Engaging Young Minds: Challenging Learning Opportunities
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Author: Austin Stanfel
With concerns about failing schools, people focus on the negative studies of the students, as all are being failed, but these schools also have bright students that are being abandoned as well. For thousands of bright, intelligent students, their talents are undercutting their full potential. It is a crisis that gifted students are spending a lot of time in classrooms relearning subjects they know and “advanced” classes that are hardly advanced at all. They become bored at this lack of challenge, leading them to frustration and sometimes failure. For these students, they quickly become depressed, and the deep pool becomes depressed, wasting young talent.
One of the essential jobs for a teacher is motivating their students. Getting them to stay motivated is an even more difficult task because any unmotivated student works a lot to avoid challenges rather than facing them directly with solutions. Every assignment done is half-attentive and uninspired by the quality of their work. Teachers have to find out what motivates their students and be able to identify what gets that student to respond positively to gain the student’s interest. Also, the teacher has to change their mindset into believing that if they apply effort into assignments, long-term success will come out of it.
How to remedy this?The evidence is evident that constructive play improves learning, regardless of age. Outside the classroom, teachers can get creative with how to facilitate innovative approaches that are attractive for functions of the mind that need the most challenging. To learn, memorize, concentrate, and control the mood have a large part on a student’s academics. Physical activity like sports and recess could enhance that since highly active play from young ages have given researchers information to study the improvement of academics with physical activity. Playtime very much affects the development of the child, and the more people incorporate it, as recess time is being shrunken to virtual nonexistence, the better students will be.
For parents, they can help by using positive reinforcement. It doesn’t have to direct rewards, but the outside motivation that children will respond to. Send the message of respecting hard work. Support children for finishing the job and for making a real effort, and for trying things they’ve never done before. For older ones who already have a developed sense of what success and failure are, remind them of long-term goals that can help push forward to what they want to do. It works with high school seniors who are trying to enter college and keep up that pace even after getting accepted.
Teachers will know very fast that the ability to create good relations with students for them to be motivated because they trust them. Teachers must go the extra mile to reach every student’s so they can find their total potential. For parents, they have to keep their goals realistic. Their child more likely will not be a star, top-of-the-class student as parents’ dreams of their children. They have to challenge their children on the effort being put in and them showing the commitment to work rather than focusing on the final grades.