Parental Involvement
A child’s reliance on a parent changes with age. Aged 0 – 3 years involves total dependence, and an almost vertical learning curve. During this phase the brain is also developing its ability to learn. Aged 3 – 5 sees a huge development in learning such as the alphabet, speech, walking, shape and colour recognition etc, and of course their ability to ask the question “why”.
Parental involvement during these phases is both crucial and highly rewarding. Repetition, an essential and enjoyable part of learning provides immediate feedback on performance allowing parents to treasure those first words and steps and ability to ride a bike etc.
And then you tend to let go. As they go to infant primary and secondary school the tendency is to back off, partly because you are now a little remote, don’t want to interfere, or wish to concentrate on your career. The intimate1:1 involvement at home is traded for a qualified teacher in a class of 30. Your awareness of progress starts to slip becoming anecdotal based on what your child tells you and the end of term or year report.
At school the learning process continues, but a key feature of parental involvement is greatly missed. Studies show that learning retention is process driven. What you hear only results in just 5% retention, what you see and hear involves 20% retention, but the practice in doing activity commands a massive 75% retention. This is the very activity in which parents excelled at home yet incur the greatest difficulties for teachers. Practice requires time, equipment and attention that are often extremely limited in class. The substitution is homework programmed to give children some form of practice to build up retention and speed but this is perhaps an outdated solution.
Modern teaching resources used in school are also ideal for practice at home. The parent’s interactive encouragement, critically at a time and pace to suit the child holds huge benefit for the child, school and parent. This dynamic involvement helps the child and tracks directly with the lessons at school – rather than a recovery after the end of term report or parents night.
Many parents relish the opportunity, resulting in a 25% improvement in performance back at school. Technology has developed immeasurably allowing the teaching content to be applied in a variety of techniques way beyond chalk, talk textbook.
Alistair Owens
keen2learn
