July 18, 2006

Helping your children to succeed

Alisa and her father are working on a maths problem. He is trying to get her to understand how to do long division. She starts getting frustrated and yells "That's wrong; that's not the way my teacher does it!" Alisa's father tries to explain that there are many ways to get the right answer. This way is easy and has worked just fine for him for years. Nonetheless, Alisa won't listen and storms out, saying, "I'm going to call my friends!"

I'm sure you would agree that it's important for parents to strive to avoid this type of confrontation, but we need to remember that adult involvement is an important element of student learning. I, for one, would not argue in favour of simply leaving teaching to the teachers.

As much as I agree with home schooling as an alternative form of education, parents of children in mainstream education also have a crucial role to play.

One of the biggest challenges for parents is understanding how to guide their children: knowing what questions to ask and when to ask them. Here are some things to think about when helping your children with schoolwork.

When helping your children with assignments, you first need to make sure that both you and your children fully understand the task. Ask them what they need to do and what it should look like when it's done? What information do they need to do the task? Have they read the instructions thoroughly? Next, you need to help figure out what resources are needed to get the assignment done. If there happens to be a variety of choices, ask your children to consider which ones would be best for the job at hand.

Also, your children need to work out how to get hold of the necessary resources and extract information. After that, you should help your children discriminate between relevant and extraneous information. They need to understand the information in the resources and take out only what's needed. Have they checked the information against the assignment's specified requirements?

Then encourage your children to synthesise the collected information. How does it all fit together? Does it really represent their ideas and findings?

The last step concerns self-evaluation. Students need to look back on their work critically. Have they done everything they were supposed to do? Are they satisfied with the work? If they had to do it again, what would they do differently?

The above guidelines hopefully provide a valuable framework for you to help your children effectively. Note that the intention is not to overwhelm your children with questions, but to encourage them to think systematically. This can only be of benefit to students in a classroom setting.

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