During a state of the pandemic, COVID-19, parents are facing a lot of difficult challenges developing methods for monitoring their children’s learning progress.
It could be stressful occasionally being stuck in not knowing how to support your children when you don’t have the experience like their teacher. However, it is essential for the parents to realize that they play a huge model in educating their children with the teacher, whether that is directly or indirectly, and they are able to support their children very well if only they have researched a few key steps.
1. Organize the learning environment
Having an area dedicated for the children to study will help them improve the learning experience. The children take the session seriously and are self-motivated to continue the process in the future. Based on research conducted by Jeramie M. Bulat-ag (BSE in Physic) from Mindanao State University, she stated that the environment defines the entire form of the ecosystem that we are interacting in which affects the well-being of the individuals in society in general. In the context of learning, it defines the rate of progress and growth of any particular student.
Instead of seeing learning as stressful, changing the environment could enable the kids to view studying as enjoyment. Additionally, there is important to question your children what are the things that you could do to help them learn, but make sure that those things are reasonable. An article published by the University of Iowa mentioned that if the teacher cares about the students and wanting them to do well, the students will be more confident in making mistakes, asking more questions, and taking more risks to develop their skills. This aspect of academic management could also be applied to the parents as well by acting as a positive model to the children and generate feedback from them to determine what could motivate them to improve.
2. Set a daily schedule to study
There are multiple benefits to having a study timetable for your children.
Mainly, it allows you to determine achievable learning goals for your children. It does not mean that you should be putting a huge amount of workload on your children to study. As a matter of fact, without a schedule, parents could end up giving too much work to their children without even knowing it.
Secondly, the children could see that they are progressing at the end of each day. It relaxes the children by knowing what to expect before engaging in a task and what they have done after. Here is an interesting fact that will blow your mind away. A statistic presented by the Harvard Business Study stated that 83% of the population do not have goals and 14% have a plan in their mind, but only 3% would write them down. Even scarier is that the 14% would be 10 times more successful than the ones that don’t. Even better, the 3% is 4 times more successful than the 14%. While your children do not have to know this stat, it is best to align them in a direction that would be associated with it.
Thirdly, the schedule helps develop a routine for the children to stay focus on the task and be prepared to do it again the next day. The routine will further have transformed into a learning discipline in the long term.
3. Communicate consistently with their teacher
The teacher is a great source of feedback that could help the parents improve and support the children to learn. The children could act differently with the teacher, as supposed to how they act with their parents. Therefore, the parents should notice some distinctive habitual reactions that occurred during learning and ask their teachers for some guidance.
A journal published by the ACT Government stated that engagement between the parents and the teachers involved in the positive development in attributes towards learning establish their motivation, confidence, and their enjoyment towards learning.
Using online resources
The 21st century consists of technological advancements such as social media that allow people to communicate with one another effortlessly and efficiently. Innovators have capitalized on this opportunity to develop services that help people making friends(Facebook), finding business partners(LinkedIn), or even finding a taxi(Uber). One of the advantages, in this case, is that there are companies that are developed to connect educators and learners all around the world, as long as they have access to the internet.
Companies like Skilligi aims to connect tutors and parents who would like to have their children to learn new skills while they are at home. In addition, children are prevented from accessing other non-essential resources on the internet.