NewsLetter # 7 May 27, 2024
You are a Teacher
What you think about learning affects your child. Whether or not you see yourself as a teacher, you will teach your child. In fact, you will be your child’s most influential teacher. Your child is constantly learning from you; you are teaching your child even when you don’t realize it. At some time in their years as a parent, every parent says, “Where did she learn that?” Probably from you. You may have not thought about teaching and learning before, but you are not a blank slate. You have been a learner, yourself, and have formed some ideas about this process.
You have at least two ideas relevant to learning. You have an idea about what you do when you teach and an idea about what your child does when she learns. Naturally, you want to be the best teacher for your child. Examining these two ideas about teaching and learning will help you accomplish your goal.
What You Do When You Teach
I am essentially asking, “What does a teacher do?” For example, when you visualize yourself teaching, are you mostly talking? Are you talking to your child or to yourself? When you teach, do you feel you mostly need to tell your child how to do something or do you think it is more important for your child’s learning to show him. If I observed you teaching your child, I might see you do both, show and tell. All of these possible teaching actions convey different kinds of information. Let’s go a little deeper into these actions.
When you only tell your child what to do, you are giving your child only language information. You have concluded that your child is only lacking information that can be represented with language and that your child has adequate language development to understand what you are saying. These assumptions may be true, but they are some pretty big assumptions.
As a teacher, language information is not the only kind of information available to you. If your child is young and new to language, then you might choose to show her how to do something. Your child probably doesn’t yet process complex sentences, so you will want to limit your use of language in teaching. For example, instead of explaining how two parts fit together, you might show her, using language only to name the important parts of the task.
An important class of teaching behavior for setting the emotional atmosphere of your teaching interactions are your own emotional responses. Your emotional responses to your child’s learning communicates critical messages about his learning abilities. You always need to consider the question: “How is your teaching making your child feel about her learning abilities?” Not everything we communicate is expressed through our speech. If, while helping your child learn math, you exhibit frustration with her attempts at math, then it is pointless to tell her she is smart. Regardless of how good a teacher you are and how many years you have taught, teaching and learning can be frustrating at times. Thus, a good teacher must exhibit considerable emotional control when teaching. She must be aware of the emotional tenor of her interactions with her child. The best emotional environment for leaning is positive.
Your teaching environment is created by you through your interactions with your child. Correcting the student’s errors is an important role in teaching. However, your child must know what she is doing right as well as what she is doing wrong. Base your teaching relationship with your child on what she is doing right. Don’t assume your child knows what he is doing right or what she is doing wrong. Remember that both kinds of information carry an emotional load that can either hurt your child’s learning or facilitate it.
What Your Child Does When She Learns
The purpose of teaching is to create learning. It is not just any kind of learning that you want to facilitate in your child. You want to create an environment that is a catalyst to more learning. Your thoughts about what your child does when she learns is as important as what she actually does. Thus, you should examine your beliefs about your child’s learning.
Do you view a child’s learning as a static process? She is an empty vessel being filled with information from an authority, which is you? If this is your view of learning, then you probably will not be receptive to questions from your child about the information. In fact, if her questions persist, you will probably become frustrated and maybe angry. Your emotions will communicate that her curiosity is not a legitimate part of learning. She will learn that information from an authority figure should never be questioned.
An important assessment of your beliefs about your child’s learning are your responses to her attempts to solve a problem. Do you see her imagination at work or do you see all the errors she is making? Children’s learning is a messy business. It’s haphazard, lacks organization, and generally boisterous. These are the characteristics a child’s behavior brings to life. If you think the most important aspects of her learning efforts are the mistakes she is making, then you will probably jump in with the right answers, ignoring her point of view. This will have the effect of shutting down her own efforts. However, it will not have changed the way she views the problem; that point of view will probably distort the “correct” information you give her. You will have lost your opportunity to learn how she understands the new information.
Another important question for assessing your beliefs is: Where do you believe most of your child’s learning occurs? Is she learning when she is engaged with materials or does her learning occur when she is engaged with books? Is the information she gets from books more important than what she receives from her engagement with her environment? Science is based on the observation and systematic manipulation of our environment. This process is not only the basis of the scientific method but is how children actually learn. Only after much interaction with the environment do scientist put what they have learned into books. By the time a scientist has put information in a book, she has moved on to other topics. You child and the scientist have one thing in common: they both learn through interaction with their environment. In what appears to be play, children are not only learning important information about their world, both physical and social, but are learning to learn.
Being The Teacher Your Child Needs
You are your child’s most influential teacher. What your child learns from you can facilitate or hinder her learning from other teachers. One could say that all the teachers your child will have depend upon the foundation for learning that you create as a parent. This newsletter does not scratch the surface of a parent’s influence upon her child’s learning. You have experience as a learner and those experiences have formed a set of beliefs and habits from which you teach your child. Your responsibility as your child’s teacher is to become aware of those experiences and how they facilitate or hinder your child’s learning.