargaining chip. It is argued that, some of these problems could be way beyond a teacher’s ability to correct. The problems could be related to social backgrounds, family background and psychological issues.
The problem, after identifying it, has contributed to a significant decline in student’s participation in class work, class debates, ability to finish their preps and evening assignments in time. The need to identify an effective approach to correct this condition is urgently needed based on the concepts of teaching and psychologically approaching adolescents.
The cause of student’s boredom, distraction and rebellion
The student’s exhibition of boredom to lessons, distraction and rebellion to studies, discipline and participation in learning is alarming. It is classified as a problem of peer influences and influence of behavior among students. This is a situation whereby the students collaborate to participate, ‘in unison’ in any form of rebellious behavior. The problem emanates from certain pressures applied by the environment the students are learning in or the people managing and mentoring these students. While this pressure might be applying, only to a few, these few students are able to influence other into rebelling against such pressures.
In this situation, the students are reacting to strict learning procedures laid bare in the syllabus. The syllabus requires the students to do theories and practical on weekly basis. The teacher is applying the same and requesting that the students every morning submit their theory study material and successful completion of short assignments on the subjects covered in the day. The objective of the syllabus is to speed up the period used by teachers to teach topics in the syllabus. Teachers often find themselves trailing behind schedules and eventually fail to complete a syllabus. The pressure on the students has resulted to those who cannot adopt the change to feel discriminated and abused by the teachers. They have imparted this concept on others who agree with them that, this is indeed discriminative. The class has joined hands to rebel silently against this alleged discrimination.
Theories of behavior modeling in schools explain how teacher-student relationships can be fostered. They also explain how this can be improved significantly to edge out behavioral influences like those identified here. Pedagogical approaches and curriculum design theories can address this context. These models are ideal for higher education institutions including high school. Problem based learning is one of the ideal pedagogical approaches that comprehensively identify and model students behavior effectively while at the same time, improve their learning skills and academic performance.
Resolving this problem
What are required here are motivational concepts. Learning is driven by challenging, open-ended problems. As a teacher, understanding this problem as context specific is essential in finding the correct approach to resolve it. As such, it will be through motivation that the student’s rationale about learning shall be reinstated. The teacher should base his motivational concept on the theory of ‘problem-based-learning. He should take advantage of the fact that students work in small collaborations, which act as investigators, problem solvers and self-directed collaborators. As such, it will be possible to identify a solution through the collaborative setting and agreeing upon with these self-directed groups on the solution. The teacher can adopt this solution as the facilitator of the guiding and learning process. He has the ability to prompt an enquiry through these groups if the solutions laws are violated.
The teacher should know that, problem-based learning is a pedagogical approach and curriculum design method which can be used in institutions with adolescents. The teacher will use a model ‘problem-based-learning theory approach to resolve this problem.
- The teacher should initially identify the context specific problem the class is facing and gain more insight about it.
- Talk to the class as their leader, mentor, and inform them about their plight and how he understands it.
- Since students work as self-directed and small problem solvers, the teachers should subdivide his class into groups of five students to form these collaborative groups.
- Through these groups, the teacher should seek to identify problem from the student’s perspective.
- The problem will be identified and discussed among the groups subsequently; a solution will be found and agreed upon then vetted for implementation. The students are motivated by their participation in resolving their problem.
- The teacher will take up the role of a facilitator of the learning process, guiding and promoting cohesion and learning in these groups.
- The teacher will, through this strategy’ allow the students apply their knowledge and skills to resolve their problem and benchmarking on how to resolve it. The students have actually investigated themselves and discovered significant resolves to their own problems.
The benefits of this model
The core benefit is that, this model motivates these students. The teacher is able to establish a bond with his students. The bond is the key to motivating the students. This further helps the students develop critical thinking skills and improve on their creative skills. These students will also develop skills in problem solving and conflict management in their environments.